This morning Paulina professed her love for Jota, but essentially made the plea that, as tempting as it might be for Martin O’Neill and his coaches to rush this guy back before he’s ready, we should be patient. We should be careful. We should be calm, and we should think about the long term. You don’t get a lot of long-term thinking in football.
When it comes to Alistair Johnston, Kieran Tierney and Kasper Høgh, we’re not quite in the same position, but the fact that AJ is also allegedly nearing the point where we’ll see him in training only increases the temptation to rush players back, to put them into the side before they are fully ready to return.
And that way lies disaster. Paulina got that absolutely right.
You risk taking a guy whose recovery is on track and screwing it up all over again.
Tierney and Kasper have both been out for the last few games.
Rumours that they would be out for months were always grossly exaggerated. Those two guys had mild hamstring injuries where the prognosis was about three to four weeks, and so them being back in training is good. It’s not unexpected, but it feels early. I don’t think either of them will start tomorrow night against St Johnstone, and it probably isn’t a good idea for them to.
But they will have to play some part in the game, especially if we want them fit and ready for Ibrox. Again, I don’t think we’ll see either player play more than a cameo role. You would like to think that both players were ready. You would like to think that both players were raring to go, but they have missed a couple of weeks each and they do need to get back up to speed in a measured and controlled fashion.
There will be a greater temptation, I suspect, to play Tierney than Kasper, because Durán is doing so well in the team right now.
The complicating factor there, of course, is that if Martin has Durán pencilled in for the left side of the attack whilst Yang is out, that is where you may get a kind of minor strategic oversight in putting Kasper back in before he’s ready.
We have a young boy from Chelsea available to come in and play, and that gives us one advantage in that regard, in that Kasper doesn’t have to play 90 minutes at Ibrox. But I think Martin will be very keen on him starting, and that raises the question for tomorrow night.
How long do you give him? And Kieran Tierney, if the plan is to start them at the weekend? Just because I don’t think they’ll start tomorrow doesn’t mean they won’t. It’s entirely possible that you’ll see both of them in the first XI. I just don’t think Martin wants to be that reckless when he doesn’t have to be, because as long as Camilo is playing up front and scoring goals, you don’t need to rush Høgh back.
The left-back area is a little bit more problematic, but tomorrow might be a good time to see Lotomba, at least as the starter, because if you’ve got Kieran on the bench, you can then bring him on late in the game to get him a little bit of match sharpness, but also to see what Lotomba can do.
The boy from Chelsea, the young striker Shumaira Mheuka, looks like he has something, but he’s not going to be starting games for a while. I would have no problem throwing him into the team tomorrow night as well, maybe not as a starter but certainly as a sub. We have nothing to fear when he comes on.
There is James Forrest, who seems to have been slightly overlooked in the conversation about who can play wide left.
It’s not his best position, but we’re in a place where playing somebody out of position is probably going to have to be necessary for the next few weeks, unless you want to go with Sebastian Tounekti, which a lot of people will have no problem with.
Left-back is a real disaster area unless Lotomba is fit and ready to play, because Liam Scales at left-back doesn’t just weaken that area of the team, it of course robs us of a central defender. And since we didn’t bother to strengthen central defence, that’s a problem.
Because if he’s playing wide left and something happens to either Trusty or Carter-Vickers — and let’s face it, both have been out with injuries this past year or two, and Carter-Vickers seems to do this annually and he’s out for months — then we’ve really got an issue.
One high-ranking Celtic site today talked about our problems on the left as if that had just come out of a clear blue sky. I almost wanted to post on there that it’s just a pity that we didn’t have a months-long transfer window to sort that problem out, but that would have been cruel and unusual: to use the truth as a bludgeon feels like cheating.
But yes, we knew those problems existed. We knew the Asian Games were coming up. We knew that Yang would be away. We knew that Jota wasn’t fit. We know that Kieran can’t play 90 minutes every week. And we know that Carter-Vickers is prone to injuries and therefore we needed somebody else at central defence.
All of this we knew, and so these problems aren’t a surprise. The only surprise is that there are people who continue to pretend we’ve been taken by surprise by them.
It is great to have Kieran and Kasper back and training, just as it’s great to see Jota back in training, but Paulina is correct that we shouldn’t be rushing him back.
And I don’t want to see us take any chances with those two either.
I would prefer they started from the bench, got 30 minutes, and then we can assess things ahead of the weekend.
I think the manager will take the same view. It’s the smart thing to do.
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