The Title Race Is Back In Celtic’s Hands … We Must Beware We Don’t Drop It.

Yesterday was wonderful. Yesterday was catharsis for months of nonsense, since the Ibrox club went top of the table. We were all waiting for the day when we flipped this back in our favour.

We’ve blown one chance – against Hearts – and we should have pulled it off at Ibrox. None of that matters now. What matters is what we do next.

The slip ups so far will give our rivals hope. I am glad. Because I feel like we’re playing better than we have in a while and I suspect we will extinguish that hope one game at a time.

The road ahead of us is fairly straightforward; I know a lot of them are pinning their hopes on us slipping up away at Killie, but even if the Ibrox club wins in midweek, we can go four clear if we beat them at home and then anything that happens at Kilmarnock is a non-issue anyway as long as we do the job in the rest of the matches.

The Ibrox club has been living on its nerves for weeks. We’ve found our feet at precisely the right time and now only need to think one game at a time, win one game at a time, and there are only five of them left to go. And if we win this, we’re in one Hell of a good place.

So, what’s the likely order of battle? We’ll definitely have Hearts and the Ibrox club at home; that’s a done deal. But of the three other teams in the top six, we’ve already played all of them at home twice and thus get a freebie. It won’t be Kilmarnock. That’s a certainty.

It’ll either be St Mirren or Dundee. I have a feeling they’ll try to give us the two toughest away games; that would be St Mirren and Killie. But Dundee at home … that’s risky for them too.

Because if that’s the final game – no guarantee that it will be, by the way, but we should be confident of getting the final game on our own turf – and we only need to win that’s the one you’d most expect us to handle comfortably. So, they will sweat this but we shouldn’t.

The only thing that would infuriate fans is if we win at Ibrox and they send us to some ground on the second to last week where the allocation is miniscule; that would be our decider.

I would be appalled if our last match was away, but if it meant winning the title at Celtic Park the week before – which would be the scenario if we beat the Ibrox club – then you could probably live with it. I suspect it’d then that they’d send us to Rugby Park.

You know what? Let them mess with the fixture list to their hearts content.

Let them conjure up whatever scenario they want; we have this in our grip again and we’ve got the players who have been over the course.

Joe Hart summed up the mood last night when he said that “We don’t just rock up on a Saturday. We work really hard through the week to have a way of playing, and to have solutions when people do make it tough for us. So, we just need to rely on the hard work we have done all season and come good at the right time.”

Hard work. Coming good at the right time. Taking nothing for granted.

Those are the things that have gotten us here, to where this is now back in our hands again as we head into the home strait. It is tremendous to be top again on points and to know that even when Ibrox has gotten its game in hand over with that we will still be there … and so we’re now only waiting for the post-split fixtures to come out.

It hasn’t been an easy campaign, this one. But it’s now poised right where we’d want it to be. Don’t drop it now, Celtic. Do not let this slip through our fingers.