Celtic saw off a stuffy Livingston side to go top of the league and apply pressure to the team from the other side of Glasgow but again, it was far from a vintage performance from Neil Lennon’s men.
The main talking point before the game was the absence of Odsonne Edouard with the 22-year old remaining an unused substitute, how his team-mates could have done with his guile and invention to make better use of the opportunities that they had.
What will have annoyed the gaffer is once again letting the opposition get an early lead, however, as with Wednesday night, they were in back front before the first half was at the mid-way point, as positive a take as any going forward.
What will have been a cause for concern is that another two goals have been shipped – and it could easily have been three – to a team sitting near the bottom of the league, 3-5-2 may be Lennon’s preferred formation but at the moment they just aren’t as fluent or as solid looking as they were in the early part of 2020 when he first made the switch.
What shape should Lennon go for?
3-5-2
4-2-3-1
Titles certainly aren’t won in September though and, as long as the Hoops are still picking up points, how they do it is largely irrelevant, but there will come a point when a change may be looked at if the ruthless efficiency in which they were sweeping teams aside doesn’t return.
Lennon has the players at his disposal to go back to a 4-3-2-1, and the fact that he had both James Forrest and Mohamed Elyounoussi sitting on the bench shows the strength of the squad that he now has, he has always been a proactive coach and he won’t be shy in making the big decisions – if he feels that they need to be made.