There Is No Time For This Celtic Team To Feel Sorry For Itself.

So the first opportunity has been lost. We’re back where we were before last weekend, having sold two points and given the temporary advantage back to the mob across town. The temptation to feel sorry for ourselves is a hard one to fight.

But we simply don’t have time for it and we cannot allow it to define where we go from here.

We gave them a lift yesterday, and there’s no doubt about it.

You can see it in their result today, and admittedly I thought the opposite might happen, that the breathing room would allow them a trace of complacency.

There was none of it.

It was easily their best performance of the season and although Motherwell collapsed, and had a player sent off early in the second half, you cannot deny that the Ibrox club grabbed that by the throat today.

That’s why we can’t be downbeat.

If we let it affect us we might as well chuck it right now.

We need to pull ourselves together. They gave themselves and their stuttering title defence a shot in the arm today after we’d taken the pressure off them. Now we’re the club that has to, in the words of the song, “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again.”

It is frustrating, but this race has a long, long way to go in it.

One good performance from them and another bad home performance from us isn’t telling us anything that we didn’t already know; they are capable of winning well and we’re capable of looking rank.

The gap is back to four points. We weren’t pulling our hair out before the Hibs and Aberdeen games cut it to two and we shouldn’t be pulling it out today. What’s frustrating is that we’ve hamstrung our own momentum and we have to get it back fast.

If we do that then by the time January comes around yesterday will be no more than a bad memory.

If we don’t get a grip on this yesterday isn’t the only day which will haunt us.