Fear And Loathing At Ibrox: The Boos Ring Out As Motherwell Hit The Glass Jaw Hard.

In the unlikely event that any of the regular readers of this blog find themselves climbing Everest, once you get to 26,000 feet you enter what’s known as “the death zone.” I love that. There is so little breathable air at that altitude and its damned cold into the bargain that your brain cells actually begin to die of oxygen depletion without the right equipment.

To function at all up there you need to prepare yourself well in advance and understand the risks, and even then, there are people who just don’t make it. It’s hard enough to perform the simplest acts necessary to survive at that height, let alone anything more complex.

No wonder the Ibrox boss sounded weary and ready to pass out in his interview just then. As someone smarter than me once said, it’s tough at the top.

There have been title contenders before who looked like champions in the making and who were undone by a single punch. All through the years of watching professional sports there have been teams who looked good specifically because they were under no pressure. Pressure is a terrible thing for some clubs. Some teams fade, others fold.

And then there are those which rise to it and make magic happen. Tomorrow at Tynecastle we’ve got a chance to go back on top of the league. If we do it, the pressure falls on us again. We’ve looked better without it, but we’ll take it because a far worse feeling has fallen over Ibrox tonight, and with it a dark question; “Did we just blow this?”

That fear, it will eat away at their insides if we win tomorrow, and it should. They won’t have the pressure of being the team at the summit, but a harder kind to bear; the pressure that goes with having had it in your hands and let it slip through your fingers.

We know what that’s like. We have to guard against that at all costs now. But we look like we might be in the ascendency. They look like a team caught in the headlights of an on-rushing car. Hard enough for them to perform when they had a cushion … imagine the pressure now not to let Celtic pull away? Managers get sacked for that kind of thing.

As I said previously, the media was happily spinning away its narrative about how Manneken Piss was the manager who had restored credibility to their club and they were perfectly happy to see improvement and convince themselves that there was a title challenge next year.

But all that went by the boards when we shot ourselves in the foot and let them back into the race. A new feeling grew, that they might just be in the race. That’s pressure in itself. Worse though, by far for them, when they went top there was now pressure to get across the line.

Suddenly, he’s the one who might have blown a title lead, he’s the one who might have surrendered an advantage, and if that’s how it turns out then he’ll be facing hard questions instead of a summer of quiet and calm. It’ll be mayhem over there instead.

Today Motherwell crashed a fist into the illusion of Ibrox invincibility. The illusion. We knew that it was an illusion because – whisper it – we’ve beat them already under this joker, a fact which the hacks have gone out of their way to airbrush out of the narrative here. He’s a one-dimensional manager. I’ve watched most of their games, they are not a good side. They are better organised than they were under The Mooch but that wouldn’t have been hard considering his public park style of football, which has gotten him sacked twice in a year.

But the media is always looking for the next Ibrox hero and if they have to ignore evidence, twist statistics and even lie to themselves they will, and they have and they do and that’s all they’ve done here again. If we had kept our head, we’d already be miles in front of this lot. If we’ve found our feet and our form, we will win this title.

I am enjoying the moment tonight. Tomorrow might be a different story and we might be singing the blues again, but if we’re back on top then this flips the script in a way that they will find profoundly shocking over there, and we’ve got free midweeks from now until we roll into Ibrox and so there’s no excuse for us not kicking on and going there top of the table.

That’s why tonight it’s fear and loathing again on their forums. Old threads which have been forgotten have been resurrected; doubts about Goldson, about Lundstrom, about Dessers, about others in that squad of theirs, and doubts about the club and its mentality. Fear of a revitalised Celtic, and of what that might mean to them.

I barely need to talk about the loathing. It’s there in all its savage forms. Refs are getting it tonight in spite of a dubious penalty and a full eight minutes added onto the end of the second half. The Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand is being debated again and the madness and the hatred are reeking off every online page. I’m strapping on the gas mask and diving in nevertheless, because those forums are a fun place to visit sometimes.

More than anything else, I think we’re all entitled to smile with some satisfaction at those in the mainstream media who declared this title race over with because they couldn’t see us not dropping points and they had convinced themselves that the Little Pissing Man of Ibrox was the greatest thing since the last manager they hailed as a conqueror in the making.

Fools. They know again that they’re in a title race, and if we win tomorrow then we’re the ones with the advantage once more. You think the fear is through the roof right now? You think the loathing is bad? Wait until this time tomorrow and see how it looks then.

Their side no longer look like swaggering wide-boys. The warm glow in which their manager has managed to bask in spite of us giving him a going over at Parkhead has faded. He’s just another Ibrox boss again, no different than the others we’ve seen off in the past dozen or so years. Only absolute cretins believed he was more … a number which includes the whole Ibrox support and much of the Scottish sports media.

That loathing they feel is really for themselves, and it’s more than earned.

Now it’s down to us tomorrow, to turn the pressure cooker up to full.

Oh what fun to watch it blow.