THIS will likely make little difference to the correspondence I will receive on the back of this article, but it’s worth pointing a few things out straight off the bat in any case.

I am not ‘hurting’ because of Celtic’s success. I am not a member of any kind of shadowy, secretive organisation. Though, I acknowledge that is precisely what someone who is a member of a shadowy, secretive organisation would say.

Neither am I that word once reserved to describe Attila and his hordes as they rampaged across the Roman Empire, but now used to derogatorily denote anyone suspected of supporting Rangers.

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As both a football fan and reporter though, I have covered Celtic closely since Ange Postecoglou arrived on these shores, and I have thoroughly enjoyed attending most of the 100 competitive games he has now racked up in charge of the club.

For the vast majority of that time, the team he has created has produced fast, free-flowing football that has proven impossible for domestic opponents to live with. Even when his players fail to reach the heights they are capable of, he has instilled a mental steeliness within them and an unshakeable faith in his brand of football that ensures they almost invariably get the job done in any case.

They have carried Postecoglou’s philosophy unquestioning onto the European stage, admittedly, with mixed results. But while success there has been harder to come by, there is much to admire in his obdurate belief that the only way his team will ever compete at that level is by testing the game they work on every single day at Lennoxtown in that arena.

Even without an emotional connection to Celtic and the added detachment that the job requires, it has been impossible not to have been frequently excited by the football that has been on display from Celtic over these past 18 months or so.

It is easy to forget just where Postecoglou picked this team up. I remember a pre-season friendly against Bristol City at their newly opened training ground a couple of summers ago, where all he had to work with essentially boiled down to Callum McGregor and a host of youngsters, as a watching horde of wantaway players sat disinterested on the sidelines.

They were soon despatched, but the scale of the rebuild required meant that the early hiccups of his reign barely hinted at what was to come. After regaining the Premiership crown and winning the League Cup in his debut season, he is now heavily favoured to tuck a Treble into the Celtic Park trophy cabinet come June.

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And boy, can he talk a good game, mate. From a professional perspective, believe me, there is not a journalist in Scotland who wants Postecoglou to leave any time soon. He is engaging, whip smart, and despite the reporters often being the butt of the joke, he makes for cracking copy.

Postecoglou ‘got’ Celtic from day one and made the happiness of their supporters his top priority. He defers to them rather than claiming to be one of them, earning him a place in their hearts that Brendan Rodgers – supposedly ‘one of their own’ – failed to ever really occupy.

Postecoglou, then, arrived at his 100th game against Hearts – ironically, also his first domestic opponent - as an undoubted hero to the Celtic support.

You would have got long odds on that scenario coming to pass on that opening night at Tynecastle, something Postecoglou pointedly mentioned in the lead up to last night’s game.

But at the risk of attracting his ire, and the certainty of attracting that of the Celtic support, might I gently suggest they enjoy the Australian as much as they can while he is still here.

Postecoglou recently said that people would be surprised just how long he will be the manager of Celtic, and given all I have detailed here, I would indeed be astonished if that was another 100 games.

Postecoglou often gives the impression he can see round corners. His recent prediction that one day soon, he would be labelled as lacking in ambition if he didn’t leave Celtic for England by a member of the media laid a trap that I am going to try awfully hard not to be the one to stick my size nines in.

I certainly wouldn’t level that accusation at him, and I don’t expect him to leave Celtic in the short term. He has ambitions to fulfil here, first. And when the day arrives when he finally does take his leave, I don’t expect it to be to a Leeds United or an Everton, as has been mooted at various points in the past.

If he continues as he has done though, it is almost impossible to imagine that his stellar work will go unnoticed among the real elite-level clubs.

I absolutely believe Postecoglou when he says that Celtic gives him everything he ever wanted in a job. Celtic are a massive club. They handed him the opportunity on the big European stage where others balked at his lack of experience on this side of the footballing world. They have been rewarded beyond their wildest expectations for doing so, granted, but it is a debt Postecoglou undoubtedly acknowledges and carries.

Postecoglou’s driving ambition seems to be the betterment of Celtic and the culture around the club, rather than his own career (you may sense there is a ‘but’, coming…), but even Postecoglou, by his own admission, can’t be sure what the future holds.

"There is no manager that will sit down and say: 'I will be here',” he said this week. “It's not our decision sometimes.

"That's why I've always consistently said I don't think about those kinds of things, all I think about is my responsibility at the moment.

"That's to produce a football team that brings success to this football club and that the fans can be proud of.”

As illogical as it sounds, the harsh irony for those who wish to keep him here to stomach is that Postecoglou is almost doing that job too well. His work will not have gone unnoticed in larger leagues, and while I do believe it would take one of the mammoths – even in England, for example – to tempt him away, it is a matter of time before he faces that dilemma.

For now, then, I would encourage Celtic supporters to live in the moment. To use the parlance of a sport beloved in Postecoglou’s homeland, he is 100, not out. How long that innings lasts, can only depend on when a top-level club twigs on to the brilliant work he is doing.