For All The Media Is Talking Up Celtic’s Rivals, Few Are Predicting That They’ll Win.

One thing I’ve noticed over the course of the day, and this may – in fact it probably will – change tomorrow; for all the swaggering big-talk out of Ibrox there aren’t a lot of the hacks going all out on the limb and predicting that they will win the game on Sunday.

There has been a lot of big talk from these people in recent months, and a lot of them had Celtic written out of the script not that long ago. But finding those amongst their ranks who are assured enough to predict a win this weekend is hard to do.

They all think the home team is the side on form; only just, as there are 24 hours between them losing to Motherwell and us losing to Hearts … but pin them down on whether it’ll be enough and they fall back on how exciting the game will be without offering a view one way or the other.

These Peepul are nowhere near as confident as they are making out.

In some ways, I’d prefer it if they were as that tends to breed arrogance and we’d benefit from that. But they are nervous and wary and unsure, and whether that proves to be good or bad for us, they recognise that they are not just going to be able to win by showing up and nothing more.

We could have worked with their arrogance. We will just have to work with their nerves.

If we start well, and get that crowd of theirs on their backs, I think it could be a very good afternoon. That’s the problem with a 100% partisan crowd; if it turns against the home side it can be a very potent weapon in our favour. Frustrate them, get them on edge, and that will leap from the crowd and into the players … and ours will draw strength from it.

I think when some of the mainstream hacks are forced, by their papers, to make their predictions tomorrow we’ll see an awful lot of them taking the draw.

Out of those who pick a team I think we’ll be ranked as the slight underdogs … a foolish sentiment if you ask me as I’m more than sure we can go there and get a victory.

But from the way they’ve been banging the drum for Clement and expressing their confidence about what he can do, you’d have thought that more of them would be putting their money where their mouths are, so to speak.

That you can sense the tension, even from those who you might expect to be brashly prophesising our doom, tells you all you need to know.