The Longer Ibrox Mistakes Celtic’s Quality For Luck, The Happier We Should Be.

There is something which is more pleasing to me, in the aftermath of running over an Ibrox team, than all the celebrations, the points, the morale lift and the disgust of some of our critics, put together and it’s this; the complete mental refusal by those across the city to consider whether or not it has wider implications and roots that reach far and deep.

I cannot remember the last time we beat them that there wasn’t some pitiful, worn-out excuse offered up for the result. It’s never that we’re simply a better team, with better players and a superior manager. Always its some other factor that came into play, and they do like to bitch and moan and cry and complain in the aftermath.

Celtic beat them yesterday with plenty left in the tank. The manager got some stick on our own side – when does he not these days? – for the substitutions, but I cannot think of a greater demonstration of our confidence and superiority than to make those changes and still see out the game in some comfort. They were never getting anything beyond their dead-ball goal, unless it was another dead ball opportunity. From open play, they were appalling.

Their lack of quality didn’t just extend to their strikers; anyone who thinks that signing a couple of players will fix their massive structural problems is kidding themselves on. That club, all of it, the whole rotten structure, needs tearing down and starting again. Anyone who thinks that style of football represents an improvement has lost the plot for a start.

To listen to some of them, they actually think they played well. The talk, again, was of fine margins and how they are “almost there.” Some of these Peepul have now spent the better part of the last half dozen years telling themselves the same thing … at some point, don’t you start wondering if you’re just lying to yourself? If, in fact, you are delusional?

These lies extend into every part of their squad. They are actually pinning their hopes on some of the “injured stars.” Like Raskin, presumably, who was one of the main reasons The Mooch got the sack. Like Tom Lawrence, who we might be able to pass judgement on better as a player if many of us had actually spotted him between long injury lay-offs. Bigfoot has been seen more since the day Lawrence first walked through Ibrox’s doors as a freebie. The way they talked him up you wondered why some bigger club hadn’t taken him since he was literally available for nothing; a few games in, he got a month’s long injury and everybody knew but them.

This idea that they’ll get Celtic “next time” … how long can that possibly last? How many games did The Mooch get? How many will Clement be allowed before what’s obvious to us becomes obvious to everyone at Ibrox? We don’t play them again for many months, so there will be plenty of time for doubts to surface along the way, and based on his reaction (which I’ll cover in some detail in another article) he’s not a guy who is going to do well under the pressure of further dropped points. When they come, they will rock confidence in him like a sledgehammer blow.

They just don’t want to face it and I don’t think they ever will. I think it’s actually outside of their ability to even contemplate that perhaps we’re just better, so much better that we can brush them aside even without being clinical or particularly brilliant, although we were certainly the better team and by quite a way at that.

Yes, they have some honking players in their squad who they’ll be looking to replace. But name me a time in the last ten years when they haven’t had honking players in their squad they were looking to replace. I don’t know who in God’s name scouted their summer signings, but their window makes ours look like the product of recruitment geniuses.

They have massive problems over there, and the biggest of them, by far, is their complete unwillingness to accept how massive those problems are. They look across at Celtic Park and they see a club that is lucky, and you know what? With rivals such as these, incapable of telling the truth to themselves, in some ways we definitely are.