Whatever Celtic Has To Fear Tomorrow, It Isn’t A Team Run On Blood And Snotters.

“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson once said, “until they get punched in the mouth.” It is one of the most well-known quotes in sport, and although it is clunky and sounds rather unsophisticated, it really isn’t. It’s brilliantly observed, and extremely shrewd.

Tyson was a master of psychological warfare. He could break another boxer in the stare-out before a punch had even been thrown. Think about those words in the context of that. Think about the weeks a fighter trains, getting himself in shape, watching his opponent’s fights over and over again, listening to those around him tell him that this is a guy who can be beaten, that there is a strategy and if you follow it, you can shock the world and take the title.

And then the night of the fight comes, and there in the ring it’s just him and you, and before a punch is even thrown all that certainty goes away as you look at your opponent, look him straight in the eye, and you realise “he’s going to be all over me in five seconds.”

Those of you who’ve ever seen, or been in, a street fight will know that most people in that situation try to finish it early. The kind of situation that ends in a punch up in a public place is usually one that escalates quickly and most of them end like that.

Most of the time it’s some half-pissed ned on liquid bravado … if you ever find yourself surprised to be in one, there’s a moment where you get hit and if you can project complete lack of concern, and the sense that you’re up for it, you might just see a subtle look come over the other guy’s face as they realise “I may have made a mistake here and I don’t want to do this after all.”

The initial bravado of “I’m gonna knock this guy out …” is all in the mind; it can disappear the minute the first punch connects and the guy’s still standing there, ready to start punching back. That’s the moment that cuts through whatever fogs up these people’s brains, and they go “Oh wait a minute …” That’s why, if you watch YouTube clips of actual street fights, the guy who throws the first punch is very often the one who gets battered.

Tomorrow, I harbour a deep suspicion that they will come out of their corner quick, and hope to strike an early blow which rocks us backwards on our heels. They need to win. We are way too dangerous for them to sit back and try and absorb damage. So, we might have to take a punch or two. Not necessarily concede a goal, but a little early nervousness.

But a good boxing match in the ring is a lot like a football match in the sense that you’ve got two professionals who have some notion of what they are doing. What you see, over the course of a long fight in particular, is tiredness that doesn’t come from the legs but from a growing sense from one of the fighters that nothing he does is going to put his opponent away. If you’ve already thrown your big punches and the guy has absorbed them it must be easy to start looking at him as some kind of superhuman and beyond your mortal talents.

But there’s danger in hanging on too, and it takes its own toll. And in football a single goal can shatter a team completely, depending on when it’s scored.

Look at what happens to a small team who have managed to come within a few minutes of taking something in a game against a much bigger side; you score a late goal against that team, and you’ll probably be able to get another one quickly if you want it.

Because whatever was holding them together falls apart, and when it’s gone there’s no way to get it back. I watched Bayern Munich suffer that the other night in Madrid; the minute the late equaliser was scored there was a sense of inevitability about the winner. They had come through a massive evening, and they were almost at the line … and the second they realised that they had it all to do again the energy that was driving them, the motivation that was keeping them pushing on, it all went out of them, and Madrid’s ruthlessness did the rest.

Tomorrow, I think they’ll come after us in the opening spell. That’s the bravado of “I can knock this guy out with one punch” … and once we weather that and start settling into our own game, we will become more dangerous with every minute that passes.

Yet Barry Ferguson thinks that bravado can win them this game.

But this is what Tyson really meant when he talked about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the mouth. That was a reaction to bravado. You can sit and psyche yourself up all you want, but if you’re overmatched all the Jedi mind tricks in the world aren’t going to make you better than you are, or faster than you are or stronger than you are.

“They’ll have heard what everyone is saying about them,” Ferguson said of this Ibrox team. “Of course they will. That they’re simply not strong enough to go to Parkhead and win … That there’s a mental block when it comes to (these) derbies because they’ve lost so many of them. If I’ve heard it all being said over these last few days there’s no way the same stuff hasn’t filtered through into the dressing room … if I was in there, I would personally be making sure of it.”

Yeah cause that always helps, doesn’t it?

“I couldn’t think of a better way to get the message through of what’s about to be required,” he said. You can see why his managerial career took off, right? “‘Do you realise what they think of us? They think we’re weak. They think we don’t have the balls for it. Well, I’ve had enough of listening to this s***. Let’s get out there and ram some words down some throats!’”

If that’s the plan, they will never cope with the first punch in the mouth. Because that … that’s ridiculous. That’s thinking a bit of Dutch Courage will get you through a car-park square go with one of the bouncers. The moment, to quote David Byrne, where you go “My God, what have I done!”, won’t be long in coming, I assure you.

This is a skill game. This is about the technical superiority of one side over the other, the managerial know-how, the ability to play under pressure. If you’re going out onto the field “determined to prove the point” and relying on bluster, you’ve missed the point.

This is The Wounded Animal theory. As in, “there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal,” or a “cornered animal” or whatever variation it might be. And I always go, “Yeah? So, a fully fit tiger, with the whole jungle to hide in, is less scary?”

Ferguson is of the old “blood and thunder” era, but football has evolved past that simple minded rubbish. It’s the same mindset of “get that up on the dressing room wall!” as if a bit of sound and fury can bridge the gap between Bolton Wanders and Barcelona.

The thing with coming out with all guns blazing when you’re in the position they’re in now is that once the adrenaline fades and the moment passes when you were on the front foot, you find that cold reality sets in and all your limitations are still there, for everyone to see, and for the opposition to exploit. Clement’s press conference, which I’ll cover later, was full of the same nonsense, about rousing themselves, giving their all like gladiators (oh yes, he said that) … it’s the kind of thinking a team that’s hoping to buck the odds and pull off a shock indulges in.

And none of it is enough. None of it will turn bad players into good ones, or a bad manager with a screw loose into Pepe Guardiola. We are a better football team, with better players and a better man in the dugout, at home, in front of just our own fans. We have a captain who is a natural winner, who oozed confidence and class at his media conference today and we’ve spent the last week focussed and treating this with the utmost seriousness in total calm.

I don’t know what state they’ve been in, but I do know too many people connected with that club see this as more than three points, and are mentally psyching themselves up for a battle, and they think some blood and snotters will get it done. Until tomorrow, and they get punched in the mouth, and every fairytale they told themselves is exposed as exactly that.

Whatever else we face tomorrow, we do not need to fear a team playing on adrenaline, because it doesn’t overcome skill .

If they want to take three points, they better come with a more robust plan than that, and plant their feet and get ready for our punches.