This Will Be A Long Ten Days For Celtic Fans. But It Will Be Longer For Others.

International break is always a drag, but especially if your team has lost.

The moment the final whistle blows, you have that horrible fortnight stretching in front of you like an ocean.

All you want is for your team to take the field again and get a result so that you feel better.

They’re hardly better, however, when you win. If your team is on a run, you want that run to keep on going. If your team is just starting to find its feet, you don’t want international breaks to break the momentum.

I hate international football breaks. They always seem to come at the worst possible time.

When you go into an international break like this one, one where your team had just gotten a big result, and especially after a spell of indifferent form it can seem like the longest two weeks in the world. But we know because we’ve been there, that there are worse ways to spend those two weeks. You could be spending them, as the Ibrox fans are, on tortured navel gazing and self flagellation.

We’re halfway through one of those weeks, but we’re still 10 days away from Celtic’s next match at home to Dundee. But that time will be spent. On anticipation of what we will see and what type of Celtic we will see when that game actually takes place. Will we see Bernardo? Will we see Palma? Will Reo Hatate be back, and fit? Will Kyogo continue to score after that big moment at the weekend?

These are the things that Celtic fans will be thinking about over the next 10 days.

Don’t get me wrong, those ten days will still take forever. But there’s a feeling of positivity in the air among Celtic fans again.

Try and imagine for one second what is like to be a fan of the Ibrox club this week. They quite literally have nothing to look forward to. They are not enjoying their football at the moment. Most of them have given up trying to discern a pattern to their play. Those who have discerned the method amidst the madness don’t like what what they have discerned that much.

Most of them find themselves in that terrible dark zone where they know the manager is a bust, but they know the club won’t act. We know what that is like, because we’ve been there. And I’ll tell you what I remember from our time in that place. You do not enjoy watching football.

For a lot of club football fans, international breaks are an unwelcome distraction, and the fans of the Ibrox club have no love of Scotland’s national team. But even the most ardent Steve Clarke hater may just view this international break as a welcome respite from having to watch The Mooch and the dire football team he has assembled at great cost to their club.

What’s worse, of course, is the way they built this team up and allowed themselves to be fooled into believing that The Mooch had constructed something good. All through the summer, their excitement had been obvious.

All the talk was of how the rebuild would assure they had a squad well capable of challenging and even beating Celtic to the title. Yet out of every target they were linked with over the course of the summer, only one really impressed me when I checked his stats, and we signed him in the final week in the window.

Their manager is now desperately trying to play down the amount they spent on transfer fees. But even accounting for his strange accounting, you wonder where the money went. Could it really be that they spent £13 million on that team and went backwards? It certainly looks like it right now.

Watching Steve Clarke’s Scotland team right now is infinitely better than watching the side the Ibrox club has assembled. Watching Celtic so far this season hasn’t exactly been fantastic, but we know the talents and skillset of the side, and we definitely know that the manager can get them to play. There are enough exciting talents at Celtic that even if the new players didn’t turn out to be great we still have more than enough quality in the squad not to be terribly concerned that we will spend the season watching a team that make us want to rip our eyeballs out.

Ibrox fans already want to rip their eyeballs out.

But more than that, they just want the manager sacked. They just want The Mooch gone and one of the things they cling to is that Van Bronckhorst was sacked during an international break. Amidst their obvious unhappiness, then, there is also a glimmer of hope. Might their club use the next 10 day to bin this manager and scout out another one? There was a frisson of excitement this morning at the news that they may have spoken to Kevin Muscat. That story was quickly denied by sources close to Ibrox.

Then this afternoon, came the dreaded vote of confidence. The board is giving the manager more time. The loss to Kilmarnock, the Champions League exit and the home defeat against Celtic are not enough to convince them that it’s time to get shot of the boss. Might they feel differently if Celtic were six clear and not just four clear? Might they feel differently if Celtic were still in the League Cup?

Would you really put it past their board to keep in place a manager they no longer have faith in because they think Celtic may be slipping? That club will never emerge from our shadow until it lets go of our coat-tails.

So this particular international break, so like others, but unlike almost all of them, Celtic fans wait in anticipation whilst Ibrox fans wait for news that will never come. That’s a hard way to spend two weeks. And what’s worse for them is this; there’s nothing to look forward to for them at the end of it, just the waiting for the disaster that inevitable ushers in the end.