Fear and loathing at Tynecastle: The Keevins Curse strikes down Ibrox hopes.

The Ibrox club lost at Tynecastle yesterday and I was delighted. Sometimes in football you suffer defeats and reversals that simply are not your fault. It happens. You can prepare well, set your team up properly, do most things right, and still get hit by something absurd. A refereeing call. A deflection. A moment of madness. A bounce of the ball that feels personal. Those moments exist, and any honest supporter recognises them.

But some managers run headlong into curses, hexes, and all that dark-arts nonsense that more of us would happily attempt if we thought it had even the slightest chance of working. Football fans are superstitious creatures. We all are.

And some people seem uncannily skilled at this cursing business.

Yesterday, one of them doomed the Ibrox club before their game even kicked off. A senior journalist, allegedly anyway, announced that if they beat Hearts they would go on and win the title. Well, the moment I read that, I knew.

This individual’s judgement is so catastrophically unreliable that whenever they make a confident prediction, you can almost set your watch by the exact opposite happening. This has been true for years. It has become a running joke.

Yesterday was no exception. Hearts won. That surprised absolutely no one except the old bastard in question. It certainly did not surprise me, and it did not surprise most people who have been paying attention.

I do not particularly rate this Hearts side. They are organised, they are committed, and they are riding a wave, but they are hardly world-beaters.

What I do rate even less is the Ibrox club. I may not rate Derek McInnes all that highly either, but he is ten times the manager Danny Röhl is.

McInnes understands this league. He understands the rhythm of it, the psychology of it, and the fragility of teams who talk a good game but do not have the substance to back it up. He also understands how to beat them.

I spoke earlier about hope, and it matters to draw a distinction here.

Celtic supporters are not mad to cling to hope because hope, in our case, has a tangible basis. January can be a genuinely transformative window. It always has been. As long as Celtic are still in the race when that window opens, and as long as they are still in it when it closes, good recruitment can change everything.

Do the work properly, identify the weaknesses honestly, and there is a real fighting chance of seeing this season through.

Over at Ibrox, hope is something else entirely. It is not grounded in reality. It is an illusion constructed almost entirely out of “what if” questions.

What if they had signed this player? What if they had appointed that manager? If only they had taken a different turn somewhere back along the road, years ago, would things have gone another way?

One obsession dominates them above all others, and it has done for a long time now. Lawrence Shankland.

Look at how few goals they score. Look at how many he scores. You can understand, on a surface level, why that fantasy takes hold. Football fans love a simple solution. One player. One signing. One sliding door moment that changes everything.

But Shankland barely got off the ground last season, and this is who he has always been. He runs hot and cold. The hot spells come and go. The cold spells linger. Unless a team builds an entire system around his very specific strengths, he simply does not deliver consistently.

This is not controversial. It is his career.

Yet this is the kind of “what if” that gnaws away at their support. What if we signed Shankland? What if we went for McInnes? Would the world look different if we brought in Player X, or Manager Y, or just made one different decision somewhere along the way?

They torture themselves with paths not taken.

Celtic supporters generally do not operate that way. We care more about fixing what is wrong in front of us than romanticising alternatives. That is not to say we never indulge in it. We’ve spent the past fortnight flirting with the Martin O’Neill idea, and that was understandable. But most people understood it for what it was. A thought experiment. A moment of nostalgia. Not a serious solution to present-day problems.

Recent Ibrox history, though, can be reduced to a single concept: the path not chosen. They obsess over it. They pull themselves to pieces over it and they replay it endlessly in their own heads. I watch it from a distance and, I will admit, I enjoy it.

Some voices in the media have even claimed that if they had signed Shankland two years ago, they would have won titles. It is madness. It is fantasy football masquerading as analysis. That belief in a silver bullet kills them again and again, because it prevents any honest reckoning with the actual problems staring them in the face.

As we head into the New Year, the Ibrox club sit fourth in the league.

Celtic have had a dreadful spell, a genuinely bad run by our standards, and still sit ahead. Hearts are enjoying a lightning-in-a-bottle season. Add that up, and second place looks plausible for them to claim being on the right road. Third could be argued. Fourth, with Motherwell sitting above them, is much harder to explain if you genuinely believe this is a side capable of mounting a title challenge.

This is the time of year when vague comments turn into hysteria. Transfer windows become fantasy novels. A throwaway line in a press conference turns into a headline about war chests and spending sprees. Vast sums get talked up.

Every scenario depends on major player sales first, and no one can ever explain where those sales will come from.

There is not a single player in that squad you could confidently sell for serious profit. Not one. They are weighed down with mediocrity. That club is carrying passengers all over the pitch. They lack a tactical mind in the dugout capable of organising a coherent run. Any talk of a title-winning surge borders on delusion.

Had Celtic lost yesterday, our slide would have continued and third place would have looked frighteningly real for all of us. I still do not dismiss that danger entirely. But the Ibrox club remains the least credible threat in this race, and that is saying something given how chaotic our own season has been.

Their transfer strategy has been just as barmy and just as catastrophic as ours, if not worse. The difference is scale. Our problems are about holes left unfilled. Theirs are about an entire structure built on sand.

Football often turns on fine margins. Yesterday did not. Hearts outplayed them. They scored twice and should have scored more. An astonishing number of people I spoke to had Hearts winning. My old man included that on a five-way accumulator that paid very nicely indeed.

Everything I wrote the other day about clubs no longer fearing Celtic applies tenfold across the city. Nobody fears them. Their brief laugh at Celtic lasted a fortnight before reality came crashing through their own front door, as it so often does.

They are not out of it mathematically, but none of them truly believes that squad gets through the rest of the season without dropping more points. Probably a lot more points. They watch their own team and they know it. They talk themselves into scenarios, but they do not believe them.

As ever, it is Celtic who keeps them awake at night.

Plenty of their supporters concluded yesterday that Celtic’s first win under the new manager could spark a run. More of them believe that than you might expect. They fear it stabilising the dressing room, clarifying communication, and getting players to buy into something coherent. They fear momentum more than they fear any single result.

We are what they fear. They laughed loudly for a fortnight because some of them suspect that was as good as it gets for a while.

This time they might be right. They might be wrong. But Celtic haunts them regardless. It always has.

Yesterday felt typically Celtic. A team, wobbling, yet still standing. A team finding the fortitude to haul itself off the canvas and win late. They remember every single time that has happened, just as we do, and it lives in their heads rent-free.

Now their anger has turned inward, which is always the most revealing stage. Tavernier took pelters. Jack Butland took pelters. Names that were untouchable not so long ago are now being questioned openly. They never stop to ask why a goalkeeper they expected to sell for £30 million arrived for nothing in the first place.

No English club ever queued for him. Not one.

The numbers have always told the truth. Even at the height of the media love-in, his statistics were dreadful. He conceded more one-on-ones than any keeper in the league. That matters. That is how goalkeepers are judged when you strip the noise away.

That is why top clubs never wanted him. This is why no one will pay serious money now. They still do not get it, and never will, because they view everything through a blue haze amplified by a media desperate to overhype their players.

That brings us neatly to Nico Raskin, absolutely slaughtered yesterday on their own fan forums. Another media creation. Brief flashes of promise followed by long disappearances. The Mikey Johnston syndrome in its purest form.

A player who performs once in a blue moon is not a good player.

They hype these players because they need to sell them. Butland and Raskin are supposed to be the blue-chip assets. Neither will generate serious money. Remove them from the equation and what remains is a wasteland.

Their fear is justified. Their loathing is justified. The situation they find themselves in is entirely of their own making.

There is a moment in Fever Pitch where Nick Hornby describes Gus Caesar attempting a clearance, missing it completely, and falling on his backside, looking, as Hornby describes it, “like a guy who had won a ‘be a footballer for a day’ competition” rather than a professional footballer. That exact moment replayed itself yesterday when Gassama swiped at the ball, missed, and collapsed in the Hearts box.

Talk of clubs doubling what Ibrox paid for him is fantasy. It belongs in the same mental drawer as all the other “what if” stories they tell themselves.

Celtic’s problems come from holes left unfilled. Ibrox filled every hole this summer. Centre-backs. Full-backs. Midfielders. Wingers. Strikers. The problem is brutally simple. None of them are any good.

Celtic need three or four quality signings. Ibrox need to rebuild an entire squad.

Yesterday was one of the least shocking results of the season unless you were a Sunday Mail writer long past the point where retirement should have intervened. McInnes loves beating them just as much as he loves beating us. That makes him unusual among SPFL managers, and it makes him dangerous to them.

He enjoyed that yesterday. So did the rest of us.