Every title winning team needs the stomach for a fight. Today we showed our true grit, our character, our determination. Today we showed why we’re champions, perhaps even more than we did last week by putting five past the pretenders at Celtic Park. Today we had to battle, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word.
It is an absolute truth of being a Celtic blogger that a lot of our rivals seem to think our views are illegitimate if we’ve failed to win. Then it becomes sour grapes. It becomes about we’re “never defeated, always cheated.” On top of the inevitable honours, one of the satisfying thing about winning so often is that we can complain without that accusation and there is a lot to complain about tonight; Hearts subjected us to 90 minutes of thuggery.
The first half was particularly shocking. Quite how Naismith completed that match without a card is scandalous. How Lafferty avoided a red is baffling. Both could have walked, more than once. One of the Hearts midfielders was equally fortunate. The two ex-Rangers players clearly saw today as an audition for a summer move. Their behaviour was neddish.
The main target of it appeared to be Scott Brown, who kept impeccable discipline throughout and was the one smiling at the end, as Celtic ran out winners. And we were comfortable winners in spite of losing the first goal. But from the moment Dedryk Boyata headed us to level terms just moments after the thuggish Lafferty opened the scoring, we were in total command.
Moussa scored the second and was almost unplayable. He dominated their back line and they had no answer for him. He could have had a couple and they would have had no complaints. His touches were excellent, his running terrorised them and the way he took his goal was coolness made form. Scott Sinclair scored the third after coming on for Odsonne Edouard; on a day when every Celtic player was viciously hacked as often as Hearts players thought they could get away with it, the horrible irony is that our on-loan Frenchman pulled up with no-one near him … the manager took him off at once. We have to hope that’s not a bad one.
Believe me, I’m crossing fingers, toes, nose hairs, whatever’s appropriate, that he is able to play some part in our cup final squad.
There have been times this season when I’ve criticised the application our team showed. Had Hearts got lucky and sneaked an equaliser before we got the third I’d have had no complaints about our commitment and fight today. Our players were rough-housed and kicked all over the park by a team of hammer throwers who are second bottom of the Fair Play League only by virtue of no-one being able to stop Hamilton making it four in a row for that particular dishonour.
Put simply, we were the only team who turned up today with football on our minds. Levein was clearly out to do his part in Operation Stop The Treble. Whilst our players turned up for SPL business, his came out of the tunnel with Rollerball on their minds.
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