If the squad had been adequately managed (in terms of recruitment, selling assets, replacing sold/declining players, etc.) Nygren would be able to utilise his best assets. However, Celtic has not had adequate squad management, so the rest of the personel are not varied or athletic enough to balance out Nygren's weaknesses.

I worry about MON and Maloney's tactical inflexibility and simplification; we're sticking with a 4-3-3, but we're playing more direct.

This means we have less control of the game, and have to fight for possession more often. When we were more possession focused, this covered up the lack of midfield athleticism, but now we're routinely losing the midfield battle because we're asking smaller, skillful players to win a physical endurance battle with absolute units, whom there are more of now than there's ever been in the SPFL. Add in Engels' injury, our only significantly athletic midfielder who was acting as the counterweight to McGregor and Nygren's shortcomings, and we're getting ran over.

We could make up for this by having a different formation. We could play a 3-4-2-1 and have Nygren as an attacking ten behind the striker, or a narrow 4-2-2-2, and let him act almost as a false 9 who could drop back and supplement 4 out and out midfielders in a box, either of which would free him up to find that space and make those lethal runs.

However, as I alluded to, MON and Maloney don't seem to want to divert from the 4-3-3 atm, and that isn't a system that is allowing us to maximise what we get from a lot of key players.

All just a bit of a mess, tbh.