For nearly ninety minutes, this looked to be a cracking 2-0 win away at 1874 Northwich. Nearly.

Speed, pace, chances at both ends, the first half sped by with Celtic taking the lead through a Jack Irlam penalty, but the lead up to that saw Liam Tongue test young keeper Max Beddow early on, and Cam Fogerty firing through a crowd and missing by millimetres, while at the other end, Michael Ibeto’s chance vanished under pressure from Jack Byrne, forcing the fullback to press the trigger too soon and fire over. With the ball pinging like a pinball, Irlam wriggled free and closed down on Beddow’s goal, only to be shoved over by Simon Njaria inside the box, no question marks on the penalty and Irlam converted. After the goal, Lewis Rawsthorn was twice denied as 74’s heads dropped and Celtic powered into the ascendancy. Kyle Brownhill almost added to his tally, sweeping in to meet Ellis Horan’s cross and be denied by a reaction stop. Right before the interval, Rawsthorn came within a hair of grabbing the second from a free kick, just clearing the bar.

That goal came instead right after the interval. Not as quickly as at Chasetown, Ruben Jerome fired that one wide, but he did have the coolest head five minutes into the half when Horan’s corner swept in. Irlam headed it goalward, it taking a deflection off Mitchell Thomas to come to Jerome to use precision to delicately head the ball past Beddow. Rather than attack attack attack, Celtic spent the next half an hour containing and probing, resulting in a Tongue special that cleared the bar and what should have been a third from Horan put past his own post by Thomas to deny him.

Five minutes left on the clock. Both sides had made changes, for 74, their biggest change was bringing on Evrard Yao who caused a lot of problems down Celtic’s right. Pressure from the home side was mounting, they chased down every ball, and moments after Yao missed by half a metre with a low drive, he put a looping cross over for James Simms, up to now ineffectual. One on one with Monks he lifted the ball over him. It should have been a warning as Celtic went into five minutes of stoppages. Could Celtic have done things differently in stoppages. Absolutely. Hindsight is wonderful. Instead of holding the ball in the corner with a minute left, Obua Mugalula and Greg Wilkinson fell foul of a well-orchestrated offside trap. Was the free kick taken thirty yards further up the pitch, yes, but the result was a long ball to Simms who saw Monks well off his line and lobbed him to equalise. A catalogue of mistakes across the park, from being caught offside, to being out of position, and it’s two points dropped after looking the better team for eighty minutes.