Last Season, Celtic Proved That “Fortress Ibrox” Is A Myth. Why Do Others Believe In It?

Last night, in the aftermath of the Ibrox club’s European win, I read, with incredulity, the opposition coach say that he thought the tie was won in the first leg because his team didn’t score enough times at home to make up for what he expected in the return leg.

As defeatist attitudes go, this was a David Martindale special, and an abject admission from him.

And it dawned on me; he believes in the fiction of Fortress Ibrox, just as other teams seem to.

I would not expect that Ruud Van Nistelrooy and his team will be intimidated by the prospect of going there, but you never know.

Some of these myths are hard to shake off.

Any club which visits that ground should ignore the white noise and basically approach the game in the same way they would at home, and especially in Europe.

You all know I didn’t rate their run last season and think it is, itself, little more than a spook story to scare kids with … what nobody can dispute is that the run was built on home form though.

Teams now go to Ibrox and change their whole style, and all it does is play into the hands of the home team and their fans.

One team in the last 12 months has not taken that approach, and that was us. We went there early in Ange’s tenure and they only just beat us. The next time we went there we came back from a goal down to win.

We did it in spite of a restricted support of less than a thousand fans.

The stadium was filled to the rafters with their own fans, at their supremacist worst and our players did not rattle. Indeed, under immense pressure in a close title race we got the win which extended our lead at the top and all but finished off their chances of catching us.

All we did is refuse to be distracted by the hype and hysteria and focus on the job.

We refused to compromise our style just because we were in their house, and it was because we played basically without fear that we got the massive result we needed.

What the Belgian’s coach last night said was utterly ridiculous. So they didn’t score a third at home.

Did it dawn on him that he had 90 minutes in which to score the goal on their ground which would effectively have put the tie out of sight? Or was he hoping simply to hang on in there and get out with whatever he could?

Clearly, he had zero expectation of getting a result, and when you take that mentality into a fixture you are done before the ball is even kicked.

We will face hellish games in the Champions League, and whilst I think it is important to be realistic I know that our best hope for getting points is to play without fear, and on the front foot.

Nobody at Parkhead will concede even one of those matches beforehand; Ange simply will not permit that kind of thinking, and no half decent manager ever should.

His refusal to even contemplate a more defensive game acknowledges that our strengths lie in our forward play and an acknowledgement that the really great teams are capable of taking apart any opposition on their day, and so sitting back and trying to hold on for a 0-0 or something like that is not only stupid, but suicidally so.

There are teams in this league who will go to Ibrox and get results this season, including ours.

So quite frankly, I don’t know why any side which aspires to play European Group Stage football should be afraid to go there and play their own game without overthinking it and changing their whole approach as if Ibrox was some impregnable stronghold.

We proved that it’s not.

Teams who go there thinking themselves beaten before the game even starts deserve everything that they get.