NOT since Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre got together have a French duo been so compatible. In an intellectual sense.

Celtic’s very own football philosophers, Moussa Dembele and Odsonne Edouard, look even at this ridiculously early stage to have the making to be the club’s best centre-forward partnership in many a year.

Indeed, it would not be outrageous to suggest that, only potentially of course, they could cause as much havoc domestically and in Europe as Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton did.

Brendan Rodgers has for some time wanted to play a 3-5-2 system, which when it clicks has five attackers if you include the wing-backs and whoever players the No10 role, but never had the personnel to do so. Until now that is.

Dembele has 50 goals from 90 games in Celtic colours as a lone striker, while Edouard proved towards the end of last season that he’s no slouch in that role. Just ask the Rangers defence.

Rodgers was never keen on a Dembele/Griffiths partnership but he saw something in what Edouard and his countryman could do together. So far, so excellent.

Dembele looks slimmer, faster, and fitter than last season. He was excellent in Armenia and helped himself to two goals in the second-leg with Alashkert. Edouard has returned to Celtic a different much better and far more exciting player.

Friends off the park, these two young men, at 20 record signing Edouard is two years younger than his senior partner, have clicked on it which makes their manager a very happy man.

Rodgers said: “They are different types. People have talked, since I’ve been here, about playing two up front but it’s about having the right profiles.

“Odsonne is a link player that can make a lot of it work up there because he’s different to Moussa and Leigh.

“Leigh is a fantastic out and out goalscorer, Moussa, as you’ve seen over the last couple of years, has other qualities but wants to score goals. Odsonne wants to score goals but he’s a player that can come in underneath and link the game very well.

“I was really pleased with the Standard Liege game because we’d been looking at different things over the course of pre-season but it was fairly slick and the shape morphed really well. It gives us a lot in attacking options and a lot of speed in our game.

“When you have that level of quality you want to try to find ways to put it in. It’s never easy because you have to pick, not the best players, but instead you pick the best team. But when you have got real, top players like that then you want to find a way that can make it work.

“You always have to be within balance, that’s important. They have both played in the same team but not necessarily together.

“Odsonne can play off the left side so he played in a different space really. It’s very promising and I think we’ve got other player that can come into that as well.”

Rodgers holds his pre-match press conferences at Celtic’s training facility where the newspaper people are sent into one of the youth dressing rooms, which is not huge.

We sit around a table and because of this, it makes Rodgers a bit easier to read and last season, whenever the topic of Edouard was raised – usually by him – the Northern Irishman’s eyes lit up.

The-then on-loan PSG man was in and out the team and, in truth, there weren’t many head over heels about the player. Well, apart from his manager. We can all now see what he did every day at Lennoxtown.

Rodgers said: “Odsonne has come back fit, he’s come back strong and come back leaner and lighter. He’s also had a good rest.

“I think Moussa respects the talent that Odsonne is and how they complement each other.

“Their movement patterns aren’t necessarily the same, they work in different spaces,a nd he respects he’s got someone who is also a really good player. It’s the cohesion that pleases us all really, each part of the team functions quite well.”

With the impressive Olivier Ntcham also a first-team regular and Eboue Kouassi fit again, this quatuor should play a major part in Celtic’s season.

Rodger said: “They are very close, the French boys. They are fantastic. For young guys, I have never had a problem with any of them. They behave themselves. Their first love is their football. They love football and they come into work hard every day.

“They go out but they are not over-exuberant in what they do and they are super professional. They come in and do the work and they want to learn. They are a joy to work with.

“I go away to Clairefontaine and 1998 when the French began to produce such great players.

“That was Gerrard Houllier when he was technical director putting a lot of things in place.

They have two decades of big talent and some of the boys there are blessed with great physical qualities but it is also based around a great level of technique as well.

“We have been lucky in Britain to have seen a lot of these talents.”