Martin O’Neill is right about Yang. This Celtic team will miss him.

After the game last night, as you know, Martin O’Neill made some comments about Liam Scales which I did not entirely agree with, and I wrote about that earlier. But he also said some things about Yang and how much the club is going to miss him, and on that I absolutely agree with him.

It has been a difficult place for me to reach, and I am sure a lot of other Celtic supporters have felt something similar. This has been a hard journey with Yang, but I think we are at the end of it now. We have reached the destination.

There are some players at your football club who achieve instant success. We are looking at one of them right now in Camilo Duran. He has already attained the status of darling of the stands, and not for nothing. His start has been excellent. He has scored goals, set up goals and looked like a really top-class footballer. It has been a genuine pleasure to watch him so far, and there are no real doubts about him.

Other players get there by a much tougher route. They have to climb rocky mountain roads and endure setbacks along the way. By the time some of them reach the summit, where they are accepted as first-team regulars who have clearly earned their place, they may have been written off more than a couple of times.

For me, Yang is definitely one of those players.

He is proof that if you are patient enough with a footballer who obviously has some level of talent, you might eventually watch the emergence of a genuinely exciting talent.

It was clear from the start that Yang had certain attributes. He is big, strong and fast. He obviously has courage as a player too. He is not one of those guys who, if a defender hits him hard once early in a game, retreats into his shell.

He was never like that. But he was difficult to watch during his early time at the club. More often than not he would run into a defender instead of beating him. His passing range was poor. His crossing was limited.

But as Paulina will say in a completely different context tomorrow, there are teachable skills and there are things which come naturally.

Some of those natural things, Yang always appeared to have.

And the teachable stuff?

Well, under the right tutor, he has turned out to be a fast learner too.

Without a doubt, we are watching a much better player than the one who first arrived. Or maybe that is the wrong way to put it. Maybe this is the player we signed, just a much more polished version of him.

Either way, he is an asset now. And not just some minor asset. He is a first-team regular because he deserves to be a first-team regular.

We signed Tounekti for a lot more money than we paid for Yang, and right now it is obvious which one looks like the better player. Tounekti may come good, but he has not yet. And Yang should be the warning against writing anybody off too quickly.

Tounekti has obvious talent. He has obvious positives. Maybe those simply need to be nurtured, worked on and polished in the same way Yang’s were.

Over the next few weeks, as the injured players start to return, with Høgh and Tierney first on the list, there are going to be decisions to make. The fact that Yang is away is going to make at least one of those decisions easier.

I think we will see Duran play on the left. I do not know if that is a position which utilises his talent set, but I think that is where he may end up once Kasper is back in the side because it is one of the clearest ways to accommodate them both.

Yang’s absence makes that choice easier.

Tounekti will get another opportunity, but he has not taken the ones he has had so far. If the next one passes him by as well, Yang is going to come back and find himself almost certainly the guaranteed starter out on the left, at least until Jota is fully fit again.

And it will be on merit. Absolutely on merit.

On the other side, Hassan, who may have thought he was close to locking down the right-hand position, could suddenly find himself with serious competition as the squad fills out and Yang returns. This is what makes players better.

Competition. Knowing you are not guaranteed your place. Knowing you have to work to keep it. And suddenly it is not remotely inconceivable that Yang will do exactly that.

Because this is a player who has come on leaps and bounds.

It is not that he has improved a little. He has improved a lot.

People who refuse to see it or acknowledge it are still judging him on those early faltering months when he looked terrible, when he seemed destined to become another member of the reject class from that entire transfer window.

But he is the only player from that first summer of Rodgers’ second spell who ever looked as though he might have something substantial to offer, and that is why he stayed while so many others were sent packing.

Yang is one of the sticks Brendan Rodgers is frequently beaten with, but in reality, he represents almost the inverse of what people think he does.

Let me put it another way.

There is a great scene in Only Fools and Horses where Raquel wants Del to clear out the spare room so she can put the baby in there. Del’s argument is that the room is full of stuff which represents saleable stock, and the only reason it is all there is because somebody had previously broken into the garage, stolen everything else, and he did not dare leave it there in case they came back.

Then Raquel makes the killer point Del has overlooked.

That was the stuff the thieves left behind. So how exactly does he expect to sell it if they would not even take it away for free?

Rodgers’ entire first summer transfer window left us with a pile of players not unlike that. And because it took a while to move some of them back out of the door, and because Yang was part of that class, there is a lazy assumption that he was simply one of the guys we could not shift. But that ignores the actual facts.

Celtic had interest in Yang. We had offers for him, including one which we were reportedly close to accepting before Rodgers put the brakes on it.

Yang is not one of the rejects of a reject window who survived only because nobody would take him. He was the player from that intake who continued to get regular football. He was the one Rodgers considered worth keeping around.

So, when Rodgers gets blamed for somehow failing to develop Yang properly, I think that accusation is completely backwards. If anything, Yang proves the opposite. Rodgers saw enough talent in him to keep playing him.

He saw enough to resist moving him on. He saw enough to believe there was a footballer in there worth polishing. And now we are seeing the result.

He recognised that Yang was the one unpolished gem in a box otherwise filled with worthless rocks.

Yang has also proven himself capable of producing in big games. He has scored massive goals against the Ibrox club. One of them was the equaliser in that 3-1 game, without which the entire shape of that title race could have looked very different.

His goal in the previous game against them at Celtic Park, which of course was Nancy’s final match, was the one genuine moment of magic in the entire fixture and a strike worthy of winning any game.

There are players who develop a happy knack of scoring big goals in big matches. Yang increasingly looks like one of them.

So, when O’Neill says he will be missed, that is no exaggeration.

He leaves a big hole on that side, and all we can do, as Martin joked, is hope his national team does not do too well and that he comes back home quickly. But Yang is now one of those players who, for me, has done enough.

He merits a better contract. He merits a more concrete place in the team’s future. And knowing this board, the other thing they will now recognise is that he has become one of the bankable assets they could eventually sell for serious money.

That is how far this journey has come.

From a player many supporters wanted out of the club to one the manager says Celtic will struggle without. From raw, frustrating and unreliable to a genuine first-team regular. From somebody who looked like another failed transfer to somebody whose absence we now have to plan around. Yang earned this the difficult way.

He has been criticised, doubted, written off and questioned.

I wish him well in that tournament, but I hope he won’t be gone too long, cause this team needs absolutely needs him and yes, it will miss him.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.