Martin O’Neill must get the Celtic midfield right tonight or face more questions.

The news yesterday that Camilo Duran is going to be fit for the game is obviously good news. It’s another example of Celtic fans jumping at shadows because a player isn’t at training. There are a lot of reasons why players miss training, and not all of them are to do with injuries. But the club is in a place now where the guys who are on form look more indispensable than ever, and so we are jumping at shadows all the time.

But Camilo Duran has never been the biggest concern, certainly not since Sunday, and not, in fact, for many weeks.

It’s the same as all the talk about Tounekti at the weekend and how his selection was where people knew we were going to have problems.

Some of us saw the midfield line-up and knew we were going to have problems. The midfield is where tonight’s game will be won and lost. It’s where the battle will be fiercest, where Martin O’Neill has to get every decision absolutely right, and that’s the worry.

Look, it is impossible for me to believe that the coaching staff do not see where this is going wrong. It’s impossible for me to believe that they will ignore, or can ignore, the situation we are in at the moment. They have watched this team, and they’ve got to know where the damage was done. I am convinced that they do. They have to.

And so, we are now in a place where we’re all reading the landscape the same way. We’re all reading things in the same manner. If they don’t fix it at this point, then we have to conclude that they can’t. That they don’t know how.

That, of course, would be a terrifying thing to realise as supporters.

Bad enough that we’re in this situation, but to look at the coaching staff and conclude that they don’t know how to fix it? That’s what you call a bad day at the office. That’s what you call hard times ahead.

There are a lot of people online already talking about this season in the context of the Covid campaign. I’m going to discuss that in a little more detail later on, because that’s a weighty subject that needs its own space to breathe.

This article is really about the midfield.

What are the options open to us tonight? Well, we cannot field three players in those separate roles and expect that to work. It clearly won’t. In the matches we’ve played against decent-level opposition, it hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s exposed us, and we’ve wound up in a lot of trouble.

So, I have to think that the midfield composition will be changed tonight, probably dramatically. I don’t know whether Nygren will get left on the bench.

As I demonstrated in the tactics article I wrote the other day, when I suggested the various formations we could play, there is room for Nygren in the squad and in the starting eleven if the manager feels he has to have him there.

But you cannot play Mika Baur as an eight in that system, so something has to give. Either Baur has to get dropped tonight or Nygren has to get dropped tonight. Whichever one of them gets dropped will tell us how we’re going to play.

If we put the extra man in central midfield, the likelihood is that it will be Sorensen, and that means Nygren drops out. If we decide to go with Nygren, it’ll still probably be Sorensen, but he’ll play much deeper, almost alongside McGregor. And because we cannot have acres of space between our two midfielders and our attacking midfielder, the whole team is going to have to play much deeper and try to hit on the counter-attack.

It’s not inconceivable that we can play that way and get away with it. The other option is to take a real risk: ditch the idea of a six altogether and play your central midfielders in a block of three, with Nygren slightly ahead of McGregor and A. N. Other. Probably Sorensen, although Baur could probably play in that slot.

There are no easy answers here. There are no solutions where you can play every player you want to. Eventually, compromises will have to be made, and changes will have to follow.

Sorensen has been signed for his strength and his experience. I was amazed that he didn’t play at Ibrox from the start, because either he or Oxlade-Chamberlain would have been an obvious choice for me. The player to sacrifice would have been Nygren, allowing us to play two central midfielders with McGregor as the six.

I still think that is the most likely tactic to be utilised tonight, and it should be. This should be the proving ground for the game that comes at the weekend.

I won’t pretend not to be nervous about tonight. I’m very nervous about tonight. Everyone at Celtic should be nervous about tonight. I know a lot of fans are saying that this game, as far as they’re concerned, doesn’t matter. But it does matter.

And not because I have any belief that the club cares about this competition.

I know they don’t. They’ve already made that clear. It matters because it’s going to tell us whether or not we’re learning anything, whether the coaching staff are doing their jobs, and whether they care enough to do their jobs.

That’s why tonight is critical. A win tonight is crucial.

We certainly cannot afford a defeat. We absolutely cannot afford a major defeat.

And needless to say, if he goes with the same playing style that we had away against LASK and the Ibrox club, and we get punished for it — which we almost certainly would, and would absolutely deserve to — I don’t know what hiding place he thinks there’s going to be.

The scrutiny he’s getting now, the criticism that’s coming his way already, will be magnified a hundredfold across the board.

And that’s before you even get to Sunday. He cannot afford to get this wrong. This has to go perfectly, from team selection to performance to result.

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