Why Celtic Have Nothing To Fear From Drawing The Ibrox Club In The Next Round.

The Mooch and his team scraped through in the Scottish Cup tonight in a game which was described as “scrappy” by some commentators. The word that those who watched it from a neutral perspective might use is somewhat less complimentary than that. What we saw was two poor sides scrabbling for the prize. It was horrible viewing.

The Mooch continues to be unbeaten. But Van Bronckhorst, Gerrard and others before him had unbeaten records at that club and were hailed as heroes before it all fell apart. But there is a great unspoken truth of football no-one in our media wants to acknowledge.

You know when you are watching your team and you are grinding out results week after week that something bad is bound to happen. It hangs in the air over your club like a killing weight, ready to drop. Hibs should have taken something. Aberdeen definitely should have at Pittodrie. They needed extra time and a one man advantage to win at Hampden.

Today they were woeful. They are riding their luck, not playing particularly well, failing to put teams away. Their watching fans know this and you can sense the anxiety in them. Most worryingly for them, the opposition seems already to have The Mooch partially figured out; play the ball on the deck, run and move, and you leave those defenders all at sea.

No team can play as bad as they are playing and continue winning. As it was obvious for a while before it happened that Van Bronckhorst was riding his luck and just waiting for the tsunami to come it’s equally apparent with The Mooch and his team.

It is difficult not to feel increasingly frustrated that we didn’t beat them at Ibrox, that we were so sub-par on the day, and the anticipation will soon build to the match at Hampden. But there is a Scottish Cup draw before that, coming tomorrow night, and I would not be particularly bothered if we drew them in it, even at Ibrox.

And if we drew them at home I would probably bust a gut laughing, short of booking a day’s holiday for afterwards so I could go out and celebrate it properly. Watching our side, and then watching theirs, is like sitting down in front of a medium well steak and sniffing the aroma, only for someone to whisk it away and replace it with a greasy kebab.

We are light years in front of them when we are on our game, and that’s the only real variable that can stop us, that and the continued influence of VAR. But if we show up for business it’s not a matter of win or lose but of how many we score.