These are the days that win titles.
What an irony that I should be writing that just hours after a scathing article about our performance today.
Celtic were dreadful this afternoon, but at the end of the day even at our worst – and I can’t imagine we’ll play that badly again this season – we still had enough to take the three points. Today, Aberdeen had a chance to keep the pressure on us. They failed.
For the past couple of weeks now, the newspapers have been full of praise for Derek McInnes and his team. Some even said they’d proved themselves genuine contenders.
This is what happens when they get a couple of good results; they get full of themselves.
I said a week ago that McInnes had made a major error in telling everyone how his side were suddenly contenders, after months in which he flatly denied this was the case. All it took was one slip from Celtic and a week of fawning press and he was a believer.
What a silly sod.
That put the pressure on his own players, which was the last thing they needed. Most of them haven’t been over the course before; they’re not cut out for a battle like this, not mentally.
The result today is unexpected because it came against a seriously weekend Motherwell team, but it’s hardly a shock that this team has hit a wall.
What will have made it worse is that they had a one goal lead. They conceded two second half goals inside a minute, and also got a player sent off. It’s been a disastrous day for him.
The media has been talking, for the last week, about manager of the year candidates; foolishly, they had started to talk of McInnes as one of them, but we can make excuses for that when we consider that the rest of their chosen field looks like, including Alan Stubbs and Mark with the Magic Hat.
At one minute to full time today I’d have said this had the potential to be a Very Bad Day indeed. As it turns out, it’s actually been a pretty decent one!