Celtic's three straight defeats before the break are being read as a crisis, but look at who they lost to: Rangers twice and Ferencvaros in Europe, as BBC Sport lays out. Their routine league away form hasn't moved, with three wins from three on the road, eight scored and two conceded on our table. So the question at Fir Park isn't really whether Celtic have fallen apart. It's whether Motherwell can drag this into the kind of game Celtic have actually been losing, and that's a big ask for a side whose own trouble has been at home.
Motherwell under Alfred Johansson have three goals in three league games at Fir Park, and the most recent of those home games was a 0-4 against Aberdeen. They've won two of their last ten across all competitions. The odd part is that Fir Park is one of the few places they do find goals against Celtic: 2-3 in May, 2-0 last December, 1-3 the February before. They've rarely stopped Celtic there, but they've rarely been shut out either.
Where it could tilt is Celtic's selection. Benfica away comes next in the Europa League, then Hearts, then Celta Vigo, and Mika Baur himself talked about "a lot of Sunday-Thursday-Sunday weeks". BBC lists Alistair Johnston, Callum Osmand and Yang Hyun-jun still out, Cameron Carter-Vickers as a doubt, and Jota possibly back after roughly 18 months away. If Carter-Vickers misses, the defence that has conceded only two on the road gets reshuffled at exactly the moment Martin O'Neill may want to save legs for Lisbon.
So I wouldn't frame this as crisis against bounce. It's a Celtic side whose problems have shown up against stronger opponents, meeting a Motherwell side whose problems show up in front of their own fans. Which Celtic turns up probably depends more on how O'Neill weighs this one against Benfica than on the noise of the last fortnight. None of that is a certainty, and an early Motherwell goal would test how settled that dressing room really is.
