LEAGUE winning sides, or even those that can navigate Champions League qualifiers, aren’t built in a day. Particularly when you don’t yet have the proper tools at your disposal.

The Celtic support fully understand this, and that is why some grace has been given to new manager Ange Postecoglou following the defeat to FC Midtjylland on Wednesday night.

How long that patience will last, or if it will even survive anything but a victory in tonight’s Premiership opener against Hearts at Tynecastle, remains to be seen. But the Australian isn’t asking for any favours.

There is a narrative around Postecoglou’s career to date that has almost always delivered success, but that it has almost always taken into the second season of his tenure for his players to fully get to grips with his philosophy. As understanding as the Celtic fans are currently being, he knows he won’t get that long here to get things right.

There will be bumps, and perhaps a few bruises along the way, but Postecoglou is adamant that success in his first season – by way of competing for trophies – is very much the immediate goal.

“I don’t try to navigate a path where success comes in the second year,” Postecoglou said.

“Wherever I’ve been I’ve tried to be successful in the first year, though sometimes circumstances haven’t helped me in that.

“I definitely think we’ll get better as the season goes on and we’ll be stronger, absolutely I agree with that, but that doesn’t mean that rules us out of being successful in the league.

“I really believe that with the group of players we have and the additions we’re going to bring in, we’ll hopefully get off to a good start in the league, and I’m very, very confident that we’ll be challenging for honours at the end of the year.”

But first things first. The Champions League exit during the week was hardly the ideal preparation for tonight’s Premiership curtain raiser, but then, ideal preparation has hardly been the theme of Celtic’s summer.

New signing Carl Starfelt will be available for the trip to Edinburgh, and his inclusion is a very welcome one for Postecoglou, especially considering the lack of options he has at his disposal to freshen things up in a side that played 120 minutes in Denmark just a few days ago.

“It did take a lot out of them the other night, for some of them it was an enormous effort to play 120 minutes,” he said.

“But looking at them [on Friday] morning and talking to them, the players have certainly recovered and bounced back well.

“We are limited a little bit in terms of how much I can rotate. We do get Carl Starfelt who is available, and obviously Nir Bitton who wasn’t available the other night which will help in a couple of positions at least.

“For the rest of it, we’re going to have to go with largely the same group of players.”

Kyogo Furuhashi will arrive in Glasgow over the weekend, and will give Postecoglou much-needed attacking reinforcements for the Europa League qualifier against Jablonec next week. The Celtic manager has repeatedly enforced the message – perhaps for his board’s benefit as much as for the supporters’ – that he expects a number of other bodies to follow.

“That’s the plan,” he reiterated. “I’m pretty confident, we are all working very hard to get at least one or two into the club by the end of next week.”

Behind the scenes though, the coach is also looking to improve the sports science department at the club, and build a support network to help manage his squad through a punishing season, where he will ask them to push themselves harder on the pitch than perhaps they have been used to in recent times.

“People have asked me about bringing my own people in, well, it’s not the coaching area that I think we need that extra support in,” he said.

“I think the areas we need are particularly in the conditioning area and the sports science area, we need some more people in to help us. It’s going to be a punishing schedule.

“I’m a big believer in needing to manage your squad of players through that period. If you want to play the kind of football we want to play, be a team that plays high intensity, pressurises the opposition and really wants to move the ball quickly, then that takes a physical toll.

“So, looking after the players off the field is really important, and certainly we’re looking to bring in people who will help us in those areas.”

Despite a career spent mostly on the other side of the world, tonight’s game won’t be the first time that Postecoglou has encountered Hearts. His former role as head coach of the Australian national team gave him regular reason to keep an eye on some of his compatriots in the Scottish capital.

“I came up here a couple of times,” he said. “Through Hearts we had quite a few players come through and go and play for them. There is a strong Aussie connection with the club.

“Paddy Kisnorbo was there for a while, Oliver Bozanic was there a couple of years ago, so I’ve followed Hearts. Being on the other side of the globe doesn’t mean I wasn’t aware of what was going on here.

“When I was national team manager my Monday mornings were literally a backlog of games that I needed to watch that Aussies were involved in. I could be watching games from the Third Division in England, to the Premier in Scotland to the Czech second division.

“Mate, I’ve watched some bizarre games of football.”

As he starts life in the Scottish Premiership, he may want to get used to it.