Keith Jackson Is Making The Usual Mistake When Talking About Celtic.

Keith Jackson today decided to focus his article on problems at Ibrox.

It should not surprise him that there are plenty over there to write about.

He knew that himself before a ball had even been kicked in this campaign. He knew it when he wrote about Beale not being welcomed with open arms by everyone in the dressing room. He’s catching up to himself.

I did laugh at one point.

When he wrote about how Beale speaks with “admirable honesty” and then highlighted how he contradicted himself over the Ibrox player contracts. If that was the only example he could think of where Beale said one thing and then basically said the opposite not that long afterwards he needs to go back and review those pressers because it’s one of many, many, many times that he’s been caught talking cobblers.

During the article, Jackson mentioned our dominance. “It’s no longer merely a case of Celtic not stopping. Rather, it’s beginning to look as if they might be absolutely unstoppable for as long as Postecoglou has his hands on the wheel,” he said.

And herein lies the mistake, or at least the one I’m making a conscious choice to highlight.

He and others keep on talking about Ange being the reason we are on top. Maybe he missed the trebles won under Rodgers and Lennon. Maybe he’s just not seeing the pattern here, and in case he’s missing it let me point it out to him.

This is only partly about the manager. Celtic, as a club, is too strong for the one at Ibrox.

Yes, Ange is exceptional and the football is glorious to watch and our form under him has been mindboggling, but we were no less ruthless in chasing that Quadruple Treble than we are right now.

We were no less hell-bent on victory, no less assured. As I’ll point out later today in another piece, their fans are going to have to start adapting themselves to a new reality here; that they are now in our shadow with no easy way to change that.

Still, people want to cling desperately to this idea that if there’s a change of manager at Celtic Park that all the dominos will fall, that we’ll be back to square one, that their club will have its moment in the sun. None of it is even remotely true.

Celtic has established new ways of doing things.

That means that whoever comes in for Ange next will probably do things this way.

He will have full control. He will have the top class scouting system the boss would be leaving behind. Ange Postecoglou would not be leaving Celtic unannounced. We would have lead time and he would sign off on his replacement.

The fundamentals at Celtic are solid.

We have paid a price in the past for failures of vision and failures of leadership. That’s all. The strength of Celtic itself was wholly unaffected by those failures. We remained a stronger, and bigger, club than theirs.

All Jackson is doing – and he’s not alone in this – is a slightly different version of that old tune “Celtic will collapse like a house of cards” which Dave King was coming out with not that long ago.

The idea that Celtic might be one bad decision, or one hard shove, from spiralling downwards enough so that they can establish themselves as the dominant force.

It pays no heed to historical precedent. It does not engage with reality.

It is a mad fantasy that he and others cling to at their peril.