From the Celtic Park kick-off, this was the week that changed everything.

The ancient wisdom, the old adage, is that a week is a long time in politics. Or, as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” It’s almost hard to believe that today we are just seven days from where Scottish football sat before the Glasgow Derby at Celtic Park.

It’s astonishing to consider the way the ground has shifted beneath our feet — and beneath the feet of the club across the city — in the space of just seven days.

Before the game, you had people like Ferguson in the media saying how much they were looking forward to it because their team was “ready.” Almost every major commentator and pundit was predicting a closer game than it turned out to be. Most of them were still clinging to the idea that there wasn’t much between the two teams. Although most thought Celtic would win, they were certain the club across town was on the right track.

I am forever amazed at how these people have an incredible knack for telling themselves comforting lies. Many of them believed that a routine victory against Ross County meant they were on the brink of a new era under a manager who was talking all sorts of nonsense about how, once his players had bedded in and the younger talents had established themselves, we would see a different team over there. And a lot of people were willing to go along with it.

In the space of seven days, that illusion has completely unravelled. The manager is now fighting for his job, and Celtic are rampant.

You even have people in the media discussing whether they are watching another Invincible Treble side. I think that kind of talk is lunacy and won’t even entertain it, but the fact people are openly discussing it is a measure of how much has changed in the last week.

Nobody in the media is in denial any longer that there is a gap, and that the gap is sizable. It helps when our club won the game comfortably and had £30 million worth of talent that we could bring on as substitutes. If that isn’t enough to convince them across the city and scare them into some frank realisations, then nothing will be.

But across the board, the penny has dropped, and it has landed with the sound of a nuclear detonation. You may have clowns arguing over whether the game itself was closer than the scoreline suggested, but nobody is denying the gulf in quality any more, nor that it extends to the setup of the whole club.

Suddenly, everyone is a critic of the Ibrox board of directors and the manager. Suddenly, everyone realises that none of their squad would get into our team, although Souness wants to make an argument for Jack Butland. Good luck with that. And you have people seriously contemplating a rebuilding task that could last years, during which Celtic will just keep winning everything.

Has a week passed or a decade?

There have been times in the last seven days when it’s hard to tell because the mindset shift that’s taken place is extraordinary.

In the history of Scottish football, it’s almost unprecedented how people have gone from believing we were suddenly in a title challenge to not just writing this one off, but talking in terms of three, four, or even five years before we face another one. It’s amazing.

And the thing is, a lot of us were there long before the mainstream press on this. If we’re feeling a little bit surprised, it’s not that they’ve come to these conclusions, but that it’s taken them so long to reach them. It’s just become news to them that their team isn’t very good, that their manager isn’t up to the job, and that their board is out of money and out of ideas.

These things have been obvious for a while.

The only X Factor was Celtic and what we were prepared to do, and how we were prepared to respond to that. For a long time during this transfer window, it looked as if we weren’t going to respond properly. And I don’t think, even now, that we did all we could.

In fact, I know we didn’t. I know that the tactic of leaving the signings till late in the day was idiotic, if I’m being generous. It deprived the manager of time to sit down with these guys and get his ideas across; it deprived them of time with their teammates. Sure, we can put that right, and we will put it right over the next week before we play our next game. But we should never have put the boss in that position in the first place.

But we did make progress. We did move forward, even if it was just an inch. And as their club has gone backwards, we’ve only opened a gap that was already a yawning chasm. It’s as if much of Scottish football has spent the last couple of years in a deep sleep, and finally, someone got tired of shaking them gently to wake them up and threw a bucket of cold water over them instead. They came out of it instantly, wide awake and in reality.

After all, what new thing transpired in the last seven days?

The transfer window has been shut for longer than that, so it wasn’t to do with that. Did it really only take a single football result? I said that the statement win would have a profound psychological impact on their club, but I never expected an impact like this.

It’s as if the very firmament has undergone a radical transformation. I can’t remember a single result ever causing such an earthquake.

What makes it all the more incredible is that day after day, after day, the crisis has deepened over there. The situation seems far worse at the end of the week than it did at the start, and it was already looking pretty grim in the aftermath of the game.

Even the news that they will soon have Ibrox back and ready — having worked around the clock and spent God knows how much money to get it up to speed much quicker than estimates suggested — is tempered by the fact that they’re still going to have a stand closed, and by the obvious torment their fans are going through, realising that no matter which stadium they’re sitting in, they’re still going to have to watch that awful team on the pitch.

Since then, the manager’s statements have been completely dismantled by some in the mainstream press, even those who think he’s God’s gift.

Then we had the Cerny interview, in which he completely contradicted the words of the manager after the match, and the Todd Cantwell interview, which called the manager a liar and slammed his tactical approach and his man-management skills. On top of that, you had more injury crisis news and the naming of a 21-man squad for the Europa League instead of the 25-man squad that Celtic named for our Champions League side.

For all that there’s been speculation that they might use the free transfer market to bring in a player or players to add strength and steel to the playing squad, what we have today are stories about how the captain, James Tavernier, is angling for a move, and his agents are desperately scrambling to get him one to one of those few leagues left in the world where the transfer window is still open.

Even by the chaotic standards of Chernobyl FC, this has been some week.

This says nothing for the meltdown on the forums across town, where the perma-rage has escalated to heights I have never seen before. Revolution is in the air over there, as was demonstrated by the fans who did turn up outside Ibrox to barrack the players after they returned from Celtic Park. That has nothing on the kind of scenes we will see if they slip further behind in the league.

That is a club in freefall, and it is incredible to think that just one week ago, on the eve of the game, they were talking about the 6-0 win against Ross County as if they had beaten Barcelona and were coming for us, coming to our house, and heading home with the points. The players were mouthing off, the manager was indulging in his fantasies as per usual, and even their fans dared to dream of victory and a good season ahead.

Nobody is talking like that anymore. It’s as if all the chickens of the last 12 years have come home to roost at the exact same time. Now the yard is full of feathers, they are up to their knees in shit and everyone is looking around and asking, “Now what the hell are we supposed to do?”