Is Ibrox at the start of a long season of injury crisis?

Last night, the Ibrox club got the news it least wanted and could least afford.

Lawrence Shankland will be out for between three and four months. He is the second of their strikers to go down in the space of only a month. The question being asked is what this does to Derek McInnes’s team plans, and the answer is that if he is complaining about it, he is not going to find an especially sympathetic audience.

He still has three fit strikers left.

But not only is it a silly question, it is the wrong question.

The question that should be getting asked, in light of other injuries to players in the team, is why this is happening in the first place.

This may just be coincidence, and it is a particularly freakish one if it is. But then again, it might not be. And that makes life over there much more interesting.

We have seen evidence from our own club that when a management team changes, you tend to get players being injured. Ange Postecoglou’s first season in charge was an absolute calamity for injuries. Brendan Rodgers went through something similar when he was putting players through their paces after his own return.

When you change the type of training people are doing, when you change the pace and the intensity of it, you are risking players who are not used to those demands falling victim to them.

The cruciate injury which happened to Youssef Chermiti does not, on the surface of it, appear related to what has happened to Shankland.

Shankland’s injury appears to be a recurrence of the hamstring problem he had last season. McInnes has confirmed that it is a grade 2C tear, very similar to the one which kept him out for nine weeks while they were both at Hearts. He could now require surgery and is expected to be out for somewhere between three and four months.

But there have been other injuries since McInnes came in.

Tuur Rommens, their left-back, has been out and is only now back running, although not yet training fully with the squad. Daisuke Yokota has also picked up a groin problem. Maybe none of that is connected.

Maybe every one of these injuries is simply bad luck. But if I were involved at Ibrox, I would at least be asking the question.

Where they should be particularly concerned is with the new signings, because those are players adapting to different demands. You are training in a different country. You are training in a different climate. You may be training on different surfaces. You are being asked to play a different way, at a different intensity, and sometimes the body reacts badly to that.

The Ibrox club cannot afford too many more of these.

They are already in a bit of a mess.

Having two strikers out long-term, and two of the ones who looked most likely to score goals, is a bad place to be.

Now, it may well be the case that Kevin Kelsy hits the ground running. He is the £9.5 million striker they brought in from Portland Timbers and, with Shankland and Chermiti gone, the timing of that signing suddenly looks even more important. They also have Ryan Naderi and Bojan Miovski available.

And you only have to spend two minutes on their forums to see how much confidence there is in that particular collection of options.

The great thing from our perspective is that Celtic are coming out of our injury situation just as they are getting deeper into theirs.

McInnes will curse his bad luck if this costs him. But Celtic have played bad hands over the years and played them well.

A lot of the decisions which have put McInnes in this position were not his decisions. But he should have assembled his own hand a little better than he has.

Maybe there is a universe in which it makes sense to sign three wingers, attacking forwards, a bunch of full-backs and other offensive players while making no real improvement at central defence or attacking midfield.

It is not this one. Their rebuild has been every bit as incoherent as ours has, but in a much more dangerous way because Celtic could afford our incoherent rebuild and they cannot afford theirs. I will talk about that later today.

What should concern Ibrox supporters is whether any of these injuries are related to the demands being placed on the squad.

If there are issues in training, then the problem is not going to lessen.

It is going to get worse. Chermiti is expected to be out for most, if not all, of the season with his ACL injury. Shankland is now out until at least December and potentially into January depending on the treatment route and how his rehabilitation goes.

For a 31-year-old striker who has already suffered the same hamstring problem before, that is a significant setback, and if they suffer another couple of injuries in other areas, the trouble they are in could become immense.

This is a club which is already out of Europe.

It has spent heavily. It has built a squad which still has obvious weaknesses. And it does not have unlimited money sitting there waiting for some enormous January repair job.

None of this proves that McInnes’s training methods are responsible.

It would be ridiculous to claim that at this stage. But when injuries start piling up after a change of manager, especially when the training intensity and demands have changed with him, it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether there is more going on than simple bad luck.

That is the question I would be asking if I were an Ibrox supporter.

Not simply: how do we replace Lawrence Shankland? But: why are so many bodies beginning to break down?

The old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.”

I do not know who cursed them.

But they have been living in interesting times for a long while now.

And things are not getting less interesting over there.

Not by a long shot.

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