Aberdeen 1-2 Celtic: Will the top players keep Celtic in the title hunt?

“What a strange player he is. He can be out of midfield but he scores goals,” former Celtic striker Chris Sutton said of Nygren on Sky Sports.

Just as Daizen Maeda still looks like a shadow of the player who lit up Scottish football last season, Thomas Tshvankara and Junior Adamu, on loan in January, have yet to fully impress, and Kelechi Iheanacho has faded from view despite returning from injury.

Nygren is not one of the title winners Tierney talks about at Celtic, but the 24-year-old Swedish midfielder is doing everything he can to make sure he picks up a league winners’ medal.

An excited former Celtic midfielder Scott Allan told BBC Radio Scotland Sportsound: “The impactful substitutions I saw at the weekend, I saw them again tonight with Benjamin Nygren and James Forrest linking up.

“The fantastic collaboration from Forest and Nygren has just come to fruition – we have seen that time and time again and it has had a real impact on this team.”

In fact, Nygren has found the back of the net three times and provided one assist in his last four Premier League appearances – and his 15 goals are more than any other Celtic player in the league this season.

“I know Nygren gives away certain parts of the game, but what he does is he gets into the box and finishes things off,” Allan said.

“I felt like his play overall in the game was really good, he played some great through balls, he always looked like he was going to be a threat around the 18-yard box, and he made the difference again tonight.”

His manager was similarly enthusiastic.

“He does something that is the hardest thing in the game, which is to score goals, and he came up again with what proved to be the winning goal,” O’Neill said.

“The substitutes in recent weeks have made great contributions to us, so this is important for us.”