The Celtic player whose goals have made the biggest impact this season

The Hoops enjoy a six-point cushion at the top of the table but, with a 33-game domestic unbeaten streak snapped in the Scottish Cup semi-final at Hampden last weekend, all eyes are on how Ange Postecoglou’s men respond.

They are, it must be remembered, still 27 games without defeat in the league going into Sunday’s trip to face Ross County.

Overall, the men in green and white have scored 78 goals so far this league season. They will need to add a few more over the next couple of weeks to ensure the Premiership trophy ends up in Callum McGregor’s hands come May.

Who is most likely to come up with the goods? Well, as a means of hypothesising, we’ve taken a deep dive into Celtic’s 78 league strikes to find out who has done that for Postecoglou so far.

Let’s start with the basics. The breakdown of the 78 goals is as follows:

As an aside - it's worth noting that 50 of their open-play goals have come inside the box, they have scored five of seven penalties taken while the split between corner goals is 6-4 in favour of the right-hand side.

In terms of individual contributions, this is the overall state of play:

That’s an impressive amount of goal-sharing. Only Liel Abada has reached double figures and no one player stands out as the main goal-getter even considering the role injuries have played in the season of, for instance, Kyogo Furuhashi.

Not all goals are created equal though. Their value depends on the context in which they occurred. The fifth in a 6-0 win is never going to be as important as the second in a 2-1 win or even the equaliser in a 1-1 draw.

While StatsBomb’s on-ball value (OBV) is a huge step forward in the quest for football to join sports that regularly utilise advanced stats – basketball, for example, uses the likes of win shares, player efficiency rating and value over replacement to seek to put a numerical value on a player’s effectiveness – that’s not what we’re about today.

What we’re going to do is make use of StatsBomb’s ‘game-state’ filter to consider Celtic’s goalscorers in the context of pressure. Who, in other words, has found the back of the net when the team needed it most throughout the season to date? It’s not just about match-winning goals either – we’ll consider strikes that drew the team level when trailing as well as ones that put them ahead when drawing.

With that in mind, we can immediately discount 43 of the 78 goals as ‘pile-on’ goals; contributions that, while still important in a match situation in the sense they can settle any additional nerves or stop an opponent from gaining a head of steam, were ultimately irrelevant to the final result.

Those 43 are attributed to: David Turnbull and Kyogo (5), Giorgos Giakoumakis and Abada (4), Daizen Maeda, Matt O’Riley, Tom Rogic and Josip Juranovic (3), Albian Ajeti and Odsonne Edouard (2) and Reo Hatate, Jota, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Anthony Ralston, Nir Bitton, Liam Scales, McGregor, James Forrest and Nicky Devlin (all 1, with the last one an own-goal).

READ MORE: The late Celtic goals that have propelled Ange Postecoglou to verge of Premiership glory

This filter means the likes of Turnbull, O’Riley and Juranovic drop out of consideration entirely here with all of their goals technically making no difference to Celtic’s final results. Interestingly, all five of the team’s converted penalties fall into this category too, with none making a tangible difference to the overall outcome of a match.

That leaves us with 35 goals to consider. Now, given Celtic’s domestic dominance and the nature of such a lengthy unbeaten run, they have rarely gone behind this season. When they have, though, the Hoops have managed to draw level three times in total. Those trio of strikes to bring Celtic back to parity with their opponents belong to Ralston, Rogic and Giakoumakis.

The context of each matters too though. Ralston’s goal drew Celtic level, yes, but this was the opening night against Hearts at Tynecastle; they still went on to lose the game even though it was desperately needed at the time. On the other hand, Rogic (against Rangers at Ibrox on April 3) and Giakoumakis (against Dundee on February 20) both netted their levellers in games the Hoops went on to win.

Speaking of, so far this season Celtic have scored 32 goals that put them ahead in matches. The breakdown of those strikes is as follows:

Jota has taken a lot of flak recently but he comes out of all this looking rather good. Of the Portuguese winger’s seven league goals, six have been what the North Americans like to call ‘clutch’. The 24-year-old has only scored twice since the turn of the year but both of those – in the same game against Aberdeen at Pittodrie – put Celtic ahead in crucial moments. The Dons are the primary target for Jota in general, with four of his six game-state-altering strikes this term coming against them.

Abada, too, has come up big for the Hoops. The 20-year-old Israeli has bagged the same number of game-state-altering goals as Jota with six while, if you like to play the percentage game, Hatate, Carter-Vickers and Ralston have all done so with three of their four qualifying goals this term meaning 75 per cent of the trio’s totals have been ‘clutch’.

Now, we will dig into this more at the end of the season and add in other considerations such as 'clutch' assists, the difficulty of opposition and the timeframe of game-state-altering goals – here’s looking at you, Tony Ralston – but for the time being just keep those names in mind over the coming weeks when Postecoglou’s side are going out to seal the league title and are in need of some big-impact moments.

Whether Celtic creep over the line or storm through it, the goals will have to come from somewhere – just don’t be surprised if it’s from a familiar face when they do.