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

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.