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Only at Celtic could strength in depth up front be considered a bad thing.

At other clubs, a range of attacking options would be considered a blessing ...

2026 Scottish Cup Football Dundee Utd v Celtic Aug 15th
15th August 2026; Tannadice Park, Dundee, Scotland; Scottish Cup Football, Dundee United versus Celtic; Sebastian Tounekti of Celtic celebrates with Benjamin Nygren of Celtic after he shoots and scores in the 53rd minute to make it 3-0 to Celtic

One of the things we know from a lifetime of following this club is that Celtic is treated differently from other clubs. The media will never judge us by quite the same standard as it judges everyone else in this country.

So whenever there is a problem at Celtic, it tends to be amplified first and foremost by the media. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of times when the supporters themselves make their position perfectly clear about where the club is going and what it is doing.

But if the media does not have a genuine Celtic crisis to cover, it has never had much difficulty inventing one.

And so right now we find ourselves with the media asking all sorts of bizarre questions. Number one amongst them is the question of big Kasper Høgh and what his place at Celtic actually is.

Paulina wrote a really good piece this morning about Celtic sites comparing Kasper with Iheanacho and arguing that we should get behind the striker who is actually here rather than obsess endlessly over the guy who is not. I agree with that 100%.

But of course, it goes deeper than that. It always does with Celtic.

We are apparently the only club that is not allowed to have too many good players in the squad. We are the only club that is not allowed to rotate. We are the only club where having more than one good option in a position can somehow be transformed into a problem and drummed up as another step on the road to hell.

It is nothing of the kind. Celtic do not have a Kasper Høgh problem.

Celtic have two good strikers competing for one place.

That is called squad depth. And so what would be a perfectly simple selection decision at almost any other club, which of our two multi-million-pound strikers we are going to play, becomes something else entirely.

Now, I am not saying there is not plenty of discussion to be had around Kasper and whether he has justified what Celtic paid for him. That is fair enough. A player who costs a lot of money is expected to prove that he is worth it, and although it is a great truism in football that you cannot blame a player for the price tag on his head, supporters who had seen what he had done elsewhere expected to see more.

That is perfectly reasonable.

But the suggestion that he may not even have a future at Celtic because he has been dropped for one first-team game and now looks as though he could be fighting for his place is nothing but mischief-making.

Every club has players who are being used sparingly. Every club has players who are off form. Every club has players on its books who are underperforming.

Kasper is no different.

Of course Camilo Durán is preferred at the moment. Camilo is better suited to the way the team is playing right now and, crucially, he is scoring goals. That does not mean Kasper will not be back, or will not deserve to be back when his opportunity comes.

We have all pointed out, as Paulina did again this morning, that these are two different types of striker. It may take two different styles of football to get the best out of them individually, and perhaps one very effective style of football to get the best out of both of them in the same team.

We are still trying to find all the formulas which work.

But while we have stumbled upon one which is working pretty well in the here and now, if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.

I said on the podcast that if Celtic had lined up at the weekend with exactly the same players on the wings and played that same front-foot football with Kasper on the pitch, I would have expected him to score a couple of goals.

We will never know whether he would have done it because he did not come on until the pace of the game had dropped, both of our attacking wingers had been taken off and we were no longer creating chances with quite the same abandon and ease.

But I did not say it for the sake of saying it.

I said it because I believed it.

While we had that attacking team on the pitch, while we were getting that movement off the ball, with the wingers jinking into the box and putting dangerous balls across goal, I have very little doubt that Kasper would have been amongst the goals had he started.

That does not mean he should have started ahead of Camilo.

One player is in form and scoring. The other is not. It really is as simple as that, and the manager made the right call.

But I think all Kasper needs at the moment is a little support while we wait for the goal to come.

It is also worth remembering that strikers do more than score goals. Increasingly in football, there is an emphasis on goal contributions, which simply means how often a player is involved in creating a goal, whether by scoring it himself or assisting somebody else.

And Kasper is doing rather well as a provider.

That is one of the things I like about him: his unselfishness, his awareness of where the other players are and his willingness to move the ball on when somebody else is in a better position to score. He does not always try to force the finish himself.

If there is a better option, he will use it. That makes him a really good team player, and the more of those you have in a side, the better.

For all that, I understand why he is being left out right now. At this moment you need the players on the pitch who are confident and who are inspiring confidence in the stands.

Kasper will get his chance to shine, and I expect him to take it.

The manager has already expressed his confidence in the player by talking about how he can score 20 goals this season. It is a big number to put on a guy who has not scored in more than ten games, but is it unfair? Is it unreasonable?

I do not think it is. This is a footballer who has scored consistently at a higher level than he is playing at right now. Twenty goals is not out of the question.

And that is why all this talk about what Celtic should do with him is so preposterous to me. The fact that the BBC is now getting in on the act is idiotic at best.

We have an £11 million substitute at the moment.

Every other side in this league would kill for that.

We have a player who has scored Champions League-level goals against some of the biggest clubs in Europe, and right now he cannot get into our team because somebody else is playing better.

At almost any other club, and certainly at one club in particular, we all know which one, that would be presented as evidence of strength in depth.

Here, somehow, it becomes a crisis. But there is literally nothing to see.

There is not one of us who would not be starting Camilo Durán right now. And it is up to Kasper, when he gets on the pitch, to do what he did at the weekend and contribute to the team as a whole.

His assist for Benjamin Nygren’s goal was excellent. The more he does things like that, the happier we will all be.

But the idea that he is already some kind of misfit, that he is regarded as a failure, that he has one foot out the door or that he must somehow be unhappy because he is not currently first choice is absurd.

Some Celtic sites highlighted his obvious joy at the first-half performance at the weekend, a performance in which he was not even on the pitch.

That does not look much like a man sulking about his circumstances.

It looks like a player delighted that his team is playing well and waiting for his own chance to make a bigger contribution.

The media can dress that up any way it likes but my faith in the player, and my faith in what he can still offer us, remains exactly what it was before.

Steadfast and absolute.

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