Hattrick Mad Stat

No hattrick - a 134 year first!

Mad stat of this month - and many before it - was provided with the revelation that the just-concluded Scottish top-flight season marked the first in the 134-year history of the competition not to produce a hat-trick. Nada, zilch, from any player, in any team.  Unpick that in a Celtic context and it offers up another crackers couple of sequences.

By the time the new Premiership campaign rolls around on August 3, no fewer than 22 months will have elapsed since a Celtic player bagged a triple in the league. James Forrest claiming that honour, with his plunder of three goals in a 6-1 defeat of Hibs in October 2022. A feat, incidentally, that serves to indicate that even when the redoubtable medals-hooverer was among more accomplished wing rivals - step forward Jota and Liel Abada - he could still impact games in noteworthy fashion.

This peculiarly-lengthy gap between Celtic league hat-tricks is responsible for two extraordinary developments. It leaves 2023 as the only calendar year in the past decade-and-a-half that hasn’t witnessed a three-goal haul in the competition from any player in Celtic colours. Moreover, it means the last time there was a longer period without such a hat-trick was between August 1989 and November 1995, triples from Tommy Coyne and John Collins bookending that gruesomely-unprofitable run.

The disappearance of the league hat-trick in the current golden era seems entirely out-of-kilter with Celtic’s front-footed focus, finesse, and flogging properties. Granted, they probably do not possess any genuine penalty-box predator types beyond Kyogo Furuhashi. As would be the description given to such as Giorgos Giakoumakis, Leigh Griffiths, Moussa Dembele, Anthony Stokes, Gary Hooper, John Hartson and, of course, Henrik Larsson. A band that are largely responsible for Celtic league hat-tricks arriving at pretty regular intervals since the late-1990s. The little sorcerer Furuhashi also chipping in across his first 13 months in Scotland - it should be said - with two league hat-tricks subsequent to his July 2021 arrival. 

Set against that, it isn’t a case of Celtic’s Premiership goal returns as a team have dropped off in recent seasons. Anything but. The 114-goal blitz last term was a new high in the post-war period for the club. Meanwhile, the 95-figure from the freshly-minted title triumph has been bettered only three times in the past two decades.

It demands positing a theory about why match balls will have proved safe from being stashed away by gleeful Celtic players on league duty for approaching two years. So here goes. The product of the five-substitute rule has been significant changes to game, and player, management in the current period. Now attackers don’t always require the full 90 minutes to bag three goals, but a cheeky wee third in the closing stages against bedraggled opponents accounts for a fair number of Celtic’s hat-tricks since 1995. As with Ange Postecoglou before him, Brendan Rodgers often changes his forward players wholesale around the hour-mark of encounters in which Celtic hold a decisive scoreline. That’s my cod-analysis, anyway. And I’m sticking to it.

New Jersey

The new home kit is usually launched in June and many online will already have seen some sneak peaks. If you haven’t, here’s Kyogo modelling it.