Fear And Loathing At Ibrox: “Who Scouted Ramsey? Stevie Wonder?”

Some stories are timeless.

One of them is the wonderful tale of the tortoise and the hare.

It’s a tale about hubris, but it’s also a nice analogy for how a league race can end like this one increasingly looks as if it will.

They didn’t fall asleep today as much as they fell over their own shoelaces.

An afternoon that started with them on a high thus ended in a deflating, horrible low.

We can put our result down to a bad day at the office – I would argue it’s a bit more significant than that – but their recent record would scare me badly if it was ours.

There is no question which team is on form and which one is not.

That’s why we will win this.

Before we get to the point of the piece, there is very obviously an elephant in the room shitting all over the carpet, and not to discuss it would relegate us to the ranks of the mainstream press in not wanting too complete a picture.

So let’s do it.

Let’s, for a moment, discuss the elusive Aaron Ramsey, a footballer who you can no longer find with satellite navigation, the Man Who Wasn’t There, the biggest waste of money since Donald Trump’s border wall.

This has to be part of the story of the day.

The media who were practically wetting their pants over this guy already owe the rest of us an apology, and I don’t just mean the Celtic fans but every fan in Scotland.

It wasn’t just their usual pro-Ibrox sycophancy, it was the insult to the whole of our game implied in the idea that the arrival of this guy was like some superstar walking onto an inferior stage, gracing us with his mere presence and asking all of us to be grateful for it.

Those of us who said it was a lunatic move were branded jealous embittered extremists, unable to acknowledge far less accept the honking narrative that was being pushed on us.

But this guy has hardly kicked a ball in two years.

You only need to look at a player like Jullien, coming back off long term injury, and how long that is taking to get him into the first team squad to realise that even if this guy was as good as they said and not just some over-paid EPL footballer with a level of hype far in excess of his skillset, that it was still highly unlikely that we’d ever find out, because he signed a three month deal and would take two to get up to speed even without his career-long history of injuries causing further delays.

It was ridiculous that the media chose to overlook these facts, and offensive that they chose to present this guy as a miracle in our miserable midst.

It looks increasingly like the joke is on them, and that we are going to be vindicated in full.

The apology won’t be forthcoming even if this season ends without him kicking another ball, but our doubts and our questions have already been proved correct and they owe it to us already.

His contribution has been nil. I don’t expect that to change much.

So too ends the argument over their Dortmund result, and how terrible it is for us that they went through, In their shoes I wouldn’t welcome two extra games and would consider the Europa League an annoying, potentially destructive sideshow. It is domestic league form which will decide this season, nothing else, and they have two wins in the last six.

Today it was hard watching a powederpuff Celtic display when we offered nothing in front of goal. I would feel a lot worse in their shoes, if we’d blown a two goal lead at home when a win would have cut the gap. Taken in isolation you can excuse a bad result … they have failed to win away from home in three games and now are shipping points at Ibrox.

Only one of these two teams is “in form” and it isn’t the one who were being hailed for “knocking out the favourites” on Thursday night. But we did try to tell them that it meant exactly nothing in the grand scheme of things.

And suddenly doubts are in the air again.

There is fear, real fear for the first time, that their manager is a busted flush. They have been lucky to assemble a team which seems well fitted to European football, and in midweek he seemed to get the tactics right … but his approach is being found out by the teams right here at home, who are increasingly learning not to sit back but to have a go at them.

They had a six point lead when he took over. They are three behind. If we win this title the pressure on him to go will be absolutely enormous and the European results will not save him.

The loathing is obvious. It extends in every imaginable direction; towards their board for the poor window in January, towards the manager for bad decision making, towards certain of their players … towards Ramsey now and the “£30 million winger” who have contributed a solitary goal between them and influenced exactly zero wins.

Over all of it is the dawning realisation about their finances and the grim thought that perhaps their board has lied to them about the exact nature of the state they are in. If they had more brainpower they’d know the answer already.

At 2pm today it felt like a very bad day indeed.

At 3:30pm their ground would have been rocking, as they sought to capitalise and looked good to do it.

By 5pm it was all ashes and the fear and loathing were rampant.

Go on their forums tonight if you want a laugh, because it still is.