With the split edging closer with every passing game, Sunday’s match will be the first of nine SPFL games still to play, and the manager is planning on the next batch of games being even better than the sequence of wins running up to the international break.

He said: “We look at it from a yearly planning perspective. The first thing is, at this point of the year this is when everything gets decided and we wanted to be in a really strong position at this point, and we’ve achieved that.

“The second part of that is that we want to finish the season strongly, as we did last year with our best form and be at our strongest at this part of the year.

“That’s been the plan all along, and if you look at the first stretch of games, then post-World Cup in the middle section we were stronger than we were in the first section, and the plan is now hopefully to be stronger in this third section, the final section.

“That’s all theory, we’ve still got to come down to the practicalities of doing it, but from the players’ perspective, and this is the first day we’ve had them back, they’re ready to go.

“They understand what has to be done between now and the end of the year, and, beginning with Sunday, that is to put in a strong performance, and finish the season in the manner we want to.”

If that comes to fruition, and the nine remaining league games, and hopefully two Scottish Cup games, are as good performance-wise and result-wise than the previous 14 consecutive wins, then we are in for a treat.

The manager said: “We’re not basing it on results, we’re basing it on performances, and I think we can still improve our performances.

“Obviously the results are the by-product of that and we always focus on trying to be a better football team - be more aggressive in our approach, score more goals – our targets and ambitions are always there.

‘And it’s a never-ending thread where we just want to keep showing that we can play better football.’

“Obviously that’s always going to transfer in terms of results, if you consider we were almost perfect in that last stretch of games.

“But it doesn’t mean you can’t improve, the results can be the same but the performances can be stronger and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

MATCH CENTRE

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Manager aiming for Celts to improve even more – starting with Ross County