Celtic is back doing what it does. Winning games and extending the gap at the top.

Celtic needed a response after the midweek reversal at Ibrox and we got it today. It was a no-fuss victory which we thoroughly deserved where Nicolas Kuhn got another double, we kept another clean sheet and extended our lead at the top of the table. We’ll get to the shifting calamity across town tomorrow; for now, let’s talk about us.

As you might have heard, the boss had a number of things to say in his after-match press conference which might ruffle a few feathers. I don’t think the Tierney comments are all that controversial; I too would prefer we celebrated the players who are here right now. It’s fair comment as far as I’m concerned.

As to his comments about the patience level in the stands, the long and short of it is that he wants fans to be more tolerant and to realise why the team sometimes do the things they do. The point is a fair one, but when fans complain about a dire display they are exercising their right to do that, and the boss can’t have it both ways.

Sometimes the manager, and the players, get their decisions wrong. It’s natural. Rodgers isn’t a machine any more than his footballers are. Where I have no fears is that even when he appears to dismiss criticism, Rodgers is always taking it on board and asking himself if it’s fair or not, and he has changed things up at times even after appearing to suggest that he doesn’t think that he needs to.

If he were unable to adapt, he would not be so successful.

Today he and the team bounced back. He made some of the changes fans wanted to see, and he can talk about what his own reasons were for that, but this afternoon he protected Hatate and Scales by taking them out of the firing line for a while and I don’t care what his motivations for it were, only what the results were, and we did the job we had to.

I had no fears about that. We’ve got an elite level manager and an elite level mentality at the club. He, like Martin O’Neill, recognises that when you’re so far ahead in the league there will be bad results and that some will over-react to them and others will smell opportunity, even if their rationale for it is as badly flawed as that which we see across our media. He also knows that the club across town isn’t all it’s cracked up to be on those days when the hacks are at their most hysterical.

Even when he’s making changes, Rodgers has confidence in this thing that he has built, and you only need to look at the league table to see how justified in that confidence he is. It’s not easy to do what he does, and what he has this side doing, week in week out and he we should never forget that his record is exceptional. The consistency of this team is amazing; that’s why some people find it so hard to take when we have our off-days, because they come so seldom and they are hard to understand.

It’s a problem common to every team which has achieved a level of success on this scale. Let’s remind ourselves – because nobody else is going to say it – that what we are enjoying right now is without precedent. No team in the history of the game here has achieved such consistent success with doubles and trebles now commonplace. You know how rare trebles used to be? Some folks should look it up to put the modern era in its proper context.

Every club would kill for this sort of success, and the manner in which it has been achieved has raised the expectations of where this team can go to such heights that every misplaced pass is treated like a crime. And I’m not even talking about the small handful of fans who think one defeat is a crisis and requires a wholescale rebuilding job; they exist in their own wee world and it’s essentially impenetrable.

Yes, we needed a win today. It needed to be a no-frills or fuss victory. It didn’t need to be a statement victory unless the statement was “it’s business as usual around here.” And that’s the only message we did need to see. This team wins games. It does it better and with more consistency than every other club in the land, and we don’t get rattled under pressure and we don’t let our heads go down at the first bad loss.

Ibrox should be treated the way the Hearts game at Tynecastle was in the business end of the last campaign; a bad day at the office, and one from which we move on. That’s not to say lessons can’t be learned; they can, they should, in fact they must. But the most important thing was to win three points this afternoon and we did … the club across town did nothing but confirm what we already knew. They can raise their game on a handful of occasions but they are a poor side led by a loser.

Celtic wins football matches. Regularly. Comfortably. Without fuss. That’s all today was; the resumption of our primary business. Look at the league table, at that extended lead, at that goal difference column. This is how we got there. It’s how we’re going to stay there.

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