Three points tonight. All that matters. No excuses for failure will be tolerated.
It’ll be a rough one, a cold one, a fight to the last breath of every player on the pitch in Celtic colours.
But it must be navigated successfully and the victory secured.
Lennon is already a dead manager walking.
Anything less than a win and I expect the calls for his head to be unanimous, and to be shouted from the headlines of every blog tomorrow.
Anything less than a win gives the Ibrox mob the chance to come to Parkhead as league champions … that is even more unacceptable than having them leave our ground with the crown.
Conditions will be treacherous. Players have no incentive to run through walls tonight, but the team must play with discipline and watch St Mirren’s counter attacking game.
They are the only club to inflict a defeat on the NewCo and they did it on their home soil, where we’re facing them in a few hours’ time. They’ve already beaten us at Parkhead.
So we all know this will difficult tonight, but the manager will have no excuses with almost a full squad available to him. It would be good to get a decent performance as well – an actual one as opposed to Lennon’s version; he thought we were somehow brilliant at the weekend – but right now we’ll all just settle for scraping home by a single goal.
The team tonight should pretty much pick itself; why do I worry that the manager will have one, or a few, of his typical changes in store for us? As long as he sticks to the basic system, with two up front, and keeps Duffy out of central defence.
It’s not going to be a comfortable 90 minutes I don’t think, and although we don’t have a title to play for the incentive of stopping them coming to Parkhead as champions is real and should enable the manager to keep the players focussed.
It was a match against St Mirren, on their home turf, which did in the last Celtic manager to be fired.
That disastrous display ushered in the first Lennon reign is boss.
This has a certain dark, negative symmetry about it tonight, doesn’t it?
Let’s hope it can be avoided, for all our sakes.