Fear And Loathing At Celtic Park: Hitler Thought He’d Closed The Gap Too

The history books demonstrate clearly that until the infamous moment in the bunker when he realised that Steiner’s phantom armies would not be coming to stabilise the front that Adolf Hitler still believed that Germany would win the war.

The records of those last few days have him on his birthday talking to Albert Speer about the new look Berlin that would rise from the ashes once the victory was complete. He was, sadly, not the only person in that city who believed it.

Hope born from delusion, then. An unshakable belief that the world as you want it to be is the world that actually exists. We all poke a toe over the line from time to time, reaching for unrealistic goals, hoping for impossible things, but we limit that exposure to those moments.

We do not, as some in this world of ours do, live there and breathe in the air of insanity each and every minute of each and every day. Josef and Martha Goebbels realised along with Hitler that the gig was up and they had wrapped themselves so tightly into the fantasy that they killed themselves and their children because the real world was too much to bear.

Ibrox has been labouring under a vast, and dangerous, fantasy for a long time now. Today they might have snapped out of it had we gone on, at 3-1, to score a fourth rather than conceding a soft goal, but I have seen enough of them to have my doubts. Nothing short of a rout for Celtic today would have brought them kicking and screaming into our world.

And you know something? If I had my choice between that rout and that result I would chose that result. Because as I said in the earlier piece, where i quoted Walter Mattheu’s character in the movie Fail Safe, they know violence but we know strategy. We recognise that the longer they live in their own world of delusion and denial the better that is for us.

That it will dawn on some of them that that today could very easily have been a convincing Celtic victory does not concern me. Not enough of them understand the fundamentals to grasp that, and so it will elude them completely. That does not make it less true.

The rest -and this includes most of the media – will continue to kid themselves on that there are big things happening at Ibrox and that those big things presage our doom. Like Hitler in that bunker moving his imaginary armies around the map, they will see only what they want to.

“The gap has closed.” That’s the mantra. How often have we heard it? No-one ever asks the only questions that matter, perhaps because the answers would be hard to hear. Is there still a gap? Yes. Is that gap still sufficient that we’re winning titles and trophies? Yes. So who cares if they spend enough that they can close that gap to 1 millimetre?

They cannot sustain a challenge to us on that basis.

Imagine two boxers who the press kept on saying were evenly matched.

If they fight three times and the same guy wins twice and forces a draw on points in the other fight, who is the better fighter?

They have proved they can match us … this will be the media narrative. Great. Brilliant. Wonderful for them. But they cannot beat us, and that, sadly for them, is the only metric that matters a damn. Their fans know this very well because right now they are watching a team of losers continuing to lose, no matter how “close” they run the team that wins all the time.

The Mooch is very, very fond of appropriating Gerrard’s record in a single season as the proof that he is some kind of managerial guru, but in the games that his club – his club, by the way – and his fans think is the only one that counts anyway is played three lost two and drawn one. Where’s the win in there? It exists, perhaps, in the same fantasy land as Steiner’s armies did.

But the reality of our superiority is measured in a league table which makes appalling reading for them tonight; a twelve point lead for us which is an accurate reflection of a gap which they might try to convince themselves they are bridging one bit at a time but which, in fact, has grown since he walked through the doors. The cup final was a further proof of our superiority.

Hampden looms. I hope we are a lot better than we were today … but in that admissions is sort of the point. Even on our off-days we still have enough about us to punch this shower to the canvass and put another check mark in the win column.

There are a couple of players who deserve special praise for today. This is not the article for that although if I may be permitted just one small one diversion into that territory; Alastair Johnston is becoming the Kieran Tierney of this team. A stalwart, a warrior, a winner, a fearsome competitor who looks a class apart from anyone in that positon in a long time.

I digress, but only because I think that guy is a superstar.

The real point of course is Fear and Loathing. And although some people want to pretend that this whole “he’s closed the gap” thing matters, most of their fans are looking at the whole front in a losing war and recognise exactly what it is that they see.

So questions now arise about this manager of theirs and what he’s really brought to the table. They have exactly one player who consistently gets into a “Celtic-Ibrox XI” and he scored their goals today and he now has 100 of them. As a dead ball specialist he’s decent, and he’s had plenty of practice at it, but I’d take our boy at right back over him every day of the week.

But ponder that their best players today were guys signed three or four managers ago and that gives you some idea of how completely that club is failing, and it doesn’t take me writing this to make it true because everyone over there knows this as well as we do.

Their worst nightmare is right in front of them now, coming two weeks hence in the cup, and there’s nothing they can do to make the time between than and now even !% better. That game is hurtling towards them like the Russian army was closing in on Berlin.