Keith Jackson’s latest is a humiliating retreat from his “title race” predictions.

This morning, Jackson posted his latest piece, and just one week after proclaiming the title race back on he was backtracking like mad. It is highly amusing to read, and so of course I’m giving this the full treatment. It might be one of the quickest and most humiliating reversals we’ve seen in years.

Strap in and enjoy it, folks. Let’s start with the headline, and it’s wonderful.

I got it wrong about Rangers being in a title race as Clement’s side is again reduced to a quivering wreck – Keith Jackson 

Oh, you certainly did get it wrong, didn’t you? And I’m moved to wonder how anyone, even someone of such limited intellect, can have been so stupid. We’ll get back to that question before the end, I assure you. Here’s the sub-heading. 

The truth of the matter is there is no race for the flag and this latest capitulation was inconsequential before it had even kicked-off

Yeah cause midweek pretty much took care of that, right? The truth of the matter is that there hasn’t been a “race of the flag” for months, and only complete fools allowed themselves to believe otherwise, on the back of a handful of games.

Let’s dive into the main body of the article. 

There’s a need to tread carefully around matters of such a delicate nature. Especially at this time of year, when there are youngsters around and all sorts of sensitive souls. Like fans of Sevco and Celtic.

Are you feeling particularly sensitive at the moment? Do you understand what that opening paragraph means? The answer, for me, to both of those questions is no. What in God’s name is this loon rambling about? 

But, even so, eventually there comes a point in time when it can’t go left unsaid any longer. So whisper this gently, the truth of the matter is there is no such thing as a title race. It simply does not exist. It never did. 

You know that old line about starting as you mean to go on? God help us get through the rest of this if we’ve read two paragraphs representative of the whole. What a convoluted (and stupid) way of getting to the opening point. 

Maybe in some fantastical parallel universe where fat men in red suits hand out presents for free – but not here in the cold reality of Scottish football’s back garden. And certainly not this Christmas time, never mind moving forward into the New Year. 

Amazing that you – you yourself, Keith – chose to live in that parallel universe for half a week. You clearly feel as if you’ve been made to look like a clown. But you did it to yourself, and it was all very predictable that you’d end up here. 

Forget what happened in Motherwell yesterday where Sevco saw Celtic’s mini-wobble and raised it into a full scale sphincteric collapse. In truth this latest woeful, error strewn capitulation of two more top flight points was inconsequential before it had even kicked off.

That is atrociously written. “A full scale sphincteric collapse”? Good Christ, stop trying to sound like there are more than too brain cells rattling around in that soup can you call a head. Stick to plain writing, you’ll embarrass yourself less.

As to Celtic’s “mini-wobble”, how many of us said that to call it anything of the sort was plainly idiotic? We dropped points in one game. Let me repeat something else for the hard of thinking; we won the cup final. The trophy has our name engraved on it, again.

The record books have it down there in black and white. We are the only team ever to win a major honour and have the opposition get the plaudits.

The media in this country is pathetic, and right here, folks, we have Exhibit A.

After a brief period of intrigue, the sanity clause came to town in Paisley on Boxing Day to re-establish some perspective and seasonal reality. And it’s reduced the Ibrox outfit to a quivering wreck of a team all over again. 

The “intrigue” only existed in a handful of minds so thick that you need to stir the contents with a cement mixer. “The sanity clause came to town” is another absolutely awful phrase, one even a first year secondary school English teacher would have given you a Fail for using in an essay. How can someone with such a poor grasp of the language ever have gotten a job writing for a living? 

Those back-to-back performances represent a microcosm of their season so far – full of unfathomable selections and lacking in intensity and aggression. Yes, they mounted desperate second half salvage missions but, even when Sevco looked capable of dragging themselves out of a hole, they were really only flattering to deceive. 

Microcosm is a big word for you, Keith. But at least you used it in context. The thing is, you know that it’s representative of their season so far. You’ve seen this movie so many times you could play every part in it. And yet you and a handful of others let themselves be swayed by a combination of hope and over-excitement. You ignored objective reality. You were virtually begging to be made a fool of. 

Instead, they did what they always do under Philippe Clement. They bottled it when it seemed like a full recovery was theirs for the taking. All of which sums Clement’s team up in a nutshell. Even when they get things right they have forgotten how to go about finishing off the job. There is no ruthlessness about them these days. 

What “full recovery” is this? Listen, this is already too ridiculous for me. Their so-called great run amounts to four league wins in a row. What’s a “full recovery?” Five? Six? Seven? Clement doesn’t have “the full recovery” in him. That team doesn’t. What does it even mean? To effectively challenge for the title two things had to happen; they had to be a lot better and we had to get a lot worse. I never thought either was likely.

There was never going to be any “full recovery.” It was never “theirs for the taking” unless we made a gigantic mess of things. That was not happening. 

On the contrary, they have become accustomed to accepting near misses and spinning stories about what could have been. It feels almost as if this entire club is now conditioned into settling for making a decent fist of things. For a while at least. 

And who’s fault is that? For God’s sake man, you, yourself, Keith, are part of an entire industry that spent the week after the cup final praising them for failure and claiming that it only came about because of bent or incompetent officiating! If the Ibrox club has settled into a period where failure is seen as acceptable it might be because they operate in a media ecosystem which refuses to acknowledge it as failure in the first place.

You, yourself, have Celtic’s cup final win as part of a “mini-wobble” at our club instead of an acknowledgement that theirs came up short yet again! 

But, eventually, it always ends the same way – with another trophy dressed up in green and white ribbons – because Brendan Rodgers hasn’t just built himself a better, more talented squad on the other side of the city. He’s created a mentality monster. 

And that is the closest you and some others have come to actually acknowledging that self-evident fact. Yes, there are green and white ribbons on another trophy. Thank you for arriving at the truth of it after weeks of dancing around it. 

And so, rather than give the game in this country the gift of a meaningful tussle at the top, the festive fixtures have effectively taken away any lingering hope Clement may have harboured with regards to a prosperous and successful 2025. 

Stop pretending that a challenge from Ibrox is something the game in this country “needs.” For a start, most people in this country are ambivalent at best and at worst actively loathe the club. This contention – which I wrote about earlier in the week – that Celtic’s dominance is bad for the game is just loser whingeing and nothing more. I think we do need a challenge. It won’t come from them. 

It’s gone now. Before the old one has even ended. And the consequence of this latest surrender comes in the shape of mounting levels of pressure and the re-emergence of the suspicion that he’s never really been cut out for this particular combat zone in any case. 

Took you all long enough to realise it, but Jackson, you were there before a lot of people were. But you are too prone to changing your mind at the first sign that an Ibrox team can string two passes together to get a goal. 

Yes, OK, at this point it’s probably an appropriate time for a bit of a mea culpa, A hands up, if you prefer. On these very pages only a week ago a question was posed and the idea was floated by some dafty that the destination of this season’s top flight title might have been declared a bit too early. 

One thing I’ll credit you with, Keithy; you are not quite the full-blown arrogant arsehole that your pal at The Sunday Mail is. He makes even more lurid and ludicrous predictions and has never once had the decency or respect for his shrinking handful of readers to acknowledge when he makes a tit of himself. You’ve fronted up to this one, and that’s a feather in your cap, and I have no problem with saying it. 

The argument – as flawed as it turned out to be – was based around a noticeable drop off in Celtic’s peak levels coupled with a sudden resurgence in Ibrox’s form and fortunes. Even if this upturn had come around more by accident than design, Clement had finally found a formation and way of playing which made his team a completely different proposition from the one which had been previously plodding its way towards the midway mark of another largely joyless campaign. 

Joyless campaign? Speak for yourself and the other pro-Ibrox lickspittles in the media; a lot of us have taken plenty of joy from it so far.

The argument was based on you and a handful of others seeing only what you wanted to see. Celtic plays at such high intensity that there were bound to be spells of a couple of games where we didn’t hit our heights. Circumstances like injuries and illness can conspire to do any team harm … this is why Invincible campaigns are so rare.

The so-called Ibrox resurgence was a complete figment of people’s imagination. I marvelled at some of the rubbish being written about it. As I said in a piece last week, the one after the St Mirren game, the Celtic bloggers knew enough just to be patient and wait for the inevitable crash. There never was a “resurgence.” They won a handful of games, with the second most expensive team in the league. No great surprise. 

But the re-emergence of players such as Ianis Hagi and Nico Raskin and the decision to relegate Cyriel Dessers down the pecking order while giving Hamza Igamane and Danilo a chance to lead the line, did make it appear as if Clement was on the right track. And who knows? Maybe he was. 

You’ve got to be joking, right? Hagi has barely kicked his own backside. What player are you watching, Jackson, that you think he’s been brilliant? Nicolas Kuhn did more in the first half yesterday than Hagi has managed in weeks. I will never understand the love affair with such a mediocre footballer. And Raskin? A thug. Nothing more than that. A sort of Belgian version of Alex Gogic. Igamane is having a good spell. Danilo is a £6 million waste of space who wouldn’t get on our bench. 

But he’s tossed it all away again. The trouble with this Ibrox side and its manager is that, the moment they get close enough to see the white of Celtic’s eyes, they tend to collapse like a pack of cheap festive greetings cards. 

THEY NEVER GOT THAT CLOSE! THE CLOSEST THEY’VE BEEN IN MONTHS IS NINE POINTS BEHIND! WHICH LASTED THREE DAYS! 

It happened earlier this month at Hampden in the Premier Sports Cup Final when they left the national stadium clutching onto their losers’ medals and another hard luck story.

The “hard luck story” is the point. It’s the reason that club never learns and never really improves. Which part of “Celtic won the trophy although nowhere near the best” escaped your attention for so many, many weeks? 

And then, just when Celtic left the door ajar by dropping points at Tannadice, they folded all over again. Of course they did. In retrospect it was stupid to expect them to do anything else. 

We didn’t “leave the door ajar”! We drew one match! We still had a commanding lead and the likelihood always was that we would go to Ibrox and leave with a bigger one.

Even now, even with the evidence that the Ibrox side is just not very good towering in front of him, he’s still not fully grasping it. Even with Celtic now 14 points clear, unbeaten domestically, rolling again like a well oiled machine, he doesn’t seem to recognise that our form is outstanding and it’s that, more than anything else, which made the Ibrox task absolutely impossible. 

By way of defence, there were a few caveats attached to the notion that a genuine title race might light up the second half of the season. And chief among them was a need for the Ibrox club to take nine points from nine over three games during the festivities. 

Don’t kid yourself, Keithy. It never entered your head to expect anything else. You and a lot of others had those points bagged and boxed with a ribbon on them. That’s part of the problem, a complete denial of the reality of the team you’ve been watching all season, one that definitely had these twin disasters in them. 

They fell flat on their faces at the first hurdle and headed to Fir Park yesterday feeling bruised and trailing even further behind their rivals at the top of the table than they had been one week earlier. And they left another two behind. 

Only the truly stupid are truly surprised by those reversals.

Of course, the response was typically feeble but the result and performance was already meaningless. Exactly the same rule will apply at Ibrox on Thursday when Celtic come across the Clyde as first footers to welcome in a new year as well as write the next chapter of the same old story. 

Yeah, that game has “dead rubber” written all over it. I still think we’ll win. 

It won’t matter if they do manage to muster up a win now that the pressure is off, which would be just like them. It’s a great deal more likely, however, that Celtic will find a way of removing whatever miniscule margin of doubt remains by chalking up another derby day win or, at the very least, avoiding defeat against Clement’s side for a seventh successive time. 

That’s about in line with what I expect, yep. 

All options are open for the time being but, whatever the final outcome, the case for the Ibrox club going the distance can be considered officially closed. It’s too late even for the man with the sack to save them now. 

Dreadful closing paragraph. “All options are open for the time being” means what exactly? That’s a stupid phrase, used entirely without context. As to the man with the sack, it’s someone getting the sack that stands the best chance of giving them any kind of reasonable time of it in 2025. Imagine missing that open goal, Keithy.

All in all, that’s a horrible piece to end the year with, full of his bad writing and daft commentary. The only thing that can be said in its defence is that he does acknowledge to his readers how completely wrong he was this time last week, even as he still refuses to see the woods for the trees and defends players such as Hagi.

A vintage Jackson piece of utter rubbish to close off 2024. I am comforted by knowing that with people like this in the mainstream media that the same mistakes will continue to be made into 2025 and beyond.