CELTIC travel to Ibrox on Sunday hoping to end their two-game losing streak at the home of their great rivals. Neil Lennon's side have flown out of the traps domestically, banging in 15 goals from their first three league fixtures.

Sunday will be an altogether different game, however. With the greatest of respect, it was always going to be a tall order for Hearts, Motherwell or St Johnstone to lay a glove on Celtic and cause them serious issues. But at Ibrox, Lennon will find a team capable of doing exactly that.

So far this season, Lennon has started Scott Brown in every match apart from the League Cup fixture against Dunfermline, and it is expected that the combative midfielder will be given the nod to start on Sunday afternoon. Lennon clearly trusts the Celtic captain and it isn't hard to see why when we look at all Brown has achieved at Parkhead. But football - and an Old Firm derby, in particular - leaves no room for sentimentality. Celtic need a win, and there should be question marks over whether or not Brown is the right man to start in midfield.

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The crux of the issue lies within the tactics that Lennon deploys. In the video above, Jose Mourinho explains that a football match can be viewed in four separate phases of play; possession, non-possession, defensive transition and attacking transition. Celtic have undergone a major shift in emphasis over the last six months. Brendan Rodgers placed a heavy emphasis on the possession phase of play and his side often benefitted from slowly constricting the opposition by retaining possession and exploiting an opposition defence with clever movement and incisive passing.

Lennon's Celtic, however, are an altogether different beast. Where Rodgers' priority lay in possession, Lennon's team are geared towards attacking transitions. When winning the ball back, Celtic now charge up the pitch immediately and attempt to score as quickly as possible. As we've seen from Celtic so far this season, this can work to great effect - just ask Tommy Wright or Stephen Robinson - but it is a philosophy which fundamentally cedes control of the match. It can make for exciting, attacking football at one end of the pitch, but places heavy demands on the players within this system.

This is where Brown comes in. Under Rodgers' possession-heavy system, the Celtic captain was crucial. It relied on a player sitting at the base of midfield, recycling possession in a solid but unspectacular style. Brown was the perfect candidate for the role and was a key component in Celtic's domestic dominance under Rodgers.

But in a team where a lot of emphasis is placed on moving the ball forward at pace, a different skill-set is required - one that Brown quite simply does not possess. In matches where Celtic are expected to dominate the ball the 35-year-old can still get by but in a match where both sets of midfielders will get little time on the ball - such as Sunday's game - Brown can look out of his depth.

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The graphic above details some of the key stats for a central midfielder, comparing Brown's season average from the 10 competitive games he's played this season, his averages for last season and his individual performances in each of the games at Ibrox last season. And we can see a notable decline in Brown's on-the-ball stats in both games.

In each of the games at Ibrox, Brown hit around 40% fewer passes than he usually did during the 2018/19 campaign and his overall accuracy dropped by around seven percent. He attempted fewer forward passes - something that Lennon's system relies heavily on -  in both Ibrox defeats and in the 2-0 defeat in particular (when Lennon was in charge) his forward passing accuracy plummeted from 83% to 45%.

Off the ball, there is no getting away from the fact that Brown's powers are on the wane. Last year, the central midfielder won around 65% of his defensive duels; this season, that figure sits at around 49%. To his credit, Brown is completing slightly more interceptions this season, but it's worth pointing out that that figure was roughly halved whenever he stepped onto the turf at Ibrox.

Essentially, if Brown were to start Sunday's match at Ibrox, Lennon would be asking his captain to play in a game that he is unsuited to, in a role that he cannot play effectively in, at a venue where he has previously struggled. All of the evidence points to one conclusion: Brown should not play. Someone like Olivier Ntcham, for example, is a far more technical player and is likely to have a far greater influence in midfield.

This isn't to say that Brown doesn't have a future at Parkhead, but he is now approaching a point in his career where he simply isn't suited to every match. In games where Celtic will dominate possession there are few better players in the top flight to call on but in matches likes the Old Firm, Brown can be found out and Lennon must resist the temptation to start Brown. It would be a big call from the Celtic boss, but it would be the correct one.