A Year Ago Celtic Went Top Of The Table. The Shock Of It Has Never Left Our Rivals.

A year ago, Celtic Park thrummed with noise like I’ve only rarely ever heard it. The light show was as spectacular as I’ve ever seen it.

As the team did the famous Huddle, the whole stadium was plunged into darkness except for the players, who were bathed in a circle of green light. It was a tremendous way to open up the game … and their players looked genuinely unsettled by it.

To be honest, they’ve been unsettled ever since. We shocked them to the core that night, and they’ve been lost in shock for the past 12 months. When that season started they were sure they were on the brink of a new era at their club. Our bad start convinced them that they were going to be champions for years to come.

They believed that we were a complete mess. They persisted in that belief all the way up to that night at Parkhead, and we blew them out like a birthday cake candle, went top of the league and we have never looked back. There has not been a weekend since where they have sat at the top of the table for longer than a day and only because of games in hand.

We absolutely upended their whole world that night. All the belief went out of them and flowed into us. We looked light years in front of them, and that impression has not left us in the year since; in fact it has only grown.

It is fair to say that the full impact of that night is still being felt today.

Celtic continues to get stronger. We will face their club at the end of this month in Ange’s second cup final, and should we win that he will almost certainly have secured four of the first five trophies for which he has competed.

We already had the first of course by this time last year, and in many ways that was the launchpad for the successful campaign … but a year ago we sealed our rise by moving to the top of the league. I said at the time we would stay there for the rest of the campaign. I had an inkling that we would be top for the full duration of this one too.

That game at Parkhead was the start of their nightmare. Until then they had convinced themselves that our cup win could be put down to a fluke, the result at Hampden in the semi-final where Hibs beat them. But under the lights that night at a ground that reverberated to the sounds of only our own fans, we showed them their future.

Oddly enough, it looked an awful lot like the Celtic dominated past except faster, more aggressive, with better football than we’d seen in years.

For all that, it stunned them and they stayed stunned. The aim now is to make our dominance so obvious that even their most avowed internet nutcases cannot deny what they are watching.