The Celtic Boss Has This In The Bag Today. He Has All Of Ibrox Foaming At The Mouth.

Kipling was a great writer, but a phony shit-bag of a person.

But he nailed a certain type of Stoic character in his famous poem “If …” and when you read those famous lines and think of who in Scottish football they best encapsulate it’s the man in our dugout.

I read Barry Ferguson late last night after seeing The Daily Record’s tweet of his latest piece.

They focussed on one line, and I thought, reading it, that it was some sort of spoof or something that someone had put together for a laugh. It wasn’t.

Writing of that now notorious picture of The Mooch and our gaffer sitting together he said, “It was as if Beale was thinking to himself, ‘Yes, you’re a good manager and you’ve got some quality players … but I’m coming to take that trophy off you big boy!’.”

When I read that I could only come up with one clear-cut comparison to it.

And since we’ve gone from Rudyard Kipling to Barry Ferguson it seems only right that we should meet in the middle somewhere; what I thought about was one of those “what’s Homer thinking” moments from The Simpsons.

This one in particular.

If there was anything at all going through The Mooch’s mind at that moment it was probably more along the lines of that monkey crashing cymbals than anything that would have made a blind bit of sense to rational people.

But Ferguson’s lame effort is a symptom, not the disease.

The issue here is what Ange has done to all of these people. He has driven some of them quite mad.

The Mooch, in particular, has completely lost the plot, as I was writing earlier.

What is it about this guy that they simply cannot take?

Is it because he is, as a Stoic, impervious to any of this nonsense?

Is his calm in the face of it really what’s driving them up the wall? We’ve had successful managers here before, and none of them drove the Peepul to this frenzy, to this craziness, to this level of mind-loss.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …” is how Kipling starts his famous piece.

And that’s why Ange will be triumphant come this evening.

Because he is the calmest person in the world and he proved adept at getting that across to this team, and they in turn do not rattle under pressure. It is quite remarkable to see.

The last seven days has been a torrent of Ibrox players and fans across the spectrum going much, much further than they had to go in upping the ante in the psychology stakes. So much so that I know a lot of their own fans are worried that they’ve gilded the lily. Instead of putting pressure on Celtic, they’ve actually heaped it on their own shoulders instead.

Cause if you talk that way you need to be able to carry it, and I think the sheer weight of that pressure even on its own could be crushing. And they still have to face the Celtic winning machine whether they can carry it or not.

Beale clearly cannot operate under this spotlight.

I have never seen someone start to unravel this fast in all my days of watching these clubs.

Even Pedro Caixinha held onto his sanity longer than this, even on the night he addressed fans from the bushes. You didn’t see the full range of his madness until it was almost over and then he started with his nutty press conferences.

The Mooch has been going full-bore loony since he first sat down with the press.

And in the meantime, we get this from the boss.

“This year has been about improvement from last year. I wanted us to be a better team this season – and I think we are. That always has to be our goal. That gives you an opportunity to win things like Sunday. It’s the position we want to be in, constantly challenging for honours. The fact we won it last year is not an extra motivator for me. We have just got to win it, whether it’s the first one or the tenth in a row.”

There is no bragging, no arrogance, no ego. Just a setting down of the standards he wants to see and his pleasure that this team has so far met them, along with a reminder that the most important game is the next one, not the last one.

You don’t rest on your laurels at this club, you don’t celebrate one win as if the whole world will reshape itself in the aftermath. You get right back to the task at hand, which is to win the next one as well and the ones after that.

This is our day today, because of that man.

Because this is the mind-set that wins things. Not cocky arrogance, when you have very little to boast about. Not big words not backed up by the slightest shred of evidence.

Deeds. Actions. Tangible success.

That’s the difference maker. It’s all in the way you think.