Holiday mode, Oh positive; 3 things we learned as Celtic lose to Hibernian

By Hamish Carton

May 24, 2023

Celtic’s post-title winning slump has continued tonight with a 4-2 defeat to Hibernian at Easter Road.

We twice had the lead in the game through goals from Reo Hatate and Hyeongyu Oh but more lapses in concentration and defensive howlers saw us lose out.

It’s our third Premiership defeat of the season and the third winless match in a row.

Here are three things we took away from the match.

An end-of-season game that burst in to life

The first-half was a fairly forgettable affair with Celtic far from their scintillating best and Hibernian not offering a great deal either.

It was easy to drift off into your own thoughts despite it not actually being an awful game of football. It just had that end-of-season feeling.

The second-half was a much more incident packed affair with goals, a red card, another red card which was overturned, VAR drama, howlers and more.

Sadly, Celtic were very erratic for most of that period and suffered the consequences as a result.

Not good enough, regardless of the circumstances

Sure, we’ve done it when it really counted in the league. And it’s a triumph that will be celebrated euphorically on Saturday.

But the three games since Tynecastle have been nowhere near good enough. One point from a possible nine isn’t acceptable for any Celtic team, nevermind this well-oiled Postecoglou machine.

The majority of the team already seem to be on their holidays. If they don’t up their levels quickly, they could be caught cold in the Scottish Cup final against Inverness.

In the grand scheme of things, tonight doesn’t really matter. But we’re not on a great run at all and we need to fix that quickly.

Oh’s impressive showing

One bright spark tonight was Hyeongyu Oh.

The South Korean hasn’t had many starts but he was trusted with the forward’s role for this game.

He repaid his manager’s faith with a pretty impressive performance, cooly netting our second goal after 58 minutes.

His best moment was during the first-half when he controlled a lofted Liel Abada pass brilliantly, turned and forced David Marshall in to a good save.

If his team-mates had put in the same level of performance tonight we might have been on the end of a better result.

In other news, Ange expects four Celtic stars to hit the ground running next season