International breaks are Hellish when Celtic are winning. At Ibrox they wish this one was longer.

International week never comes at a good time, and it’s no wonder that most fans hate it.

But there’s probably not a worse time for an international break than right after your team has lost a major game unless it’s after you win one.

For Celtic fans, this feels like a little slice of hell.

If I were an Ibrox fan, I wouldn’t be too keen for football to start again in earnest though.

Celtic’s next game will be at Celtic Park, against Hearts. Knowing we have to wait until the 14th of the month feels like an impossibly long time to see our club take the field again. The wait is made only slightly better by the knowledge that we have the chance to move eight points clear of the Ibrox shambles if we win the game itself.

It’s been an annoying trend lately that Celtic play their games on Sundays, while the Ibrox club play on Saturdays. All the early fixtures this season have had us playing after them, and there were long spells last season where it felt like we were playing second every week.

It didn’t do them any good in the grand scheme of things, but let’s be honest—it does put extra pressure on you if you’re playing after the other side every weekend, because they can put points on the board first, and you’re under psychological stress trying to keep up.

When you’re the club doing the chasing, and your opponents put points on the board, you know you cannot afford to drop any. That gap just starts to get wider, and every game feels like the “Is this the week?” game, where disaster seems just a hair’s breadth away.

We’re currently in our “hard games at home” spell.

This is something we’ve talked about before on the site. Every second year, the SPFL fixture computer seems to give us a reasonably good sequence of opening matches. But in the other year—like last year—we visit every tough away ground first. This year, we’re in a good cycle, playing all the top teams at home first, while the Ibrox club has to play them away.

They’ve already visited Tynecastle, and they dropped points there. They visited Celtic Park and were pulverised. Their next game is the day after we play Hearts at Celtic Park—a game we expect to win, which would extend our lead at the top to eight points. That would leave them with an incredibly difficult follow-up match at Tannadice. Dundee United currently sit third, above them, making it a potential banana-skin fixture.

What’s more, their next two away games are at Kilmarnock and Pittodrie, and a team in their state won’t be looking forward to either.

Another crucial advantage for us, at least in the short term, is that during their Europa League run, they’ll have to play all their fixtures on Sundays while we’ll most likely play on Saturdays. That will confer an advantage on us all the way into January. By then, we will be on the flip side of the current fixture list and playing all the harder games away. This is a chance right now for us to build a cushion, so that if we drop the occasional point later, it won’t matter too much. Not that it looks like we’re going to do that, because we are tearing through the opposition right now and look as if we could just keep on doing it.

Ironically, what might make the biggest difference—what might bring matters at Ibrox to a close much quicker than Celtic just keeping on winning—is if Dundee United and Aberdeen continue to get results, and especially if in doing so they take points from them.

One of the things already driving their fans to distraction is that they are currently sitting fourth in the table. They are five points behind Aberdeen and Celtic, but also behind Dundee United themselves. If Aberdeen continue to win, it’s not inconceivable that the gap between second and third will grow dramatically.

Of course, Aberdeen are not the most consistent side in the world, and they haven’t put together a decent league run in many years. So, expecting them to open up a gap between themselves and the Ibrox club, no matter what that club does, might seem unrealistic. But I’ve long said that all it will take for a genuine third club challenge to emerge is for one club to be better than everyone around them on a consistent basis.

So far, Aberdeen’s new manager has eight wins from eight, which is remarkable—even if four of them came in the League Cup against less than stellar opposition. Eight wins from eight is not to be laughed at, mocked, or downplayed. It’s a serious bit of form.

I suspect it’s the composition of the fixture list that will scare their fans most because none of their upcoming games are going to be easy. Even their home games look a lot tougher than they would under normal circumstances. It doesn’t matter whether their home is Hampden or Ibrox with three stands open—they’re still facing an incredibly difficult spell between now and New Year.

Aside from the faint hope they may have a partially usable stadium before October, there’s no good news over there right now. Everywhere they look, it’s dark and negative. Even the prospect of being back at their own home ground isn’t necessarily a comfort.

This is the weakest and most impoverished Ibrox side that any of us has seen in years. On top of this difficult domestic schedule, they’ve got the Europa League group from hell, which they don’t look remotely capable of doing anything in.

So, while the international break is usually an interminable bore, and while teams who lose big games don’t usually want an international break straight after, I think this one will come as a blessed relief to the supporters across town. I don’t think they’ll be in any great hurry to see their team play again or endure the terrible football and potentially terrible results that come with it. Every day they are marching towards it, and every day they must wish they weren’t.