Celtic cannot turn Duran into our single point of failure.

History turns on a dime. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? Have you ever wondered what it means? It means that the gap between success and catastrophic failure is sometimes so small as to be virtually impossible to comprehend.

It means that everything that has happened to us as a species has happened along a historic trail that could have gone in any number of other directions, some of which would have led to great success and some of which would have led to complete failure. People don’t often realise how thin a line we’re walking.

If that sounds like doomerism, I apologise.

Try to think about that in the context of football. Think about the way seasons can change, the way everything that you thought was going one way can suddenly veer another way. We saw a lot of that last season.

You saw the scenes at Tynecastle on the last midweek, heading into the closing moments of injury time at Fir Park; their game was already finished. Derek McInnes was imagining putting up the bunting, his place in the hall of fame of managerial history and everything else, and a moment later it was gone. That’s why it’s so hard for a lot of these people to take. It was in their hands, and it wasn’t that they dropped it; it’s as if someone bumped them in the back and it fell to the ground and broke.

This happens across complicated systems and across major institutions.

Things that are not supposed to happen, happen, and the whole trajectory changes. Look at the examples of NASA and Boeing, two massive organisations renowned for their engineering and their safety ethos, which more and more became obsessed with getting results at speed and at maximum efficiency and all that modern managerial claptrap that gets people killed.

Suddenly you have one of the safest aircraft manufacturers in the world losing planes and the space shuttle blowing up live on television.

Small faults, things so inconsequential as to have been regarded as unimportant, because how can something inconsequential cause disaster?

Well, it causes it all the time.

Both managers this weekend are well aware of this because both of them have seen it happen: a break of the ball that goes against you, a bit of bad luck, a deflection, something completely out of your control as a coach, something you can’t account for.

For McInnes, it’s confirmation that he’s not the guy to be in charge of the club across the city. No one will care whether that break, that coincidence or that accident was something he had a say in or not. He’ll carry the can just the same.

Martin O’Neill should be immune to being judged on the basis of luck, on the basis of a single moment, but his reputation took an enormous hit in Linz because a coaching team that cannot defend a four-goal lead with 60 minutes of a game left is always going to be the subject of doubts, questions and concerns forever after, or at least on a long enough timeline that it won’t soon be forgotten by anyone who witnessed it.

You can guard against those moments as well as you like, but they happen. They happen a lot, and there is no way to fully protect yourself against them.

But you can stack the odds in your favour with a good plan, with good players, by reminding everyone what their own personal roles and responsibilities are and by making sure that message gets through.

The moment those players walk out onto the pitch, though, it is all in their hands and in the hands of the gods, and they do not always smile favourably on you. They do not always grant your wishes, and every manager is constantly living in fear, not that the plan isn’t good enough, but that some random event or series of events conspires to disrupt it.

Martin O’Neill assembles that plan, on no account can he assemble it around a single person. Systems are not designed that way, and this is why I believe that when he said in midweek that he’s learned we probably can’t live without Camilo Duran in the team, he was having a little funny at the expense of the hacks who all went away and wrote that story as if he meant it.

I would be very concerned if he meant it. I would be very concerned indeed if there wasn’t a plan that survived the loss of one player. One of the ways you guard against one of those disaster scenarios is that you do not allow any single point of failure.

If you have redundancy against failure in any specific area, you increase your chances of avoiding disaster a thousand-fold.

Celtic already flirts with disaster every time Callum McGregor goes out onto the pitch as the sole player at the club who can play the defensive midfield role effectively, and there are some who question how effectively he plays it now that he’s 33 and doesn’t have the energy he used to have.

So, in some ways, our club already has a single point of failure, and I think it would almost be in our interests to be without McGregor for a while so that we can better adapt to what life without him is like.

We have gone into games without McGregor before and we’ve been fine, but the fact that we all question what happens if Callum gets injured, or Callum has a bad day, tells you that we are still operating on the ragged edge.

There is no such thing as undroppable because the second you classify a player as undroppable, you’re categorising that guy as the player the opposition has to stop. And if your whole plan is built around that guy, he’s the only player the opposition has to stop in order to stop you as a functioning unit entirely.

If a player has become undroppable, that’s because the system itself is faulty. It’s because it has become over-reliant, and I don’t believe a guy just in the door has become so critical to the system that it breaks down completely when he’s not around.

Any plan built around the individual talents of a player is a plan that won’t survive contact with reality, and this was the central criticism I made earlier in the week about the tactical system and the style.

You can criticise individual players all you want, but eventually the system itself has to be looked at, because a system that isn’t feeding a striker enough chances is failing him and failing itself. So, the decisions that our coaching staff make on Sunday have to be perfect.

Not only has there got to be a Plan B, but Plan A has to be capable of getting the job done independently of whether one player is on form or off form, tightly marked or given the freedom of the pitch.

Imagine Martin O’Neill’s managerial reputation taking another pounding because one player in the team has an off day, one player in the team can’t find his shooting boots, one player in the team is double-marked and never gets a sniff.

Right there, history turns on a dime for O’Neill.

Suddenly this season has a very different shape to it, and so this is a big weekend for him and for everybody else at Celtic Park.

Whatever we put out on the pitch has to be coherent. It has to complement all the various styles in the team and forge them into a single unit with a single purpose. Relying on individuality will not get this done.

We do not want to be coming out of this game with a sob story or a hard-luck story because Camilo Duran got tackled in the 11th minute, had to go off and we didn’t know what to do without him. If we don’t know what to do in a scenario like that, then everyone has failed.

He will play. He has to. He is the in-form player in the side, and I can tell you right now that their defenders are terrified of him. But the plan will not rest solely on his shoulders. It can’t. It has to be able to cope with anything that gets thrown its way.

This is, after all, a team game, and it’s the team that wins or loses in the end. People ought to keep that in mind when they’re thinking about what the team will be, or should be, or could be. Nobody is undroppable, and nor is his position through the middle necessarily sacrosanct.

Duran should not be the foundation stone of the plan. The plan has to be better and bigger than that.

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