Celtic's Narrow Win Over St Johnstone Raises Concerns
Martin O’Neill left Perth with three points and a furrowed brow.
Celtic’s 100% start in the Scottish Premiership rolled on to six wins from six, but this was no swaggering champion’s performance. It was a narrow, awkward, stop-start win over St Johnstone, sealed by Mika Baur’s first goal for the club and followed by a manager who sounded more puzzled than pleased.
“I’m not sure what to make of it, really,” O’Neill admitted to BBC Sport Scotland, before telling Sky Sports that his side are “still well short of it”. The table looks healthy. The team does not.
A night of experiments – and few answers
O’Neill used McDiarmid Park as a laboratory. Sam Johnstone, on loan from Wolves, started in goal. Oliver Sorensen was handed his first Celtic start in midfield. Dane Murray stepped in at centre-back. Sebastian Tounekti and Kasper Hogh were recalled to the front line.
Five changes. Plenty of data. Not much clarity.
With a Europa League opener against Ferencvaros and a double-header with Rangers looming – Premier Sports Cup on Sunday, league the following week – this was supposed to be the night the veteran manager sharpened his view of a reshaped squad as he “juggles” roles and responsibilities.
Instead, it raised as many questions as it answered.
The biggest surprise came before a ball was kicked. Camilo Duran, Celtic’s early-season livewire and attacking talisman, was dropped to the bench. Most of the pre-match talk had revolved around how he might dovetail with Hogh: twin strikers, or Duran shunted wide? Almost nobody contemplated him not starting at all.
By full-time, it felt like a one-off experiment O’Neill will not repeat in a hurry.
“Our main man only came on in the last 10 or 15 minutes, so it gives you food for thought,” he said after Celtic failed to build on Baur’s strike despite a late surge.
Duran’s cameo underlined the point. He injected urgency, movement, menace. The Colombian has been “just class”, O’Neill said, and even his manager’s attempt to protect him – citing fatigue from the sheer volume of work he gets through with and without the ball – only reinforced how central he has become.
“He’s second only to Daizen Maeda in terms of closing players down,” O’Neill noted. “So, I wanted to try and see if we could do without him, and the answer is probably not.”
Celtic have been down this road before, leaning too heavily on Maeda. O’Neill knows he cannot allow the same dependency to form around Duran. But nights like this show how hard that balance will be.
Hogh isolated, supply lines broken
If Duran is the all-action spark, Hogh is the penalty-box predator. A pure poacher. On Wednesday, he starved.
With the service from wide areas badly off-colour, the Dane endured a grim first half, touching the ball only twice in the box. He spent much of the evening pulling away from defenders, making the right runs, and then watching the ball go somewhere else entirely.
O’Neill did not spare his record signing entirely. “You just can’t put the ball on a plate for people,” he told Sky Sports. “They have to make room for themselves in the penalty box to try and score a goal.”
But the lack of quality from the flanks made that task far harder than it should have been.
Yang Hyun-jun’s absence loomed large. In his place, Tounekti struggled badly. The contrast in confidence and end product was stark, with James McFadden branding the winger’s first-half display “safe” on Sky Sports.
“He likes to come inside, that’s pretty positive until the last part,” McFadden said, highlighting Tounekti’s starting positions and his reluctance to drive down the outside. Time and again, promising situations fizzled out as he drifted into traffic, leaving Hogh gesturing in frustration in the middle.
The pattern was clear: Celtic looked exactly like a side that had made five changes and lost its rhythm.
Sorensen anonymous, Johnstone alert
St Johnstone, for their part, were not just sparring partners. They made four changes of their own, including a first start for Joe Cotterill and a debut for on-loan Hibs midfielder Josh Campbell. Cotterill forced Sam Johnstone into a superb save, one of the few moments when the new Celtic keeper truly had to justify his selection.
O’Neill had admitted before kick-off that he “had no idea” what Sorensen would bring. Ninety minutes later, he might still be wondering. The game largely passed the midfielder by, and his withdrawal for Benjamin Nygren with just over 20 minutes left felt inevitable.
Leaving both Duran and Nygren – two of Celtic’s clearest goal threats – on the bench from the start was a bold call. It just about worked in the sense that Baur’s goal delivered victory and allowed the pair a partial rest before Rangers. But it also underlined how thin Celtic look when too many of their main weapons sit beside the coaching staff.
A perfect record with obvious flaws
Strip it back and the numbers are pristine: six league games, six wins. The champions sit exactly where they expected to be.
Yet O’Neill’s tone tells a different story. “I know the results have been fine, really fine,” he said, “but when we get players up to speed, that’ll be great. I think that’ll take a few weeks for players. In the meantime, the most important thing is to try and keep your head above water.”
It is a strange place for a Celtic manager to be: unbeaten, top of the league, and still talking about survival mode.
Ferencvaros arrive next, then Rangers twice. The experiments may have to stop. The juggling might give way to something more settled. Because in a week that could shape their season, Celtic will need more than a perfect record on paper. They will need a team that finally looks like itself.
