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Celtic’s Improvement Has People Elsewhere Spooked. Good. Let Them Sweat.

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The performance at the weekend, and in particular the way we attacked so relentlessly and created so many chances, has spooked people who were complacent and thought that this season was a foregone conclusion.

Good. Let them sweat it out.

We have a home game in midweek and a home game again at the weekend. We expect to win them both. Do that and our next domestic game is in the league at St Mirren, another match at home.

Three wins out of three will set us up nicely for Ibrox.

Over there, they face a fraught night on Tuesday.

They have a relatively easy cup tie, but then face a trip to Ross County in the league. If they go out of the Champions League on Tuesday then the feeling at Ibrox will be febrile and Gerrard will be feeling the heat.

Lose either of the two matches that follows, or even drop points in the league game, and Ibrox suddenly looks as a do-or-die fixture for them. As outrageous as it is this early, it’s also definitely true.

Suddenly our immediate situation looks much more straightforward than theirs, and although we have a massive Europa League tie against AZ Alkmaar sandwiched in between the St Mirren game and Ibrox they might have their own massive challenge to overcome.

A week ago, the media was giggling over the apparent state we were in.

But we should have beaten Hearts.

We really ought to have gone through against Copenhagen as well.

It shows you what one extra week can do with players bedding in and with a fresh injection of talent; suddenly we’re the team everyone is talking positively about, as dark clouds gather elsewhere.

The shock is obvious when you look at some of the hacks. Keevins is trying to laugh off his own embarrassing sycophancy. Tom English is confronting the fact that he made a raging idiot of himself at the weekend, but he’s trying to spin it into wisdom. Not a single reporter tipped us to win the league this year, not a single one.

Whilst few are doing a full-on reversal (they still haven’t gotten how exceptional the circumstances of last season were and expect the Ibrox club to go on a long run … haha the fools) they are now franticly rowing back on their comments about it being a foregone conclusion or something that would be achieved easily. I enjoy watching them squirm.

The squirming has just started. If we can complete a couple more signings this week – or even just one, a good one, for a few quid – then the feel-good factor at Celtic will be through the roof.

If the mob across the city don’t win on Tuesday, they can forget signings; they are facing the prospect of having to weaken the team instead … a delicious irony considering how many people suggested that it would be us who struggled to emerge stronger.

Our problems aren’t completely solved.

But what a big step we took yesterday towards a better place, and this club needs to keep on pushing forwards and let things unfold as they will elsewhere. There are more problems across the road than most people are aware, and although we have one or two issues of our own to resolve the direction of travel is good.

People are starting to sense that something big may be happening here, and whilst that fills us with a renewed sense of hope and optimism and excitement, it has others thinking darkly about what happens if we really are as going to be as good as that performance suggests.

They sense that the great machine of Celtic, for too long running on automatic and grinding through the gears, has been oiled and tinkered with and repurposed.

Nothing on earth scares them more.

All of a sudden, you can smell the fear on them.

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