“Glamour friendlies” are all very well but you only had to see the half-full Celtic Park on Saturday to play the English Champions in the International Champions Cup to get an idea of the difference between real competition and exhibition football.
Managers can say what they like about playing to win in these tournaments but the smiles all round after Leicester City won the penalty shoot-out showed that only the established UEFA-recognised tournaments count in football.
So, the complaints about Brendan Rodgers being left hamstrung were well justified – it is shocking that the club had to go into such a crucial qualifier without a recognised reliable central defender.
However, amid that sort of adversity, sometimes a genuine talent emerges who would not otherwise have been given a chance. In Astana, that was Eoghan O’Connell, rightly praised for a composed performance belying his young years and inexperience.
If we could just get a mirror image of the left side of our defence and apply it to the right, we would have lot fewer nervous Celtic fans.
The other post was on how fantastic a result a draw would be against a team that Galatasaray, Benfica and Atletico Madrid all failed to beat in Kazakhstan, last season.
So, in the circumstances, Brendan Rodgers and the players deserve all the credit coming their way for achieving that at such an early stage of the season, with such frailties in the squad.
There were mistakes and nerve-wracking times – far too many – but what was most encouraging was how Celtic managed to get a grip on the match in the last 20 minutes, when previous sides would have crumbled.
In fact, it was as if the team matured before our eyes, using the ball intelligently after Patrick Roberts and Leigh Griffiths had combined to produce a goal of exceptional quality.
We've had to many European disappointments to count in recent years, so there was never a sense of the job being done until the referee's final gift to Astana of five minutes added time had expired.
But, under immense pressure, there was a self-assuredness on the ball in the late stages that surely reflected the first meaningful improvement under Brendan Rodgers and his team.
There is still a major amount of work to do against an Astana side that showed once again that the generously funded Kazakh football has arrived and will make an impact soon.
We can look forward to that day – but hopefully not for another year yet.
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