With Daizen Maeda suspended for the first leg of Celtic’s Champions League playoff tie against Bayern Munich, Adam Idah is the last man standing as a recognised senior striker in the ranks of the Scottish champions.
Between then and now, Celtic have two matches. Tomorrow night, they face Dundee at Celtic Park, before hosting Raith Rovers in the Scottish Cup on Saturday. Fixtures in which, with the greatest of respect, they may not have to deploy their full arsenal in to get a result.
It may be understandable in fact if manager Brendan Rodgers chose to wrap Idah up in the proverbial cotton wool, and either deploy Maeda through the middle or hand an opportunity to the likes of Johnny Kenny, who he spoke glowingly of as he addressed the media today.
But when asked if he would be taking Idah out of harm’s way with the visit of the German giants in mind, Rodgers said: "No. You've got to be robust. You can't want to play every game and then look for a rest.
“I was just conscious that we've got 16 goals on either side of the field, and the idea was to bring someone else in to support Adam, rather than having to sacrifice those 16 goals to bring back inside. And then you've got to find another winger that can score 16 goals!
“But either way, we'll be strong mentally, physically, going into our remaining games, whatever team is out there. And as I said, there's still a lot for this group to achieve and I'm looking forward to seeing that over the coming months.”
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That being said, the return of Jota as an option on the left and Celtic’s failure to bring in a striker to replace Kyogo Furuhashi means that Rodgers is open to reassigning Maeda as a centre forward if the need arises. Especially after scoring a header against Motherwell at the weekend that Rodgers said Henrik Larsson himself would be proud of.
"One hundred percent,” he said.
“I actually can see a lot of more natural, instinctive, striker movements that he has and how he plays the game. And I think if you track back to when he came in, if you look back on your stats, I think you'll see his numbers from when he came in, from Yokohama, he was playing as a striker.
“He was up to 23 goals in something like 33 games or something. He's a goalscorer and he's done it in Japan and now you see him doing it here.
“And whether he's wide, whether he's through the middle, if you think of that hat-trick in Yokohama, and when I played him up front earlier in the season, when Kyogo didn't play, he scored two.
“It was the most pressing and penetrating runs that we had of any striker. Way above Kyogo's levels of penetration running. And he scored two and could have had more.
“The way I ask my number nines to play, to run and set the game quickly and create space for other players, I have absolutely no doubt that he can do that.
"I don’t want to have to do that, but I know that it's something that we can use him.”
