When Celtic Lose Qualifiers We’re Permitted Neither Alibis Nor Excuses For It.

Had we played, and lost, last night in the manner of the club across the city then nothing would have been the same. The inquest would be underway already before the second leg had even sold out.

There would already be talk of a season in crisis.

At the weekend, the clownish Keevins suggested that if Celtic had lost at home to Aberdeen that our fans would have been ready to tear down the building.

That man is a complete yahoo, but he gives himself and the paper he works for away when he writes such tripe.

That is precisely the reaction they would have tried to provoke in their coverage; the feeling that one defeat had plunged the whole club into gloom, that the wheels had come off big time, and that Ange was a one-season wonder.

In their euphoria over the Great European Run not one national title has ever done what I spent much of the end of the last campaign doing, and subjecting it to honest-to-God scrutiny.

A lot of our own fans talk as if it was some incredible run of games instead of an incredible run of luck. Seven wins in twenty-one matches – a ratio of one win in three – should not take you to a European final.

Our own six wins from fourteen games barely gets talked about.

We would never have gotten away with a result like that one last night, not even with the possibility of overturning it in the first leg.

The rest of this week would have taken on an air of crisis “Celtic facing two must-win games in seven days” would have been the headline as though Ross County away had become a fixture fraught with peril and the prospect of doom.

In the aftermath of last night there was talk about how VAR had cheated them, about how too many players haven’t had a chance to settle in yet, about how it’s a scandal that these games come soon for Scottish clubs … some of that is stuff we’ve talked about.

But none of those alibis would have been granted us.

Not one of those excuses would we have been allowed to make, and get away with, by the hacks.

Today’s Ibrox pity-party was expected, but it is no less nauseating because we knew it was coming.