Celtic’s rivals are filled with fear, and Clement’s latest comments prove it.

If you’re Philippe Clement, I guess it’s important to claim your little victories wherever you can, and he’s been doing a bit of that over the weekend by the sound of it.

One of the stories I missed yesterday, which was sent to me, involved his comments after his side’s match late Sunday against St Johnstone.

Once again, this is a man clutching desperately at any straw he can grasp. His latest attempt at finding comfort came with a remark about how both Celtic and Aberdeen scored late in their games. Behind this comment is his complete underestimation of the size of the challenge in front of him. He’s done this before: denying the gap between our clubs, relying on misleading statistics that supposedly show his team has had our measure.

But this latest comment is a particularly pathetic example of Clement trying to extract some crumb of hope from thin air.

I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of Gordon Strachan, but I’ve discussed on this blog several times how, during our pursuit of a third consecutive title, even when the gap between us and Rangers seemed impossible to bridge, Strachan never gave up. His focus was always on mentality.

Strachan’s message was simple and clear: don’t focus on your rivals. Don’t take comfort from what you perceive as their bad performances. Whether you’re chasing or leading, the focus should always be on your own team. It’s about winning the game in front of you, not worrying about what’s three matches ahead or what your competitors are doing.

Clement, on the other hand, always seems to focus on the wrong things. If it’s not the financial gap, it’s statistics that he believes can somehow alter match results. If it’s not that, then it’s referee decisions. He spends far too much time looking across at Celtic, too fixated on what we’re doing.

This is a man who is deeply unfocused. He doesn’t seem to know what his priorities are and always looks for an excuse. At a club where the media is happy to amplify those excuses, he’s been getting away with it for far too long.

There was no reason whatsoever for him to mention Aberdeen’s late winner or ours in his post-match comments. He did it because that’s where his mind is. That’s what he’s thinking about: clutching at any straws, hoping we slip up somewhere.

And perhaps most importantly, he did it because he lacks confidence in his own team’s ability to overhaul us unless we make some catastrophic mistake.

The gap between us is five points, not 15. If he had faith in himself, he’d be saying, “We play Celtic at home soon, so no matter what happens before then, we’ll close the gap to two points if we win.” But he can’t bring himself to think like that. He’s simply incapable of focusing on his own team and trusting in his ability to make that happen.

Strachan, in that famous season, told his players to focus on cutting the gap one game at a time, one point at a time. He insisted that we don’t worry about rivals, knowing that football’s immutable law is that all teams eventually drop points. All teams go through rough spells, but the key is to capitalise on that by focusing on your own performances first and foremost.

That’s how we won that title: by stringing together a run of wins, slowly chipping away at the gap. It remains one of the most satisfying league titles I can remember.

I’ve seen other Celtic managers take this same approach since. It’s the strategy that won us the double last season. Even when the Ibrox club got its nose just in front of us and the media started talking about their momentum and their fans started banging about a treble, Rodgers told his players to block out the noise, ignore the media hype, and focus on themselves.

We had two derbies left, one at Ibrox and one at Celtic Park, and we took four points out of six, which was, even on its own, enough to have made us champions.

But this is a lesson Clement just doesn’t seem to grasp.

He’s constantly caught looking over the fence, and in doing so, he’s admitting his insecurity. If he really believes there’s some deeper meaning behind our late goal on Sunday, he should look at how often we’ve done that over the past few years.

What he’ll find is that this isn’t a team relying on luck; it’s a team that plays until the final whistle, a team that fights until the job is done. That’s the real lesson he should have taken from it, instead of fooling himself into thinking we simply managed to scrape by.

If I were in his shoes, I’d be looking at a side that came back from not just a bad result in Germany, but a humiliating one, went 1-0 down at halftime and still won. I’d be concerned about a team like that, especially over a full campaign. I wouldn’t be taking false hope from it or clinging to theories that have already been overwhelmingly disproven.

In truth, Clement’s countdown clock is already ticking.

He knows that we can keep winning, and that one slip-up from him could end it all. His constant glancing over the fence only telegraphs his own fear. If he had true confidence in his own team and his own ability, he wouldn’t need to look for signs of slippage on our end. When you start doing that, you’re essentially admitting your fate is no longer in your hands. And what’s even more curious is that, at this point, his fate still is in his own hands.

But he doesn’t trust those hands at all.