Barry Ferguson turned in his Record column today I see. And it was sensible for the most part. Except towards the end, where he said something I’ve heard a few times this week, albeit people always phrase it slightly differently.
And it’s cobblers. And it’s insulting. It’s designed to devalue everything we’ve done up until now. It pisses me off, because it’s so transparent. So pathetic.
“But, I must admit, I’m really looking forward to December 31,” he wrote, “because that will be Celtic’s acid test.”
Oh yeah? Really? Is this guy kidding or what?
Actually, as I said a moment ago he’s simply parroting yet another pitiful media line of attack, another shameless snark, that in fact we’ll have done nothing and proved nothing until we’ve gone to Ibrox and won. It’s been coming, this. It was the obvious next attempt to define this season as some kind of aberration, just another part of the Sevco players learning curve.
Everything will be better now these players have “settled in.” Yeah, yeah. Because that will turn lower league footballers into title contenders, won’t it? If this line of reasoning is so right on why, then, does Warburton need more players in the window?
This line of thinking is so fraudulent that it takes your breath away, but as far as I’m concerned they can delude themselves as much as it takes their fancy when it comes to their own club and its form, but this gets irritating when they turn this around and make it into some kind of test of our own ability, and some kind of comment on our own form.
Yes, we’re top of the league, with a cup in hand already. But none of that counts because we’ve not gone to Ibrox and won yet. So really, we’ve proved nothing. We’ve done nothing. This is just pathetic. It’s dire, dire stuff.
In point of fact, we’ve been tested constantly this season.
This idea that we haven’t is an insult to the whole of Scottish football and that, on its own, would be shocking enough. Apart from a domestic fixture congestion these last two months that would make a professional baseball team sit down and cry we’ve had Europe on top of it. Is Ferguson really trying to suggest that we weren’t tested in Europe? By Barcelona? By Monchengladbach? By Manchester City? That our results in Germany and England weren’t impressive?
This is tiresome stuff, but in many ways there’s a backhanded compliment in this. Because in spite of what certain other people think – Boyd being one of them – there were games this season in which we weren’t tested at all.
One at Hampden and one at Celtic Park.
Sevco, to be frank, never laid a glove on us in either. We won those games, the cup semi in particular, almost effortlessly. Now, because of a couple of wins on the bounce (and we’ll see if they can keep it up in Inverness tomorrow night) they are world beaters again.
Come the 31st, this bunch are in for a rude, rude awakening.
If they get that far, still on this “unbeaten run” of theirs, we’ll provide the ultimate “acid test” for them and their notions of being better than they are.