Today has been a good day for Celtic on the injury news. But it’s a warning shot.

Today at Celtic’s press conference ahead of tomorrow’s game, Shaun Maloney took media duties instead of Martin O’Neill, who one would hope is up to his neck in transfer-related business. During his presser, Maloney shot down some of the wild online rumours about players being out for months.

He said that both Kasper Høgh and Kieran Tierney will miss tomorrow’s game, but he hopes that both will be fit for the weekend and that neither injury is serious.

He also said that, in spite of leaving the ground in a protective boot the other day, Callum Osmand’s injury is not serious either and that he expects the youngster to be out for a few weeks. That is all very good news.

Clearly there is a lot happening behind the scenes at Celtic at the moment. There seem to be a lot of transfer moves being made, a lot of wheels turning in the background, and although I remain extremely frustrated at the scattershot nature of what we appear to be doing, the fact that we are trying to do it, albeit late in the day, is encouraging.

If we are going to compete on the multiple fronts I talked about earlier, then we need a bigger pool of players than we have right now.

There are issues over the European squad and how many players we can realistically register for it, but what is not in dispute is that Celtic needs more depth if we want to get through a domestic and European campaign successfully.

It is good news that we have not lost any key player to a major injury, but the fact that supporters have spent days sweating over the possibility tells you something about where the squad is. We cannot go into the rest of this season with a threadbare group and simply hope everybody stays fit.

I do not know what the merits are of having already got two midfielders almost over the line while still apparently looking at a third. I am not going to complain about that, because the more quality options Martin O’Neill has, the better, but Celtic cannot allow that activity to distract from obvious weaknesses elsewhere.

There is still a lot of work to be done before the transfer window closes.

Adding another striker is also good news. It certainly suggests that Martin is not kidding around when he talks about playing two up front, because if you are going to use that system properly, you need genuine backup and you need enough forwards to survive injuries, suspension and rotation.

The latest player linked is Chelsea youngster Shim Mheuka, who is reportedly undergoing a medical ahead of a loan move. He is 18, highly rated at Chelsea and was named Premier League 2 Player of the Season after scoring 18 goals in 19 league appearances last season.

There are people who will immediately scream “project” because he is young and because there is no option to buy attached to the loan. But not all projects are created equal, and not all loan deals without an option are inherently disastrous.

This kid apparently is something special and I have no problem whatsoever with Celtic bringing special footballers to this club, and nor should anybody else.

There are also people talking about our own academy players being overlooked again for youngsters from elsewhere. My answer to that is the same as it has always been: if our academy system worked properly, if it was worth a damn, and if we were leaving quality young players withering on the vine in order to bring somebody else’s youngsters in, that would be one thing.

But we know our academy is not producing players on the level of some of the best English academies. There is no obvious equivalent to this Chelsea youngster sitting in our own structure right now, certainly not one with the same level of youth production behind him. So as a backup player and as a backup signing, I am pretty comfortable with this one.

The Tierney situation is the one causing the most consternation, and understandably so.

We are probably going into tomorrow’s game with Liam Scales at left-back. He will do there at a push in Premiership games most of the time, but Scales is not a player I personally would have in the squad, far less someone I want starting regularly when the chips are down. I certainly do not want him playing in a position which is not his natural one.

So, we need to get things done on that front.

We need a Kieran Tierney backup, or preferably someone good enough to challenge Tierney for that position, and we need that player quickly.

I think all of us will feel considerably better when that most glaring hole in the first-team squad is no longer haunting us. Tierney has to be backed up properly because the last few days have demonstrated exactly why.

Supporters have been sitting here nursing nightmare scenarios about Tierney missing months and Celtic having no natural senior player capable of stepping in for him. That is not good enough for a club of Celtic’s size. Once we solve the left-back problem, I think everybody will feel a lot calmer about the shape of the squad.

But Kieran has surpassed every expectation I had when he returned to the club.

I did not want Celtic to sign Kieran Tierney.

I did not believe he was reliably fit enough. I did not believe he would necessarily come back and play every week, and I wondered whether we might be signing a lesser version of the footballer who left us in the first place.

You know what?

He may have lost a little along the way, but Tierney has been a formidable signing.

You only have to look at his assists, his goals and his all-round defensive play to see that we still have a very good footballer here. He remains one of the most important players in this team and one of the biggest assets Martin O’Neill has.

Unlike a lot of people, I am not minded to be overly critical of the fact that Kieran does not play 90 minutes every single time.

No player in this team should be playing 90 minutes three times a week.

That is exactly why you want a big squad. You do not want to have to put any player through that workload unnecessarily, and Tierney obviously has unique challenges attached to him because of his injury history.

The simple fact is that Tierney is head and shoulders above a lot of the players Celtic would realistically be able to buy. He is still a top-class performer and I still regard him as an elite-level player.

His ability to play every single minute may be more questionable than it once was, but we have already got much more mileage and much more game time out of him than I expected. I continue to think he is one of the biggest and best assets we have at the club.

But like Callum McGregor, he is carrying an awful lot of water on his own.

That is the problem. The news today that Tierney is not going to be out for months is a huge relief, but if we already had a proper backup player through the door, supporters would not have sweated this quite so much.

Teams can go through spells where three or four players in the same position get injured. That is football. Nobody can legislate perfectly against everything.

But Celtic imposes unnecessary difficulty on itself when it fails to cover key positions while it has the opportunity. We have dodged a bullet here. We have got off lightly in the grand scheme of things.

Now we have to make sure we cover those bases properly and ensure there is enough talent in the building in case we are not so fortunate next time.

Obviously, you never want to lose players for any length of time, but today is a good-news day and I will take that every time.

It is also a warning shot, and we cannot ignore that.

We should be doing our damnedest to make sure we do not end up paying the bill the next time injuries hit, and I am hopeful this will be treated as a lesson learned and that some business will swiftly be done.

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