Carter Vickers is right. This Celtic team has damn all to prove this coming weekend.

Yesterday I did my favourite gloating piece, Fear and Loathing, and I highlighted, amongst other comments that Ferguson made after the game, the one where he said that their club is no longer feared.

I wholeheartedly agreed with him on that. They are not feared, not by anyone. And this is something I said several months ago. Clubs have figured them out. Clubs know not to be intimidated by the pinstripes. You’ll remember that analogy.

When you read the press, and indeed just listen to anyone connected with the club across town, the sense of entitlement is almost overwhelming. They genuinely believe that the game owes them, that they only have to show up to win matches, that the opposition is expected to roll over and put up no fight at all. It offends them to think that no club is afraid of them. It offends them that clubs now treat them with a certain amount of contempt. But it’s a fact.

Aside from that, they have an all-consuming focus on Celtic.

They think about nothing else, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are on their minds. We are in their heads.

We don’t feel the same way. As I’ve said before, our triumphs are for their own sake. We celebrate being champions because of what it means for us, not because we want to rub a rival’s nose in it. And this myopia they have — this view that every triumph must be seen as a victory over us rather than something worthwhile in and of itself — blinds them to a lot of otherwise obvious facts.

That’s why I was delighted to hear Cameron Carter-Vickers completely dismiss any suggestion that we are going to Ibrox this weekend with anything to prove. What do we have to prove? We’re the champions. We’re on the brink of a treble. We’ve won four titles in a row. This will be the second treble in four years. Overall, we’ll have won 10 trophies from the last 12.

Even if they somehow get a result against us, what does it mean? It means nothing. It’s the hollowest of hollow triumphs. It won’t even give them a lift going into the next campaign because the guy in the dugout won’t be there next season. It’ll be someone else’s team, starting again from zero.

And although Ferguson may take some momentary satisfaction out of it and out of his record as having played us twice and beaten us twice, that’s all he’s ever going to have. He’s not going to get the job on the back of it. He’s not ever going to get to hold a championship trophy aloft.

When it comes to the crunch, he’ll be back at the Daily Record when this campaign ends, and Rodgers will have another trophy in his vast collection.

What will it prove? That Ferguson’s a better manager than Rodgers? If Ferguson was a better manager than Rodgers, he’d have an equivalent career. He has no career to speak of. Will it mean that they’re a better team than us?

Well, the league table and the trophy count don’t reflect that, and those are the only things that matter.

Will it prove that some of their players can raise their game for individual matches? That’s not anything we don’t already know.

They don’t even get bragging rights for it, because how can you brag about being simply the second best? How can you brag about a blow you’ve inflicted on a team that will just shrug it off and go on to wrap up the domestic Grand Slam?

It would be embarrassing to think there are bragging rights at the end of a campaign in which you failed, and failed utterly. So what exactly is it worth?

Carter-Vickers doesn’t fear a negative result. In fact, he sounds positively bullish about our chances of going there and getting three points, and I’m pretty bullish about it myself. But the idea that we have to win the three points to prove some point? Someone’s going to have to explain the point to me first. Someone’s going to have to explain why they think we’ve got something to prove.

On the final day of this campaign, we’ll be presented with the league trophy. That’s a done deal. We have nothing to prove.

We’re going to win the league. The League Cup’s already won. We’re heading for the treble and everyone expects us to win it. The manager will be named Manager of the Year if there’s any justice in this world, and if there’s any sanity in our game. Maeda will be Player of the Year. I don’t know whether Engels will be Young Player of the Year, but he sure as hell deserves to be. Our footballers, our coach, our club will dominate all the awards ceremonies and take all the prizes.

So exactly what is there still to prove? The idea only exists in the fevered minds of those who think about Celtic all day, every day, who cannot even consider their own club without considering it in the context of ours. Our campaign does not come down to a handful of games against them. If we lose a third one out of four and still finish as champions, we’ll have demonstrated that quite clearly.

I know that every Celtic fan wants to see us win that game — but then, I want to see us win every game. If we’d lost the last two matches against any side in the league, I would want to see us make up for that by beating them the third time.

But I wouldn’t consider it a matter of any real consequence if we had already won the title and then failed again. I would be disappointed. I would wonder how they got one over on us, and I might think that perhaps that was something our team had to work on over the summer. But it wouldn’t cause me sleepless nights, and it won’t cause our players any either. It’s just another game, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s really what Carter-Vickers is saying. Not only do we have nothing to prove, as we’re already champions, but it’s just another football match. We’ll want to win it, we’ll go out to win it, and I expect that we will win it.

But any suggestion that it’s about anything more than just another three points is for the birds, and just another part of the Ibrox delusion — that we are as obsessed with them as they are with us, when in reality they define themselves by us and we don’t define ourselves by them.

This war’s already won, and the result of one game won’t change that. Whatever the outcome might be, they will not redefine what we know about this season. They will not rewrite the history books or devalue what we’ve done.