Of Course Celtic Will Drop Points. Does Alex Rae Want A Medal For That Observation?

Alex Rae doesn’t get paid for talking sense. Although he occasionally stumbles into it. I don’t know where or when or to whom he made his comments urging his favourite club to hang in there because “Celtic will drop points” but he’s right for once.

Of course we will drop points. Every great Celtic side there has ever been has dropped points. His casual suggestion that all they have to do is not drop any and wait until we do would be blinding insight if it wasn’t blindingly obvious.

Why is such a sophomoric suggestion generating headlines? We’ve already lost one game this season. Last season we dropped points in nine games and got 93 points. Even in the Invincible season we drew four times … that’s three games in which we dropped points more than we already have in this campaign. We won that title by miles.

Rae can send all the feel-good to his club that he wants. Even as things stand right now, we need to drop points in two games for them to edge ahead of us. And they cannot afford to drop a single one. Not one point, not in one game, or we move further ahead.

Ibrox’s unbeaten league season saw them drop points in six games. They haven’t gotten near a 32 game win run in any season since they’ve been in the top flight other than the COVID year. Rangers rarely had a 32 game season and they were far better positioned to.

Ibrox has already dropped points in three matches in this one … out of eleven.

Rae is desperately clinging on to hope. I understand that. People sometimes do when a situation looks desperate. The issue here is consistency over the campaign. Even if we dropped points in another two matches – say we lost at Ibrox in both games – as long as we win every other match or, at the very least, match them result for result, except that we then beat them at Celtic Park we win this whatever else they do.

This has nothing do with them at all. Rae is telling them to keep their heads up because a theoretical “if” might happen at Celtic. And it will. Be at this point I think we have the wind at our back and we’d need to have a catastrophe run of it not to be firmly in the driving seat when January comes around, and I do not think we are going to have a catastrophe.

We will drop points. They will drop more. They will drop more because we’ve gotten a bit too good to drop lots of points in games now. Because here’s what I didn’t say about last season.

Almost all of the games in which we dropped points last season had already happened by this point in the campaign. Another small bump occurred when we were nearing the finish line.

Apart from that we were as good as I’ve ever seen us … and this season we’ve been better.