This Celtic Team Boasts “We Never Stop.” Today, We Never Showed Up.

Gutless. Weak. Inept.

All three adjectives describe, perfectly, a Celtic display at Hampden today was which was utterly bereft of a single positive except that those who constantly slag Greg Taylor need to do us a favour and take the night off.

For everything else there is only anger as we produced our worst performance in many, many months on the stage we most needed a big one, and considering the worrying lack of application, heart and will to win that was on display on that pitch today the league triumph that many of us have taken for granted since Ibrox is no longer such a lock either.

Any team in the league would have fancied their chances against that tame, pitiful version of Celtic which showed up today and then promptly downed tools.

There was nothing to credit that performance whatsoever, not one thing, and if the manager tells us that he thought the team played well then he is kidding himself and watched a different match.

One player threatened to make an impact on their team; Maeda, who ran and ran until he was dead on his feet.

The rest of this team barely functioned.

Jota, in the last two months, has produced not one thing of note which makes me believe for one minute that we should be paying £6 million for him when this season ends … I’ve said that Carter Vickers is the better of the two and that was highlighted again today in a performance of total ineptitude from the Portuguese.

He looks like a player who would struggle to warm Benfica’s bench and if he and his agents think the super clubs will be queuing up after this campaign ends they are delusional. He looks like a guy who decided some time ago that this would be his only season here; on the evidence of today nobody is going to miss him and the money can be put to better use.

Hatate has an excuse for his limited performance; he’s played a full season in Japan. I don’t what Rogic’s excuse was. I don’t know what game Juranovic thought he was in before he came off and Abada was too easily brushed off the ball.

No review of this game would be complete without my expressing my absolute contempt for and disgust of the referee who was woeful throughout and did everything he could to make sure the game was played at our opponent’s pace.

Not that it mattered because we allowed them space and time to get their breath back after every break in the game.

A team which should have exhausted itself chasing us in the first ten minutes was allowed to meander around the pitch taking it easy because we ditched the high press for the day to let them.

The whole display was absolutely shameful and every Celtic player should be embarrassed as they are made to watch it again. These guys could have written their own page in the history, but instead they turned up and put on a performance like that.

What we witnessed today was a joke.

It was the complete inverse of our full blooded claim that “we never stop.”

Today, all any of us were asking was “does this team intend to start?”

And the answer was a resounding no.

What a disgrace, what an utter disgrace.