Regardless Of The Title, An End Of Season Shocker From Celtic Is Still A Shocker.

Celtic fans will tolerate a lot from a title winning team, and especially one chasing a treble. But a complete breakdown? A complete downing of the tools? A team that chucks it and doesn’t want to do it for the travelling support?

That’s unacceptable.

Hibs were good for that win tonight. They wanted it and many of our players looked as if they didn’t care less. That’s understandable to a point when the title has been won.

That point has been reached. That team need a collective ball booting for that.

Anyone still thinking we don’t need a goalkeeper in the summer?

Bain was having a perfectly adequate game until that shocking mistake for the third. The fourth was not exactly a surprise although the word “shocker” definitely comes to mind.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t give a toss what the media writes about this team.

But we’ve allowed a negative narrative to develop here and if we’re being whipped with it far into the summer that will be our own fault. There is no excuse for the utter collapse of our form, even taking into account everything we know this team has achieved.

The travelling support tonight deserved better. They deserved much better than that.

They deserved a bare minimum of effort, of composure, of concentration.

Ange was right to say that even the champion is allowed to lose a round, but surely he can’t think a performance like that is acceptable at any point in the calendar regardless of what’s been achieved?

There are players in this team who appear not to know that they haven’t convinced fans yet that they have something to offer, and those players have done themselves no favours at all turning in a performance like that.

Some of these guys are almost out of time to make their case before the summer comes, indeed, in many ways they are out of time.

They will be under pressure next season on the first occasion they feature in the team. Bernabei, Kobayashi, even Iwata … not looking the part right now. Not looking anywhere near the level we require if we’re to progress.

I am not writing any of these guys off.

I don’t do that. I don’t do rush to judgement.

But I’m a realist and I know what the media will be writing about these guys for the rest of this week and into next when we’re heading for Hampden. I know what a lot of you guys and the wider support will be saying about them.

What’s worse is that these guys could yet conjure up our worst nightmares because performances on this level will put us in trouble in the final and there are players in this team who could not possibly recover from that.

This team has been sleeping for the past few weeks.

It’s wakey-wakey time. They have allowed the media narrative that this is a team severely lacking in depth to take root, and now they will have to respond to it, and the trouble is, at this point in the season, with no time to change minds, a lot of these guys are going to have to live with that through the summer.

A lot of our players have put themselves under needless pressure tonight, and I hope the manager is as pissed off about it as I feel right now. A lot of us have tolerated recent bad performances and even bad results with a certain amount of equanimity.

But that tonight was absolutely atrocious and unacceptable.

There are two games left. The holiday is over.

This lot better get back at it, and hard.