Ange Postecoglou reveals long-term Celtic absentee is ready to return – and become a key Parkhead player

However, his countryman Postecoglou, whose team take on Hibernian in a cinch Premiership game at Parkhead tomorrow night, expects the six-times capped 27-year-old to show supporters what he is capable of up front in the months ahead.

“Giorgios is back in,” he said. “He’s done all the rehab. We gave most players the week off but him and a couple of others worked right through and he’s all good to go.

“He’s one of three or four who probably didn’t have an ideal start. He came in late and had several challenges, not doing pre-season and the season already up and running when he arrived.

“He had a couple of injury setbacks and there’s been a whole range of things. So, we did have to be a bit patient with him.

“They weren’t all going to hit the ground running in terms of an immediate impact. Two or three of the signings were quick off the blocks. But others needed a bit of time.

“Hopefully, now Giorgios is ready to go again. He’s trained really well and he’ll get an opportunity in the games ahead to show what he’s all about. But all the players are important.”

Kyogo Furuhashi and Daizen Maeda are both set to be called up by Japan later this month for their World Cup qualifiers against China and Saudi Arabia and the Celtic manager anticipates their fellow forward Giakoumakis will get game time.    

“Right now we don’t know who’s going to be away on international duty,” he said. “That’s still to be decided. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens.

“There’s no doubt, though, that with the fixtures ahead of us we’re going to need as many players available as possible.

“I think it’s the one area in the first half of the year that we struggled in terms of consistency of performance. We kind of have the squad now to be able to rotate and keep people fresh.

“We suffered injuries before because we weren’t able to. There are two or three back available to us which will help because of the load we have with fixtures.”

Asked if he will request the postponement of any fixtures if three or more members of his squad are called up for international duty this month – as SPFL rules permit him to do – Postecoglou said: “That falls into the department of stuff that I don’t really think about.

“It’s not a problem yet. I could spend hours thinking about it and what we were going to do and strategise and have meetings on it – then in the end find out that only one gets selected. So, I’m not going to worry about that.

“We’ll plan as we always have, that when we lose our players to international duty we’ll crack on and play the games we need to play. At the moment, there’s no point even thinking about that. As it stands, none of the players have been selected, so until that happens we’ll look at it then.”