Hugh Keevins is back to his usual today, slobbering all over an Ibrox team and making big predictions about what they might do. He reckons – and I’ve heard this nonsense echoed elsewhere – that they could do an Invincible season.
He is full of it. That is a record that we set and which is never going to be beaten. In all the long history of the game here it’s been done exactly once, by us, and it won’t be done again. Some in the press corps are getting way ahead of themselves.
But nobody does that quite like Keevins, of course.
His assertion that a “large percentage” of our fans is scared that the Ibrox club can go and do the clean sweep without losing a game is, frankly, bullshit.
I’ve heard that expressed exactly once, and by people who spend an inordinate amount of their time telling fellow fans how brilliant the Ibrox club are whilst at the same time insisting that the rest of us shouldn’t mention them at all.
I don’t believe there’s the slightest danger of them going through a domestic campaign without losing a match. It is not just a special feat, it is a nearly impossible one. To do it, we had to show an almost mind-bending consistency in performances and attitude; it’s one of the reasons I scorn any suggestion that this team is mentally weak or unable to cope with pressure.
Gerrard’s team won’t do it. I firmly believe if we were in better form they’d already be feeling under enough pressure to crack them. There are still question marks about their mentality overall, and I have never believed they are as good as the press makes out.
I said yesterday that one of the problems we have is the poverty of the SPL as a whole; I said it was difficult to see where they would drop points. But they will. They have twice already this season, after just 15 games, and the second half of the season often results in wild swings as opposing managers approach matches against them in a different way.
Unbeaten runs end. Ours was exceptional. Even the great on-form sides of yesteryear – the Lions, the O’Neill team of the first campaign – couldn’t accomplish what we have in that campaign. It is no coincidence that the same players went on to such untrammelled success in three years that followed, a period of dominance no side will ever match.
I all else fails, and it comes down to us, I have no doubt we’ll beat them ourselves.
This comes up every year when the Ibrox club is on form. There are big predictions. There is euphoria. Does this year feel different? In some ways yes, but not in the ones that matter. If we suddenly hit form again, you’ll see them start to wobble.
And eventually they’ll fall. There isn’t an Invincible campaign in them.
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