Last night we got the news we did not want about Cameron Carter-Vickers. He is going to be out for around ten to fifteen days and will almost certainly miss our next group of games, some of which are absolutely massive.

And this is the start of it. This could be where Celtic begins paying the price for the decision, beyond comprehension in my view, not to sign another central defender during the summer transfer window.

Everybody in the Celtic support knew that position was of critical importance.

Precisely because of this.

Carter-Vickers has had injury problems before. We knew that. We knew how important he was to the defence. We knew the alternatives behind him. We knew the consequences if he went down at the wrong moment.

And Celtic gambled anyway.

Now the first bill for that gamble has arrived.

Listen, it is not a long-term injury, and we should be thankful for that at least. Ten to fifteen days is not catastrophic in itself.

But with major league games coming up and important Europa League fixtures as well, it is the last thing Celtic could afford at this moment.

And the maddening thing is that it was entirely predictable.

I still cannot understand how this club committed the folly of going into the new season with essentially the same central defensive options as last year, especially when we had already seen what happened when injuries hit.

There were matches last season, including that Scottish Cup quarter-final at Ibrox, where Celtic went in severely depleted at the back and without anything like the cover a club of this size should have had.

That should have been the warning.

Instead, Celtic looked at the evidence, looked at Carter-Vickers’ injury history, looked at the lack of depth behind him and somehow decided to roll the dice again.

Now here we are.

As John McHugh at Video Celts pointed out, Celtic have four games in the next ten days: Benfica, Hearts, Celta Vigo and Hibs.

Then, before the month is even finished, Dundee United arrive on October 28.

Two of those three league games are at home, and so is the Celta Vigo match. But that is about as good as the news gets.

These are all fixtures where you want your best players available. They are the sort of games where mistakes are punished, where concentration matters and where you need your strongest defensive unit on the pitch.

Instead, one of Celtic’s best defenders, arguably the best defender at the club, will be sitting in the stand.

That is not bad luck in isolation.

It is the consequence of going into the season without enough proper cover in a position where the risks were already obvious.

It is entirely conceivable that Celtic get through the three league games with the squad we have. It is not impossible.

The European games are a different matter.

Most Celtic supporters are already thoroughly fed up with the complete lack of preparation we have done for Europe. Expectations are low, and that in itself is part of the problem, because Europe is exactly where this club should believe it can punch hard.

Instead, the manager has not been properly equipped to do it.

But even if we get through the domestic games, and even if we somehow get past Celta Vigo at home, this is still the warning shot.

This is exactly what we were all worried about.

This is exactly what we were all concerned about going into the season: a difficult run of fixtures, Cameron Carter-Vickers unavailable, and no obvious replacement of comparable quality ready to step in.

It was madness not to sign another centre-back in the summer.

It was cheap. It was stupid. It was reckless beyond belief.

And there was always a very real possibility that a bill would eventually come due for making that decision.

I just hope this next sequence of games is not where we pay it.

Because I am worried.

Carter-Vickers is the one player at the back I genuinely did not think we could afford to lose, and the coaching staff certainly could not afford to lose him either, because they were involved in making this call.

If this run goes badly, they are the ones who are going to take an enormous amount of criticism for it.

And they will deserve it.

In Carter-Vickers’ absence, O’Neill has to go with Auston Trusty. He has to.

And if he is going with Trusty, I would prefer him alongside Dane Murray rather than Liam Scales. I have very little confidence that will happen because O’Neill clearly loves Scales. Scales looks like the undroppable player in this defence, and I have very little doubt he will be in the team come what may.

My fear is that Trusty will be the one left out tomorrow.

I hope I am wrong.

But that is what makes all of this so frustrating. Something completely predictable has happened, and yet again the only people who appeared not to see it coming were the people being paid very good money to anticipate exactly these problems.

I still remember hearing that Shaun Maloney and the rest of the Celtic coaching staff had decided against signing another central defender, that it simply was not a position they wanted to prioritise.

I could barely believe it.

From the beginning of the rebuild, I said there would have to be compromises. There would have to be changes to the original plan. There would probably have to be loan players brought in because Celtic were never going to spend enough money in one transfer window to repair every weakness in the squad.

And centre-back is not the only position where we remain short.

Whether Jota is fully fit anytime soon remains to be seen. Until then, there is still a major problem on the left-hand side, although Yang has done his best to fill it and has been better than most.

We still do not have the serious ball-winning defensive midfielder many of us have been asking for forever. We are all broken records on that subject. We could go 99 rounds over it.

Did we solve the left-back problem?

Maybe. Maybe not. We will find out.

So this is not the only area where Celtic lacks cover or quality. It is not the only position where the summer rebuild fell short.

But central defence is the one which gives me the most sleepless nights.

Because the prospect of Celtic going through an extended spell with Murray and Scales as the central defensive partnership worries me, even against SPFL opposition.

And that may very well be where we find ourselves over the next few weeks and into next month.

The important thing now is that nobody at Celtic treats this as some freak event they could never possibly have anticipated.

They could anticipate it. We all did. That is what makes it so maddening.

Carter-Vickers getting injured was always one of the most obvious risks in this squad. The question was never whether Celtic could afford to strengthen at centre-back.

The question was whether they could afford not to.

We are about to find out.

What a gamble.

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