This Ibrox Club Is Full Of Slow Learners. School Is In Session At Celtic Park On Sunday.

I remember a couple of years ago, well, more than a couple of years ago—about half a dozen years ago—when Joey Barton joined the Ibrox club. It was in the same transfer window as Niko Kranj?ar and other players, and the talk from everyone at Ibrox was about how they were going to show us up in our own house for Brendan Rodgers’ first derby.

By full-time in that game, we had destroyed their pretensions. We had shattered their egos and torpedoed and sunk their morale. In the aftermath of that game, Scott Brown stood in front of the press wearing an ear-to-ear smile. We had dominated so utterly from start to finish that you could almost have felt embarrassment for their players.

There’s a fantastic pre-match photograph with the two midfielders from either side facing each other, and shaking hands; in that picture, Brown is looking straight at Joey Barton—unblinking, unhesitant, unafraid—and Ibrox’s pretend hard man cannot meet his gaze.

In the aftermath, Brown, who had kept quiet throughout weeks of media stories and quotes from Barton about how he intended to run the show that day, finally had his say. The Sky Sports interviewer put this question to him at full time: “Much had been made of your battle with Joey Barton in the build-up to this … how was it out there?”

Brown, wearing half a smirk, replied, “Easy. Yeah, fine … there wasn’t a problem. There was no battling whatsoever.” And then, with a dig at the press, he added, “It was more media than anything else … I made no issue about it.”

When asked if he felt he’d got the best of it, he smiled and said, “Well, the scoreline speaks for itself … it was men against boys.” When the commentator asked what Brown had said to Barton after Celtic scored the second of their five goals, Brown said, “I was just making sure he was alright.” It was a masterclass in handling the press.

The crucial point Brown made, amidst the sarcasm, was that in the run-up to that game, he, as a player, and we, as a club, had just let them do their pitiful, ineffectual trash-talking. We let them run off at the mouth, and then, on the pitch, we settled that debt.

A lot has changed since then, but that hasn’t.

At Ibrox, they still have that habit of shouting from the rooftops about how good they are and telling us how afraid we should be, whilst inside Lennoxtown, the manager keeps our guys focused on the task at hand, and we utter not one word about it.

When Rodgers was explicitly asked, on Sunday after our match, for a comment on Clement and his daft comments the day before about how confident he felt about getting a result, Rodgers laughed and joked with the hacks, asking what headline they wanted, before giving them nothing at all.

“Our focus is only on us,” he said, and that was exactly the right answer to give.

That’s the line from everyone out of Celtic, all the time, as we approach these games. Callum McGregor was also asked to comment on the talk coming out of Ibrox, and this is what he said. “‘No. It’s just talk, isn’t it — and talk is cheap,”

The message is crystal clear; we do our talking out on the pitch, and if we sound a little haughty and superior in the aftermath, that’s usually because we’ve shown that we are where it matters.

I couldn’t believe it last night when I checked online for the last time before I went to bed and found that Tom Lawrence was the latest Ibrox player to indulge in this crazy habit they’ve got—to talk big before a ball is kicked about what they’re going to do and how confident they are, about how ready they feel.

And I wonder, not for the first time, where the hell is the discipline at that club? Why do they keep blundering into the same trap? Why hasn’t anybody in a position of responsibility over there said, “For once, we’re just going to keep our mouths shut and prepare in silence”? Why do they constantly provide us with this extra motivation?

They don’t know how; that’s what I think. This is cultural. This is ingrained. This, I suspect, is policy. They’ve been told that they have to do this, that they have to sound confident, that they have to keep us uppity Fenians in our place and project supremacy.

Come on, it’s the only explanation for it, isn’t it?

Otherwise, somebody, somewhere, would put a stop to it for their own good. I would be mortified if someone at Celtic spoke like this in the week before a game, and this isn’t just one of them. This is half a dozen players and the coaching staff as well, right up to and including the manager. And they do this all the time before every one of these games. And they did it all last season, and they lost 4 out of 5. And they still don’t learn.

What we have here is a slow learner, and they say that a good teacher is at their best with a slow learner. So, on Sunday, folks, school is in session again, and we’ll teach them again and I suspect they’ll fail to get it again and we’ll have to repeat this again and again and again and again … and maybe, someday, maybe they will learn.

But not, I hope, anytime soon.