Another Team Comes To Celtic Park To Sit Behind The Ball And Gets Nothing.

I do not feel sorry in the least for managers or players who come to Celtic Park these days, but I do feel sorry for a lot of the fans who travel to our ground. They must know now how it’s going to go, but they come anyway.

There’s a lot to credit in that.

Unfortunately, their players and the manager so often let them down and so it was on Saturday with a team coming to Celtic Park with no intention whatsoever of playing to win the game. Sure they got up the pitch a small handful of times but their game-plan was to sit with people behind the ball and try to play the role of spoilers.

This must be chronic for their fans to watch.

It’s certainly chronic for our fans who have had to see this over and over again. But we have the pleasure of usually running out winners. We get to go home having seen our side win.

Derek McInnes said after the game that this might be the best Celtic side he’s seen. It’s nice to actually get some praise from him, and it feels strange. But he also acknowledged that he needed to come up with a better “answer” to us than they had in this one … which of course I surmise means returning Kyle Lafferty to the proceedings as I said yesterday.

Perhaps if his team had risked something on Saturday they could have got something. They certainly cannot sit back in a cup game and “play for a point”. They cheat their fans in these games, they cannot afford to do it at Hampden.

So they need to come with a better Plan A because although they held out for most of the first half, the minute we opened the scoring they were beat. Because there is no Plan B for these guys.

If Plan A fails all that they are risking is the roof coming in.

I’m not a guy who is ever going to complain about watching his team win, but it does start to feel as if teams aren’t even turning up to try.

I didn’t expect McInnes to have our number – this guy is genuinely hopeless – but it was still awful watching his team huff and puff their way through that game and I cannot imagine how he will approach the cup game.

But I’ll tell you this, if he approaches it like that his fans should be furious.

On Saturday they came to contain us, they got nothing and that was what they deserved.