Michael Stewart is right. It’s not Celtic who are sweating every Aberdeen win.

Yesterday in the aftermath of Aberdeen’s 1-0 victory against Dundee Utd a curious exchange took place on the TV when the anchor of the Premier Sports football show, Rory Hamilton, tried to suggest that Aberdeen will be worrying Celtic.

Michael Stewart’s ears pricked up immediately and he didn’t hesitate to correct this daft interpretation.

Stewart notes that there’s only one Glasgow club sweating Aberdeen’s form, and it’s not us. We’ve already played against them recently and they did very well to come back from two nil down at Celtic Park to get a draw. But we are on level points with them. We’re not the ones who have to go to their ground next six points behind, knowing that if the home side hits their stride and wins, that the gap will have grown to nine.

And at that point, the manager’s neck will be in the noose.

Both of those clubs are in a very curious position going into Wednesday night’s game. They’re both in the position of knowing that whatever result happens that Celtic will be the prime beneficiaries as long as we win at home against Dundee.

And the moods around the two clubs could not be starker. At Aberdeen, they are brimming with confidence. At Ibrox they are brimming with fear.

They won their game today, and that was important for them because they couldn’t afford to go into that match on Wednesday any further behind. But their fans are not enjoying the experience at the moment, and I think a lot of them just want it to be over.

They just want the boring, horrible soul-destroying football to be in the past, and I’ve been there. We’ve been there as supporters. We know what that’s like. We know what it feels like to go to games with no sense that you’re going to see anything good, thinking that there will be no pleasure at the end of it except perhaps the pleasure of a scraped victory and three points you barely deserve

It’s a horrible thing for any football fan to have to go through that, to know that there will be a disaster at some point, that it might just be right around the corner and that in the meantime you’re going to have to suffer interminable boredom, interminable frustration and seething anger that there’s no way out of except just to go through it and hope that there’s something better on the other side, and I don’t mean at the end of a 10 game winning run. I mean, when the manager is no longer there, when that disaster has changed the landscape.

And the worst thing is to go to games and be caught in that strange world between wanting to see your side win and willing that disaster to come. That can’t feel good. I know it didn’t feel good when it was us. I know that when we were in the latter stages of the Lennon calamity that most of us just wanted it to be over, wanting to see it end and to know that there was something better around the corner, although we didn’t know whether there was or not.

I remember in that grim awful year getting an equaliser against Hibs late in an away game and knowing that it would keep Lennon in post for another week. I remember the grim realisation that he wouldn’t get sacked because it was a disaster averted when we all knew that we were just waiting for one and that something worse was coming.

There was a clear sense of that, a grim, terrible, horrible knowledge of some awful series of events that lay just around the corner.

It was 21 November 2020 and we came back from 2-0 down that day to get the goal in the last minute, and a lot of people celebrated that. But for some of us, it was a moment of utter despair. It was a moment when we knew that all we had done was delay what had to be done.

Five days later, Sparta Prague beat us 4-1 in the Europa League. Three days after that, Ross County knocked us out of the League Cup at Celtic Park, which sparked some scenes of disorder outside the ground, although we were in the midst of the COVID lockdown. In our next league game, we drew against St Johnstone and the misery just wouldn’t stop.

Four league wins in December and a win against Rennes in Europe may have convinced some people that we were out of the woods and that we were going to emerge on the other side with our club intact; these false dawns are symptomatic of the crisis though. January was the disaster we’d been waiting for. Two defeats, three draws and one win in the league, and at that point, there was no more hiding. Action had to be taken, and shortly thereafter it was.

And that’s where the Ibrox fans find themselves right now; in that awful place where you know that there’s no happy ending, and you know that it’s going to be awful, and you know that you cannot possibly watch much more of it and that it cannot possibly continue, but where circumstances are not quite dire enough that the board has no choice but to act.

It is soul crushing and it amuses me mightily that this is where they currently find themselves.

What makes it worse is that this is the year that another club emerges to go on an extended winning run and the terrifying thing for them now is that a third place finish is not out of the question. It’s not even a crazy proposition. If Aberdeen can beat them, if Aberdeen do that and get the result they need, then the chances of a third-place finish are very, very real, and there’s no telling when this ends, because sacking the manager might not necessarily turn it around

You look at that impoverished squad of theirs, you listen to the words that their chairman and others at the club have said, you read up on the financial sustainability regulations and those horrible numbers that I published the other day about the squad wage cap and you don’t see where, or how, they get out of this.

Nothing about it will be easy, that’s for sure. And nothing about it will be quick. There is no silver bullet solution to these problems they find themselves in.

We are on a tremendous run of form right now. It’s as good a run of form as we’ve been on since the Invincible season. We’re racking up points and banging in the goals.

The Dortmund hangover looks as if it’s behind us.

We played well enough today not to have concerns that we’re still suffering from some lingering effects. We believe – because we’ve seen nothing else for years in this league – that Aberdeen will falter at some stage. Whether or not it will be a minor slip or the full-scale dramatic collapse is all that remains to be seen. But we expect it to come.

So, we don’t have concerns. We’re not worried about Aberdeen.

But the Ibrox club would be forgiven if they were spending every waking moment right now worried about Aberdeen. Because their fans are already furious about the idea of finishing behind us.

But the truth of the matter is, as I said in the piece about the five stages of grief, there are a lot of them who, as far as the season goes, and perhaps even looking ahead to next season, have already come to terms with finishing behind us.

They have come to an acceptance that it is the probable outcome.

They can rationalise their situation in any number of ways, including some quite bizarre beliefs that the league is rigged against them and in our favour. They think we’ve taken advantage of their long climb through the divisions to consolidate and build our power and strength—which, to some extent, we have. Those individuals cling to the notion that they are victims of a gigantic conspiracy, and it’s this very conspiracy that keeps them down. But at least they have acclimated themselves to some version of the present situation.

However, nowhere in that reality did they expect to finish third. Nowhere.

Most of them are struggling to accept that we are on the brink of overtaking them. But once we do, even that reality will be something some of them can live with—not comfortably, not easily, not happily, not well, but it will be survivable.

Third place will be unacceptable to them. Third place is what’s driving the protests, the demonstrations, and the fury unleashed on the club.

I don’t know whether Rory Hamilton is some kind of Ibrox apologist or just a complete idiot who cannot understand that only the club at Ibrox is having sleepless nights over the form of the now wide-awake Aberdeen. But Michael Stewart wasn’t going to let him get away with that, and he hammered his point home.

Now it’s up to Aberdeen to turn this immense emotional drama into a full-blown explosive Ibrox crisis that no manager can escape from.

We’ve seen this movie so many times; it’s an annual event, like a part of the Halloween tradition. The Ibrox club moves one manager out and brings another one in. I genuinely don’t believe we’re going to have this year spoiled by having that movie put on hold.

But if it comes, it means that the disaster has arrived over there, that the waiting of their fans is over, and that the misery has come to a temporary halt. But another kind of misery will inevitably take its place, which is why we’ll keep watching, even after the final credits roll on the story of Phillipe Clement.