Hearts’ draw in Paisley, coupled with Celtic’s victory, narrows the gap at the summit of the table to six points. <\/p>\n
It was perfunctory, but after the week the defending champions have had, that’s exactly what they needed.<\/p>\n
Next is an altogether different challenge, with Rangers and a League Cup semi-final lying in wait at Hampden on Sunday. <\/p>\n
Celtic entered the game with an intent. There’s been flashes of that, but not with anywhere near the same intensity that has been seen prior to this season. <\/p>\n
Twenty six shots were aimed towards Scott Bain’s goal on Wednesday, 11 found the target, two hit the woodwork. They made 119 successful final third passes, too.<\/p>\n
In Kenny, they’ve got a forward who is grasping the opportunity gifted to him. <\/p>\n
His two goals were instinctive, while a third really should have been added in the second half.<\/p>\n
“That’s been at Celtic for quite a considerable time, getting the ball forward quickly,” O’Neill told Celtic TV.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes we played it and we played it too quickly, it’s fine. As long as there’s an end product. We’ll see how we can come out of the game.<\/p>\n
“As it turns out, even at my age I’m learning about players. I’m learning some of our players are really good.”<\/p>\n
The interim manager joked on Wednesday that if Falkirk doesn’t go to plan, he won’t be there for Sunday. <\/p>\n
So, mission accomplished. If he completes his next one, O’Neill can expect to be asked about his future plans a fair bit more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hearts’ draw in Paisley, coupled with Celtic’s victory, narrows the gap at the summit of the table to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-233805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}