Celtic's Hero Delivers Perfect Parting Gift to Dig Far From Polished Outfit Out of the Mire

St Mirren play their part - but champions maintain 100 per cent record.

Celtic were pushed all the way in Paisley, but come the end of a pulsating 90 minutes had still found a way to preserve their perfect start to the Premiership season. Trailing to a Nikolas Agrafiotis penalty that had St Mirren leading both the match and, temporarily, the league table, too, Martin O’Neill’s side dug deep in the second half to equalise through a Liam Scales header and then forge in front via Yang Hyun-jun’s fine run and finish.

Yang will now head off as part of the South Korea squad competing in the Asian Games making this the perfect way to sign off as Celtic stretched their lead at the top to five points over a St Mirren side tasting league defeat for the first time. Craig McLeish and his side can perhaps feel hard done to having contributed so much to a compelling contest although, not for the first time, it was their finishing that let them down as one player after another lined up to shoot late on but couldn’t find the net. If St Mirren can still take heart from their performance, then for Celtic it was all about the result.

This was far from their polished best but a fifth successive victory to start their title defence allows them to work on improvements from the strongest of positions. Their late splurge in the transfer market was reflected on the team sheet. Six new players arrived in the final 48 hours of the window and five of them were accommodated on the bench.

That none were deemed worthy of a starting berth perhaps told its own story. St Mirren’s impressive start to the season will have surprised all but the most buoyant of Buddies and there was evidently no notion to adjust their attacking philosophy here, even given the undoubted step-up in the calibre of the opposition. McLeish’s insistence that his team pass their way up the pitch is easy on the eye when it comes off but, against a team that presses as relentlessly as Celtic, it also tends to put his defence under pressure while giving home supporters palpitations.

It also, though, allows St Mirren to strike quickly on the counter, primarily using the lightning quick pace of Ismeal Kabia, the winger on loan from Arsenal, to create opportunities of their own. Viljami Sinisalo did well to repel a Fraser Taylor but respite would be brief as the home side forged in front. From the resultant corner, Scales stuck out an arm to block Chris Mochrie’s volley: penalty.

Up stepped Agrafiotis, the Dutch-born Serb plucked from the German third tier, to lash his effort past the goalkeeper and give his team the lead. That great big tease of modern times – the As It Stands table – had St Mirren, remarkably, sitting at the top. For all their possession, Celtic hadn’t created a huge amount by that point but duly upped the ante.

Duran saw a shot saved and then did have the ball in the net as he scrambled to touch in Yang’s shot that was dribbling towards goal. A VAR check, however, showed the Colombian to be offside by the finest of margins. Jacob Chapman was the busiest man on the pitch at this stage as he raced out of his goal to deny Duran again and then stretched to tip over Callum McGregor’s bouncing shot to allow St Mirren to head up the tunnel at half-time with their lead preserved. Celtic, though, were only down but not out and a vibrant start to the second half duly delivered an equaliser.