In a surprise admission, or possibly a spot of misdirection, Philippe Clement has strongly hinted that Cyriel Dessers will start at Ibrox on Sunday, after strongly defending the striker’s record this season.

In words echoing Ibrox Noise’s own comments on the Nigerian, Clement explained that the lad works hard, has a great record for the club, and put it very pointedly:

“The life of a striker is you score chances and are the guy, you miss chances and you get told you are a bad player. It doesn’t work that way.”

Pretty much – when Dessers scores, everyone ‘loves’ him and mocks the notion of his being rubbish, when he misses, he’s the biggest ‘this and that’ the club has ever seen and 75 year old Boab who’s supported Rangers all his life ‘has never seen a worse striker at Ibrox’.

And that strong defence from Clement went on:

“It’s not just scoring, it’s all the work for the team from the forward players. Cyriel also puts a lot of effort into our defensive setup, he is in a good way and everyone sees a better player than five months ago.”

This looks about as direct a ‘he’s starting’ as we’ve seen, but then as we suggested earlier, we did expect some misdirection from the manager.

Equally though, Clement has strong defended pretty much every player he’s been asked about, in a very fatherly fashion – the players at Ibrox know Clement has their back and that makes them play for him.

He supports them, they run through walls for him. And this is more of that – Clement knows Dessers is no Haaland, but he’s what we have, and Clement backs up his men unconditionally.

Does this mean Dessers will start? We never really doubted it in truth – he’s the best and only option right now that is fit, and he’s the biggest strongest striker we have who can actually cause a bit of a ruckus in Celtic’s rather modest defence.

So we’d probably expect him in the XI on Sunday.