Fear & Loathing at Celtic Park: Rodgers delivers the “Statement Win” and Clement ponders the abyss.

One of the greatest military defeats in history happened at Cannae, where the Romans were annihilated – not just beaten by annihilated – by Hannibal, who had studied their tactics, knew their military strengths and weaknesses and proved it. The Second Punic War was overwhelmingly going in their favour when the Romans appointed a new general to combat him; Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus

He turned the tide of the war, and by the time the two sides met at Zama he had crushed Hannibal’s forces and driven them from Iberia, which is now modern Spain. Hannibal knew he had to win at Zama, and so he went to a familiar playbook; he intended to use his elephants to charge the Roman lines, a tactic which had proved phenomenally successful for him earlier in the war.

But Scipio was ready for that. He anticipated it, and not only that but his troops, by then, were amongst the most battle hardened and capable in the history of warfare. Not only did his men withstand, and repulse, the charge of the heavy elephants but they turned them into their own lines where they rolled up the Carthaginian flanks and allowed the Roman cavalry to slam into disorderly formations, with predictably spectacular results.

The Second Punic War was over.

Sometimes the opposition is just too good. Sometimes they learn quicker, and they develop better tactics. They learn from their mistakes. And sometimes an inspired general makes small tweaks which proved devastating in battle. This might be a weaker Celtic team … but it’s a better Celtic team because these players are a little more aware, a little more battle tested, they feel a little more invincible and the manager has changed just enough to unlock their full power.

I remember laughing out loud years ago, reading Salem’s Lot for the first time, and getting to the moment when Floyd Tibbets, dressed in a raincoat, rubber gloves and with a scarf across his face ambushes and beats up the living daylights out of the hero, Ben Mears; when Susan Norton, Ben’s lady and Tibbet’s ex, visits him in hospital Mears tells her, through a haze of pain “I think I knocked out two of his teeth. Not bad for a writer fella.”

When you’re on the end of a beating you take the victories where you can get them I guess. For months that’s all Clement has been getting by on; “I knocked out two of his teeth … “ boldly asserted from the hospital bed where the other guy has put you. He has no such fig leaf to cover his embarrassment today. We beat them in every department. We played them off the park at times.

Here’s a fun stat; had we scored one more today – had the one that was chopped off counted, and that has to be the closest and most suspect decision since Gore vs Bush and the Florida “hanging chads” – Clement’s hapless side would have conceded, in less than a year, against us the same number of goals Brendan has conceded in every game he’s managed against the Ibrox club … standing now at a mere 12 goals in 19 matches. Let those still in doubt cease their nonsense; Rodgers is the Real Deal.

All week long I’ve talked about a “statement victory”: to my mind, it was never in doubt. The thought of Maeda destroying Tavernier has been in my mind for weeks, but it was actually on the other side of the pitch, Jefre versus Kuhn, where I suspected the real damage would be done and over and over it was.

During Hitler’s War in the West, political and military experts said that what defeated the French in such a short space of time was not simply Guderian’s brilliant innovations but that the French were, to put it in the language of the time “still fighting the last war.”, using antiquated tactics against a modern war machine. Here’s something for you; almost all France’s military supplies were still being carried by horses, and so were most of their infantry. The Germans had trucks and tanks.

And if Clement prepared his own plan for last season’s Nicholas Kuhn he hasn’t watched the actual one in pre-season or in this campaign so far, nor the marauding power of Alastair Johnston on that right flank; to play the Cypriot League left back against them today seems like lunacy until you consider the lies he and those in his orbit have been telling themselves all summer about the gap is actually a myth and how with a little luck they could have won those games last season.

Some months ago, I wrote a piece which quoted a CDC report which put the Americans top of pandemic preparedness just months before COVID hit; “And then the game was played,” as Michael Lewis put it.

In the aftermath, one senior expert coined the phrase of the whole crisis. “You are only as good as your record says you are,” and America’s problem is that it had no record on which to base its own readiness. Now it does.

That’s America’s excuse, and ours … but Clement has no excuse at all for talking that crap. Prior to today his record was played 4 lost 3. It’s now played 5 and lost 4 and that’s the only thing he should be judged on. He can kid himself all he wants that his side were competitive in those other games and wail as he likes about disallowed goals. We had a disallowed goal today. Six minutes later we went back up the park and put one in they couldn’t chop off.

Last season, after Dessers’ goal Clement moaned about how it had “changed the game.” If we let ourselves wallow in self pity like that Maeda would never have been on hand to batter the ball home to “open” the scoring today. Their club stinks of loser mentality and grossly misplaced arrogance. We just get on with winning.

Any manager who was as good as Clement thinks he is might have been able to foresee some of what befell him today; the rampaging destruction we wrought on the right of the pitch for one thing. Maeda – today’s man of the match in my view, by a country mile – roasting Tavernier; how many more lessons can we hand out in that regard? But he’s also have foreseen Kyogo playing on the shoulder of the last defender … and the new position Callum McGregor takes up in games now, which has him scoring goals nearly every week, like the player he was in Rodgers first campaign.

He wasn’t prepared for any of it. I thought Rodgers might have to spring a surprise to get a statement win today but in the end he didn’t even need to do that. He only had to trust the players he had and the system he’s devised for them, an entirely different system than we used last season, and it was as easy as ABC.

And that forces Ibrox to confront a number of hard truths and the first of them is that we are miles in front of them in every position on the pitch. Manneken Piss can bang on all he wants about giving his young players a chance to bed in but he knows, as well as we do, that time is the luxury he hasn’t got. They are out of the Champions League already and five points behind Celtic, and we’ve finally delivered the victory which leaves hiding place whatsoever, after the statement win we were hoping for

I have no idea what the mood is like tonight in La La Land; I’m in the pub already with my mates celebrating the victory we’d been hoping for and which I had expected the whole of the week. But they are entitled to their fear and it is not misplaced in the least. Because we had the luxury today of being to bring on to the field tens of millions of pounds in substitutions after leaving them in the dust with what we had out on the park, and that reveals the strength of our club relative to theirs.

The loathing, I am certain will be flowing like a river, and much of it will be coming from fans who have spent the last week since their own “statement win” over Ross County telling us how good it made them. Fools. They should save their loathing for who they see in the mirror, because no fans believe more in the bullshit they tell themselves to keep reality as far from the door as possible as they do.

I’ve had my issues with our own Happy Clappers over the past month or so, but they are only able to sustain their own belief in our board because Rodgers and his team keep on proving, on the park, how vastly superior they are to this hapless shower and because the Ibrox club continually finds ways to self destruct.

But no amount of positive reinforcement on our side comes even close to that which goes on over there, where a couple of good results can turn grouse beaters into world beaters all over again, and where one win over a terrible bottom six team can have everyone dribbling and drooling all over each other and talking about how this is the team to finally put Celtic in our place. Yeah, better luck next time.

This is why I enjoy days like this so damned much, why Fear & Loathing is far away my favourite series on this site and why I will never get tired of writing them. They are reality talking to the darkness of delusion in which they dwell … and I know that at least some of it gets through, and so the fear rises and the loathing with it.

For everyone else, they are a cherry on top of a cake we’re already deep in enjoying, and friends, dine heartily the rest of the day on their tears and their pain … our own success is what drives us, but by God they don’t half add some flavour.