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Every Team To Beat Celtic Talks About “A New Benchmark.” None Ever Reaches It.

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There is a commonly held view amongst Celtic fans that there are teams which rip off their own supporters because they basically only “turn up” a few times a year, for the “big games.”

You see a team like St Mirren giving everything they have in the tank to get a result against us and you wonder to yourself; where are those performances every week?

Stephen Robertson has told the papers that for his team this is “the new benchmark.” That’s setting the sights a bit higher than he should. We all know that they won’t reach that.

That’s setting yourself up to fail before another ball is even kicked.

If we get sick of this, think how the fans of the clubs themselves must feel. They produce that for a single game, and then fall back into the usual pattern of inconsistency.

A lot of people think that for a club in Scotland to “challenge” Glasgow they need to spend vast sums of money; I’ve always said that this is simply not the case.

All they have to do is find a way to be consistently better than everyone else in the league first, week after week, game after game.

Establish themselves as the genuine third placed team and then improve in increments until they are hitting major points totals each year. From there you simply need to get a couple of big results against us and the team across town.

That means that the players have to start turning in those kind of performances – the one they did against us – in every single game and all of us know that’s not going to happen.

These guys have that in them once in a blue moon and that’s all.

My old man and I used to talk about how whenever one of these teams beat us that they would sink into a two or three game form slump; it used to happen as regular as clockwork.

St Mirren now has two weeks to regain their strength, fitness and focus.

But I’m willing to bet that they don’t come close to hitting that target their manager has just set them.

Because these teams never do.

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  • MarkE says:

    I’ve been impressed by a few teams in Scotland this season, St Mirren the latest of them. If they used the same tactics in every game they played, they could be challenging for European places, but they’ll probably revert to type against the other teams and drop needless points.

    Dundee United look like they’ll be climbing the table towards Euro spots as the season wears on, and Hearts look like a decent side too, to name a few.

    I still think our top flight, and teams outwith Glasgow, would benefit enormously with more clubs in it, but the possible short term cash loss outweighs the long term benefits for most of them; we’d obviously renegotiate a tv deal to accommodate a bigger league, but these clubs don’t look that far down the road

  • John Copeland says:

    You’re right ! Could not agree more ! What it does do though ,is make it easier for St Mirren to take £30 from each fan to help them through their other problems ! As Greavsie said ,’its a funny old game Saint ,’innit ‘ .

  • John Copeland says:

    You’re right ! Could not agree more , James !What it does do though ,is make it easier for St Mirren to take £30 from each fan to help them through their other problems ! As Greavsie said ,’its a funny old game Saint ,’innit ‘ .

  • Johnny Green says:

    The rest of the teams outside of Glasgow are all much of a muchness and are all capable of dropping points on a regular basis to each other. They all have their occasional moments of reaching the heights, when everything goes well for them, but none of them can achieve a decent run of victories as they just do not have the will power or the quality to sustain that. St Mirren caught Celtic on a bad form day and smelled blood as the game progressed, they took inspiration from our apparent ineptness and took full advantage of it. It won’t happen again anytime soon.

  • Effarr says:

    It’s the same with their goalkeepers and even their defences. All world class for the 90 mins and then dross against equal calibre teams and hopeless against Old Firm Sevc.

    I don’t think Siegrist will ever reach the heights for Celtic that he reached against them.

  • John Gow says:

    St Midden were crap. Didn’t see anything that you could call football being played by them and they cheated at every given opportunity aided by the ref. We were poor from the start. It wasn’t surprising given the starting selection but this “praise” of St Midden is over the top imo.

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