Celtic is too professional and focussed not to shrug off the weekend and bounce back tonight.

I’m a major movie buff, and I’m a big fan of the Rocky series, including the Creed movies. There are a handful of masterpieces among those films—genuine cinematic masterpieces. Movies 1 and 2 are exceptional.

But it’s the little one tacked on at the end of the Rocky series that always brings a smile to my face—the film Rocky Balboa, which you could, if you wanted, call Rocky 6.

There’s a moment in that film when the aging former fighter is arguing with his son, and he says something to him that, in its own way, is quite profound.

“It’s not about how hard you can hit, but about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” It’s a fantastic statement because all long-term victory depends on that philosophy. That’s how great sports careers are forged, how great success is accumulated, and how winning individuals and teams are made.

We know we can hit. We know that, on our game, there’s no team in this league that is our equal—not even close. You can win games by being relentless, and you can pile win on top of win on top of win. But sustained success, and the mental fortitude to keep winning, come from having the right mentality when times aren’t so good. It comes from being able to say, after a defeat, that everyone involved has dusted themselves off and gotten straight back to business again.

If you let a major setback get inside your head, if you start to overthink it, wallow in self-doubt and self-pity, you’re asking for trouble. You’re never going to be successful. Because success, at the end of the day, comes from that ability to take a punch. Even to get knocked down—but to get up regardless and get straight back into the fight.

This team responded well to the defeat at Ibrox at the start of January. We need to respond just as well to the defeat at the weekend. And I have no doubt whatsoever that we will.

Way back at the start of Brendan’s return, we lost the League Cup game against Kilmarnock. That knocked us out of the competition and denied Brendan the chance to do another domestic clean sweep. I think a lot of hacks thought we’d collapse in instalments. During the mid-season slump, we lost twice in a week and allowed the Ibrox club to get in front of us after once being seven points behind.

There are a lot of teams that would have been finished off by that kind of setback. There are a lot of teams that would have crumbled, and the Ibrox club would have won the campaign by a double-digit margin.

But the strength of this team is its ability to keep remembering the fundamentals, to keep believing in itself, and to always trust in its ability to turn any situation around. Even if the Ibrox club had not lost at the weekend, right after we did, I don’t believe it would have made much difference to the way we approach tonight or the rest of this campaign.

Thirteen-point lead, ten-point lead—it’s all the same to us. Because the mental fortitude in this side would never have allowed us to dwell on the gap reducing or let doubts creep in. It has remained, and will remain, very much in our hands. And as we proved last season, even when we needed to win every single game just to make sure that, on the final day, it was in our hands, we could do that.

When Brendan was asked yesterday how he and the players handled the weekend’s defeat, his answer didn’t surprise anyone. We handled it the way we handle everything else. We get past it. We move on to the next one. We keep moving forward.

In short, we get hit, we get straight back up, and we get right back in the fight. Because that’s how it has to be done. You don’t let a drama turn into a crisis. You don’t let one bad result—or even two bad results—spiral into a season-ending calamity.

Look across the city, and what do you see? A team that cannot operate under pressure of any kind. Even when they had the chance to merely close the gap to ten points at the weekend, they couldn’t do it. They simply don’t have what it takes to mount any kind of challenge. They’re mentally weak.

That’s what Stallone’s little monologue in Rocky Balboa is really about—mental strength, fortitude, guts. All the things they don’t have.

If there’s one thing we know about this Celtic team, if there’s one thing we can say with absolute certainty beyond their talent, it’s that they have more guts and fortitude than anyone else in the league. They can play under pressure. They can get up and go again after a defeat, even a poor one like we just endured.

This is a team that came out of Dortmund on the back of one of the worst European away hidings in our history—and then turned in one of the best away performances at the end of the campaign. Somewhere in there, we changed tactics, we changed our style—but the most important change was in our heads. In our thinking. We didn’t let that defeat shatter us, even though it easily could have.

I’ve long worried that our European problems were problems of mentality. But for the first time ever, I see a Celtic side with the mental strength to stay strong in European games and bounce back from setbacks. And that’s why I’ve got no fears about tonight. That’s why I’ve got no fears about the rest of this campaign.

We will go on and win the two trophies we need to complete the treble.

And that starts with tonight. At the weekend, we got hit. We even got knocked to the canvas. So tonight is about getting back up and throwing some punches of our own. And that’s not even in question. It’s not even up for debate. That’s exactly what we’ll do—because it’s what we always do.

So, I expect us to win tonight. Of course, I do. I always expect us to win. Because this is a team that has been forged in fire. This is a team that has passed every test and in front of a home crowd, I expect us to find that little bit extra that was missing at the weekend and send us into the next game in style.

Photo by Sathire Kelpa/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images

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