Celtic: The impressive stat which shows why Scott Bain is playing ahead of Craig Gordon

It is safe to say that Scott Bain is very much Celtic’s current No.1 goalkeeper.

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The 27-year-old has played the last seven games for the Parkhead side since taking over goalkeeping duties at the start of 2019, and during Sunday’s 5-0 win over St Johnstone in the Scottish Cup fifth round he surpassed the ten hour mark without conceding a goal.

Following the 2-0 win over Hibernian last week, Celtic boss Brendan Rodgers was effusive in his praise of the former Dundee goalkeeper.

Scott Bain applauds the Celtic fans following the win over St Johnstone.

A key attribute that appeals to the Northern Irishman is Bain’s ability with the ball at his feet and his decision making.

“First and foremost he is very agile,” he told BBC. “He makes saves, that’s the first thing you want from your keeper. It’s no good being good with your feet if you can’t keep the ball out of the net. What he has is a wonderful view of the game. He understands the game, when it needs speeding up, when it needs control.

“For my teams throughout my life, that’s how I have always had them. They don’t need to be 6ft4, 6ft5, as long as they have got good agility, can make saves then they can participate in the game when we have the ball.

“You see a game like this tonight, Hibs are playing with two front players, they want to press, they have a No.10 in behind looking to press, you need your goalkeeper then who can stay calm and pick out the lines of pass that we would want him to.”

His passing ability is backed up by the statistics which may explain why he has ousted Craig Gordon. Currently, no player in the Scottish Premiership has a better passing success rate than Bain’s 96.23 per cent accuracy from 159 passes.

The percentage is superior to Gordon’s 87.07 per cent from 410 passes.

Bain also tops the charts in terms of long pass accuracy with 85.9 per cent of his 14 attempts finding their target, albeit that comes from a small sample size.