Ange Postecoglou is hoping to unleash his full attacking might on Motherwell today- including Giorgos Giakoumakis.
The striker completed his move from VVV Venlo on transfer deadline day and has been restricted to a 25 minute run out in the Europa League defeat from Bayer Leverkusen.
With Leigh Griffiths and Odsonne Edouard leaving the club at the same time there are high expectations on Giakoumakis with Kyogo Furuhashi setting the standard for new strikers.
The former VVV Venlo striker was left on the bench when Celtic won away at Aberdeen but after two solid weeks on the training ground Postecoglou is looking forward to throwing Giakoumakis into his side.
The Celtic boss told The Sun:
Giakoumakis is the one who benefited the most from the international break. He missed pre-season and the start of the season. Then he had ten days quarantine when he signed, so he was really under done.
We were kind of holding our breath to get him through to this break and I think he feels a lot better in himself. He feels ready to make an impact now. That’s great for us.
We have him, Albian Ajeti, obviously Kyogo, Jota, Abada, there’s Mikey Johnston now available and James Forrest on the way. We have good attacking options to start and on the bench too.
We’ll have a couple of attacking players that I can throw on and help us with our momentum late in games. We just haven’t been able to do that before now, so we’ll be in good shape.
Even at this early stage of the season Celtic have little margin for error, going into today’s match they trail Motherwell by a point.
Full points today and again in 10 days time away to Hibs are essential to kick start the season- if Giakoumakis can make a scoring impact Celtic could develop some momentum as the season starts to settle down.