The SPL takes a breather

Five weeks into the new season, and the SPL takes a breather for 2 weeks while the focus switches to international football, specifically the start of the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign. By the time league business resumes, the transfer window will have closed. So the clubs are pulled in two contradictorary directions - on the one hand, they can relax a little and take stock (especially those players not on international duty), but on the other hand, the managers will be working frantically to try and strengthen their squads before Friday.

It's been an unusual start to the SPL season, feeling something like a prelude before the real business begins in September. The league might have started early but the transfer window is the same across Europe, and so Scotland's clubs have had to deal with the same restrictions as everyone else, and wait until late August until finalising their business. Take Falkirk, who have been looking for a striker all summer, and finally sign a loan deal for an Arsenal academy player - Anthony Stokes - on Tuesday. As such, each team has looked much like a work-in-progress these past 5 weeks.

Celtic finally signed Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink just before the weekend, leading to the predictable and desperate "biggest name in Scottish football" puns in the papers. Having got rid of the archetypal target man John Hartson in the summer, Gordon Strachan has signed an archetypal target man, for 10 times the price. Time will tell if that represents good business or not, but it was £3.4m well spent judging by his debut, when he came on for the final 30 minutes against Hibs and scored the winner.

It's not all happiness and joy in the East End of Glasgow, though. Target men have 2 uses - scoring goals, and teeing up chances for others. Stilian Petrov, the man Celtic have relied upon to convert so many of those chances over the years, seems certain to go, probably to Aston Villa to link up with Martin O'Neill again. He wasn't in the squad on saturday and Celtic looked a bit lost without him, and were lucky not to lose the match, let alone get all 3 points. Thomas Gravesen may yet replace him, but he's not the same kind of box-to-box player, and certainly doesn't score as often.

Rangers still look weak on paper, and manager Paul Le Guen seems intent on riling the only person scoring goals for them at the moment, which might be genius mind games, but might just be lunacy. Hearts have signed lots of players all at once, and they will probably be as curious as the rest of us to find out how they gel. They're not all Lithuanians, either, but it's a curious feature of Hearts transfer policy that they exist almost entirely in their own bubble. This summer they have loaned or released a few players to other Scottish clubs, but during Romanov's reign they haven't bought a single player from a rival.

As for the rest... well, they all want strikers, pretty much, and there's a fair bit of horse-trading going on between them.

Celtic 2-1 Hibs
Hearts 4-1 Inverness
Aberdeen 1-0 Dunfermline
St Mirren 1-3 Dundee Utd
Falkirk 0-1 Motherwell
Kilmarnock 2-2 Rangers