A Bad Day From Which Celtic Will Learn. What Will Others Conclude From It?

Unacceptable. The only word that comes to mind. There are people who will apply other adjectives to it such as “meaningless” or “irrelevant” but if you are thinking that way then you aren’t thinking straight. That performance is scandalous and wrong and inexcusable no matter the venue, no matter the circumstances, no matter the opposition.

There are factors beyond that it makes no difference to the outcome this season. We now have to endure weeks – nee, months – of utter media inspired nonsense from now until the start of the next campaign because of one result. Every one of Ibrox’s supremacist delusions will resurface and we’ll be subjected to so many rewrites of history you’ll wonder if our recollections are faulty.

It does not matter that they aren’t, or that they weren’t or that we’re champions and on the way to a treble. That performance, even in isolation, was shocking and there is no excuse for it that can be made. If you’re even trying you’re pretending not to notice how lacking in quality and urgency and competence it was. Even when the league has been won, that simply cannot be excused.

I have little doubt that there will be a major internal inquest into that by the manager and his coaching team. They will be deeply concerned by how off the pace we were. The weird thing, of course, is that we dominated possession and created more chances than we have in the games we’ve beaten them this season … there is nothing that makes that look one bit better.

Some will point to how many players we had out. So did they, and to be frank, if our players who came in weren’t good enough then they ought not to be at the club. Putting the blame on them doesn’t cut it anyway. This was a collective failure on every level.

Do I think it matters? Hell, yes, it matters. There are considerations other than just what impact it makes on the league table (none) or the impact on the campaign as a whole (none) or how it looks for us heading for a treble (which it does not impact at all.)

And yes, I accept that for some of these players they’ve put everything into the games that have really mattered. But they are kidding themselves to think that the job is done, and if they take this kind of stinking attitude into the cup final then we really might have a big problem … players cannot simply decide not turn up. They cannot just chuck it on the presumption that these games don’t really count for much. There was an element of that today too.

Listen, this has an impact on their club too today and I think it will not be the positive one that they think at the moment, as they bask in their glory. We’ve been here before, and I’ve seen what a result like this does to a club which is playing for nothing but pride. Nothing good, let me put it that way. It allows a lot of people to kid themselves on that things are far, far better than they actually are … I don’t think anything in football is more dangerous than false hope.

But let’s not kid ourselves either; we showed some weaknesses today which have to be corrected. The worst thing we can do is write this off as something that doesn’t matter. On the other hand, lets not pretend that this is the stuff that provokes a crisis either.

We stuttered last season towards the end too … but this has been by far the team’s worst domestic performance since Ange became boss and we cannot simply ignore that.

We must ask what we can do to make sure that it isn’t repeated.

I think their club is in more danger than ours is over this today.

I will discuss later on why I think this is the case and my good friend Matt Marr will be doing a piece on a similar theme.

But this isn’t a good day, it is not a good performance and it is not a good result. In fact, it’s a shocker. It’s been an appalling display and one that demands a response … but as a club we’re well placed to deliver one, and the right one.

That will test more than just the players and the manager.

Armies lose battles. Even elite armies, even great armies, suffer defeats. But wars are not won in single engagements and it’s clear that over the course of the campaign we’ve grown in stature and our club has moved further ahead of theirs … one result does not change that unless you want to argue that St Mirren showed there’s not much of a gap when they won 2-0 earlier in the season.

This is not that. We all know it’s not.

But the truth is that it might as well be that. Because the manager was right today in a sense to talk about what these results mean; in the grand scheme of things they don’t mean a damned thing. Just as a Celtic victory would not have resulted in the next campaign beginning with us in front of them so we don’t finish behind them on the back of that.

So today stings. It will have provided food for thought for the manager. It might slap a lot of people out of any lingering complacency. These are potential silver linings ,although none of us care that much about that at the present time. But over the course, they are going to matter, I think, more than we can properly analyse in the here and now. They might even define the next campaign in a way that the Ibrox club does not presently expect.

So at the end of the day the outcome is a shocker. The performance, taken in isolation, is an unacceptable one and a disgrace. But I can already anticipate Ibrox’s reaction, and I comfort myself in knowing it will be completely wrong. I can also anticipate ours and I have no such fears about that because I think that in general terms we’ll get the response right.

But today is a bad one, and one that cannot go without a response. The team didn’t produce anything today that is in any way acceptable. We never stop is the mantra, not we never start, and today we were second best so often that a lot of heads need banged against the wall.

At a time like this, a good leader stands aloof from the sound and fury and tries to learn what he can. There are definitely lessons here and I have no doubt that Ange recognises that fact and will drum it into these players. The difference between us and them is that when we lose like this we don’t kid ourselves that w e were cheated or robbed or just unlucky … there are things we can learn from here and the great managers go away and study this stuff and learn.

That’s the task in front of Ange and these players today. I have little doubt that we will do what has to be done. In the meantime, we put this one in the rearview, as painful as that might be, and we move on. If we had spent weeks after St Mirren licking our wounds and feeling bad for ourselves we would not be a handful of matches from the treble right now.