This Time Last Week, Most Of The Hacks Thought The Celtic Boss Was On The Brink.

What a difference a week makes. They say it’s a long time in politics, but in football even a day can upend The World As We Know It. Or, at least, The World As We Think We Know It.

Reading through the hack predictions before the game last Sunday I was struck by how many of them had tipped the club from Ibrox. I wrote about it and said that I felt kind of good about that. It’s been a long time since we were written off in one of these games.

One idiotic sports reporter – I refuse to use the word “journalist” in the context of this joker – who writes a Sunday morning column thought Rodgers might be gone by the end of the day based on how many we lost by.

He tried to couch his words as a warning to both bosses, but he also wrote about how “the roof could fall in” and tipped the Ibrox club to win … so who was he talking about it falling in on if not Brendan Rodgers?

It is pretty clear what he thought would happen. And as per usual – so regular that it should make him embarrassed – he was wrong. Completely. Utterly. Most of them were, and I don’t mind that. A lot of our own fans thought the same thing.

A handful took their emotional views out of it. A handful were able to analyse the match in a proper fashion. A couple of them tipped Celtic as a result, talking about how our experience and our superior manager would get us there. They were the exceptions. For the most part, the Scottish sports media was unified in its ignorance of fact and logic.

I read some of the stuff in the run up to the game and I could not imagine what two teams they thought they had been watching. Ours hasn’t been great but the Ibrox club has been absolutely dreadful. Their tactics look incomprehensible if what you are looking for is complexity or some kind of sophistication; it’s like what I always say about a top-class chess player coming up against a complete novice. The pro will look for a pattern, sometimes taking losses, before settling in to his own game … and that point it goes quickly.

There is no pattern underneath it all with their team. There is nothing to uncover. What you see is literally what you’re supposed to get. This is how The Mooch wants his team to play. He built them with this system in mind, this long-ball punt up the park style. How did they believe that would threaten a team as disciplined as ours?

Rodgers is clearly a vastly superior manager to The Mooch and the bulk of the team that was heading for Ibrox had won there before. We are current champions. How do they think we achieved that status?

By having the roof fall in on us?

The idea that having no fans inside the ground would crush our team psychologically was also a pretty weak reason for believing this would be a bad afternoon for us … the Ibrox crowd was as big a burden to them as it was us, something we proved over the course of the afternoon. It wore them down, not us.

As I wrote last night, the eruption of anger over the result is partly because the Ibrox fans allowed themselves to believe, as the media did, that we were there for the taking. It was nonsense. Aside from the back line we are stronger in every area of the pitch and I said that if our midfield did its job there would be nothing to worry about. It is the midfield, after all, which controls how a game pans out and the simple fact is that ours is better than theirs.

The one genuine elite level match-winner is in our team, not theirs. He proved it on the day. Their forwards were so ineffectual than even when our backline was weakened even further, we still didn’t look to be in any real danger. The four players we had at the back at full time will in all probability never play together in the same team again, far less at Ibrox. Still, their forwards were unable to break us down. It didn’t matter what they did.

Between our team and our manager, we came through a match that few in the press corps thought we even could. Now, today, that one I mentioned earlier is essentially claiming to have been right all along because of the firestorm that has raged all week over the Ibrox boss … but he and others want us to forget that at least part of the reason for that firestorm is that they shared the arrogant belief of the fans over there that we would be soundly beaten.

The writer in question believes our fans would have reacted to a defeat the same way. I can’t speak for everyone but I don’t believe for a second that the majority of our supporters would have reacted with anything other than measured calm. The general impression I got talking to people before it are that it was just another three points, and it wouldn’t leave us too far off the pace. They know that Rodgers is too good not to get this team firing.

Of course, there might have been some over-reaction, but I know that the blogs would have urged people to be patient and wait until our injury issues started to ease, as well as reminding folk that we were only two points behind. Yes, there would have been tension in the air this past week but it would not have exploded the way the anger has across town.

Nor would our board have reacted reflexively. They would certainly not have opened briefed against the manager in the medias as the Ibrox hierarchy has done, using one of their paid toadies to get the word out about the transfer window and how they backed the manager’s judgement in it; which makes it clear that if these players don’t impress it’s on him. The idea that The Mooch is facing the sack is now pretty near universal … nine games into his season.

It’s been a week. There is no sign that things are getting better for him, or that the Ibrox fans are calming down and starting to see things in a more neutral way, and I understand that completely; you can see exactly how this is going for the guy and his team. But still … the fundamental lack of understanding amongst our hacks is profound.

Most of them got their prediction for the game entirely wrong, and they are now struggling to process the aftermath. That both things were predictable apparently hasn’t dawned on them.

But last weekend they had Brendan Rodgers on the brink, an idea so manifestly absurd I am shocked that more than a handful of people – the kind of fantasists who let their imaginations run wild with the idea of the roof falling in and Celtic defeats of four or five – could ever have believed it. A week on, it’s as if we’re in a different reality.

But that’s the operative word here; reality. This is where we were always most likely to be.

Everything fell into place exactly as a handful of neutrals thought that it might, because they took a step back and looked at the whole picture rather than a narrow strand of it … which is why some of them did take Celtic to win, why some of them looked past a couple of injuries and some indifferent form. Some looked at the fundamentals, at both clubs.

What a pity that some of our “journalists” didn’t do the same.