Celtic’s Task For The Day Hasn’t Changed One Bit. A Win And The Nine Point Lead.

The job in front of us today is easy. Just win the game. It’s so easy that this is the only place where we’ve not done it in this campaign. But that result sent shockwaves through football here and a pulse of hope through Ibrox.

The same pulse is beating right now. This is what we’ve reduced them to; relying on favours from St Mirren, to keep alive the faintest flame of hope that their car-crash season can be salvaged. There is more wrong over there than they care to admit though, and even if lightning struck twice and we did lose today it would make little difference.

Celtic is as direct, driven and motivated as I’ve ever seen it. This club is doing all the right things, and I’ll be writing about another of them before the match kicks off.

This is the first time I’ve seen us in a place where every constituent part of Celtic is working together, in harmony, exactly as it should, where every player knows his role, where the manager and the board work seamlessly and where it looks built to last.

Because even without Ange, this is the way the club should work from now on. This is how future managers should operate, with total control and full backing from the board. This is Celtic as it should have been years ago.

I expect we’ll win today. Lightning doesn’t usually strike twice and this team is a little bit too good to go down twice to the same side. The last result was one of those weird days in football where nothing seems to go right for you; I had a bad feeling from the minute the game started and we saw those two nearly identical kits.

I’m told the ref has insisted that we, again, wear that ridiculous grey outfit. You would think these muppets were deliberately trying to ruin what should be a good game. Or perhaps they think that conferred some advantage on the home team and want to try to replicate exactly the circumstances of that first match, a sort of weird Boys From Brazil type thing … if you’ve seen the movie or read Ira Levin’s mad book you’ll know what I mean.

Try as they might, we didn’t luck into our title. We earned it.

We’re the best team in this country bar none and I expect that before today at 4pm we’ll have proved it.