Ibrox Faces A Reckoning As Another Cup Failure Casts Doubt On Their Squad.

The mystery of last season deepens then, and you all know my thoughts on it.

An incredible confluence of events, unlike anything we’ve seen in Scottish football before, came together and gave the club across the city a shot in the arm and this coincided with a disgraceful collapse in standards at Celtic Park.

Their league form is inexplicable. Whatever drove it no longer applies.

Looking at their record, their march to the title poses a lot of questions which nobody seems to want to answer. The truth is, that squad of theirs just isn’t all that good.

Too many players in it are one note footballers.

Ultimately, they are a triumph of hype over achievement. If you accept – as seems clear – that their title win was achieved by something more akin to black magic than the fusing together of good footballers to make a truly good side, then a harsh verdict has to be returned on not only the squad but the nine years in which that club has existed at all.

In the course of their short history, Sevco has spent more than £100 million on the assembling of a team which has one major honour.

That is a colossal waste of money.

If you had given Derek McInnes that kind of cash he would have achieved more with it than successive Ibrox bosses have managed to. The history books will record that they stopped ten in a row, but that makes their single league triumph about us and not about them.

Has this era of theirs been a success?

No, it’s been a massive, expensive collective failure of enormous proportions and this squad of theirs has been one of the most spectacularly underachieving teams in the history of Scottish football.

Their fans are not oblivious to that fact. They understand that too many of their current crop simply cannot be trusted on the big occasion. Goldson, Tavernier, Kamara, Kent, Hagi, Aribo, Morelos … these guys are not the foundation stones of future success and nor are they bankable assets of the sort that the media would have you believe.

They have a squad full of footballers on big salaries who aren’t going to take them forward and who they couldn’t afford to keep even if they were.

But they can’t move these guys on either without getting real on the transfer fees … and they need to get transfer fees to have any chance of rebuilding the squad. We couldn’t have rebuilt ours without the sales of Edouard and Ajer.

To give their new boss a fighting chance, they need to find big money from somewhere and every player they bring in has to be better than what they manage to ship out.

What a nightmarish task they are facing. It is easily the equal of the summer rebuilding job we’ve just undertaken, but without any guarantee that the funds to do it will be available to them. If we win this title – and the chances are good – they face an incredibly tough summer. We know what that’s like, but there was a rainbow on the other side of ours.

An impoverished club, steeped in failure, its morale shattered and its fans in revolt and facing a strengthened Celtic with Champions League cash in the bank ….

Well that’s a hole they might not climb out of for years.

We have a foot on their throat. We only need to press down on it.