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So When Does The Challenge To Celtic Start?

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Before this season began, we heard a lot of very confident predictions from the media and from inside various clubs.

The general tone, the attitude, the message was that we had to watch ourselves because this was the year we were going to get a “real challenge.”

The media meant from Sevco, of course, but they were also unrealistically confident about both Hearts and Aberdeen.

Well I wanna know something, and maybe they can help me;

When does the challenge start? Has it been delayed? Has it been put off? Suspended? Have clubs decided just not to bother this year? Because it’s been something of a slow beginning, hasn’t it? The danger is that by the time it gets properly underway we’ll be out of sight.

Listen, I am delighted that Celtic is playing such good football here in Scotland, but you can’t have helped notice the European result the other night. That’s only partly because Barcelona were quite simply brilliant, which they were and which we all acknowledge.

Celtic doesn’t get properly tested most weeks; that’s the simple and horrible truth.

I don’t expect Aberdeen or Hearts to reach Barcelona style heights and give us that kind of a game when we come up against each other, but the real problem in Scottish football has never been that Celtic are too far ahead of the rest; for large spells of last season we were staggeringly vulnerable and might not even have won the title. The problem is that no one club has risen above the other teams in the league, and stuck together a run of wins that at least puts us under a little bit of pressure. And we need that pressure.

We need it because it makes us play better. It keeps the players on their toes and focussed. It’s when a club is out in front that it starts to slip across the boards. That will affect everything, including our chances of getting anything out of this European group.

For the good of the club and everything we’re trying to do, we need a challenge.

One of the annoying things about the past few months is the arrogant presumption coming out of Ibrox that they were the only ones who could make that challenge. I never believed it, and their start to the season has been no more abysmal than I thought it might be.

Their team is years behind ours but it’s also significantly behind the one at Pittodrie and the one at Tynecastle too. Had those clubs started the season as they’d confidently predicted Sevco’s ability to win a European place would already be in the deepest doubt.

This season we’ve started brilliantly, but that we’ve already built a solid lead is less about our own achievements than it is about the state of play elsewhere. It helps, of course, that we’ve already taken on Hearts, Aberdeen and the Ibrox club itself – and beaten them all – but leagues are won in between games like that, on the bread and butter days like yesterday when Sevco couldn’t rise above their disaster last week to claim three points and Hearts were beaten by St Johnstone.

At the time of writing, Aberdeen are tied one each at half time with Dundee.

A challenge will come, eventually, and it will be from the north of Scotland or from the east coast, as I said some time ago.

But waiting for it … well, it’s been a long time already and it feels like it’ll be a long time coming.

Until then, of course, Brendan marches on.

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