Celtic fans must not ignore that warning of Ibrox in spite of where we are now.

Celtic fans have had a good couple of weeks. But at half time at Ibrox in the league game it realy did feel like we might be on the brink of End Times. It felt like the culmination of something that had been years in the making.

It is strange writing that now, because what followed afterwards has changed the mood dramatically. Celtic clawed their way back into the race. The team steadied itself. We left with a point after a tremendous second half. Then we went to Pittordie and won. We knocked the Ibrox side out of the cup in the return to that ground and now we’ve dispatched Motherwell in good order.

Suddenly the narrative has shifted from collapse to revival, at least for some folk.

Nobody regrets that. Not a single supporter wanted the nightmare scenario some people had feared. The team has shown character and leadership in the weeks since. Martin O’Neill has dragged the squad back into the fight and the players have responded.

But what happened afterwards does not erase what many of us felt watching that first half unfold.

Because the truth is that the feeling of impending collapse did not come from one match, or even one bad season. It came from years of warning signs that had been piling up while the people running the club insisted everything was fine. At half time that day, it felt like those warnings were finally about to catch up with us.

Some people have tried to reduce that moment to the failures of one summer. They talk about the sales of players like Kyogo and Kuhn. They talk about recruitment mistakes and a chaotic period in which nothing seemed to go right.

It is comforting to believe the problems began recently. Comforting in the same way that ignoring a pain in your chest can be comforting. You convince yourself it will pass if you simply refuse to confront it.

But the truth is that this has been years in the making.

You cannot trace it back to a single moment. All you can do is recognise that the road we were on was clearly signposted.

Rodgers himself saw it long before many supporters did.

In the third season of his first spell as manager we spent the entire summer doing exactly what we did again recently. We messed him around in the transfer market. Targets he had identified and wanted brought to the club were ignored. Players like John McGinn, who were clearly achievable signings, went elsewhere while Celtic dragged their feet.

Rodgers was visibly frustrated by the end of that window. The January window that followed made things worse. Instead of backing him properly, the club signed a Ukrainian winger he had not asked for and did not want.

The writing was on the wall.

Rodgers did what almost any elite coach would have done in those circumstances. He walked away from the situation. The process did not begin there, but that episode told us how bad things already were inside the club.

An elite level manager was being second guessed by bean counters and lawyers. People who had somehow convinced themselves that their judgement carried more weight than the man responsible for delivering results on the pitch.

That arrogance has been a recurring theme ever since.

The appointment of Neil Lennon in the Hampden shower was not just another warning sign. It was a full-blown service station on the motorway of decline. Toilets, petrol pumps, retail stores and a giant neon arrow pointing towards the future.

You could not have gotten a clearer indication of where the club was heading.

Everything about that moment reeked of amateurism. A serious football club does not conduct its managerial recruitment in that fashion. Yet the people responsible behaved as though this was perfectly normal. Even worse, there were voices inside the support base prepared to pretend that it was.

That decision was not simply lazy. It was the product of a culture that had stopped holding itself to serious professional standards.

The appointment of Ange Postecoglou was another signpost along that same road. Some people prefer to rewrite that story as a masterstroke of genius. It was not.

The truth is that Ange arrived after the fiasco of the Eddie Howe appointment collapsed in embarrassing fashion. Celtic were running out of time and running out of options. Turning to the City Group stable was the move of a club that had reached the end of its ideas.

That gamble paid off spectacularly. Ange turned out to be exactly the right man for the job. But pretending the board had some grand masterplan is simply dishonest. They spun the roulette wheel and happened to land on the winning number.

Luck bailed them out.

That luck cannot be relied upon forever.

Even Rodgers returning to the club was not necessarily proof of a bold new direction. Rodgers was an Irish-born Celtic supporter with an established relationship with the club. That connection played a significant role in bringing him back.

Strip away that emotional dimension and the decision looks far less revolutionary.

All of those moments form part of a pattern. None of them, on their own, explain the anxiety that hung over the club at half time at Ibrox. But taken together they explain why so many supporters felt that the season was drifting toward disaster.

Inside the Collective there were people who believed that if that nightmare week had played out in full then the situation would become impossible to ignore. Two league defeats, humiliation in Europe and elimination from the cup by the Ibrox side would have created a crisis that no amount of spin could conceal.

Some even suggested that further organised protests might not be necessary. That events themselves would expose everything. Instead the opposite happened.

The team rallied. Martin steadied the ship. The players responded with performances that reminded everyone what this squad is capable of when it is properly led.

The cup victory over the Ibrox side was the moment the mood truly shifted. That result did more than change the trajectory of the season. It reminded supporters that there is still quality and character in this dressing room.

But we should be careful about the conclusions we draw from that revival. Because what has rescued this situation is not anything coming out of the boardroom. It is the manager and the players.

This feels less like a vindication of the club’s structures and more like a Martin O’Neill style rescue act. A strong manager, a determined squad and a refusal to accept defeat dragging the club away from the brink.

That kind of recovery is admirable. It is also dangerous if it becomes an excuse for ignoring the deeper issues that created the crisis in the first place. Because short term success can easily paper over long term problems.

What the past few weeks have shown is that Celtic still has the capacity to fight its way out of difficult situations on the pitch. What they have not shown is that the underlying culture of complacency inside the club has disappeared.

Moments like this should not lull anyone into believing that everything is suddenly fine.

Think about how we treat crises in the real world.

Swine flu arrived years ago and the world largely escaped the worst case scenario. When swine flu passed without devastating consequences many people quietly decided that the danger had been exaggerated. The lesson that should have been learned about preparedness was largely ignored. When COVID came along the world discovered just how fragile those assumptions had been.

Football clubs are no different.

Sometimes a crisis hits and exposes every weakness in the system. Sometimes the damage is contained by good leadership, good fortune or sheer resilience from the people on the front line. But survival in those circumstances is not proof that the system is sound. Often it is proof that the people lower down the chain managed to compensate for its failures.

What Martin O’Neill and this squad have done over the past few weeks feels like that kind of moment.

They have stabilised the situation. They have dragged the club away from the brink. In doing so they have reminded everyone that Celtic still possesses quality and character where it matters most.

But that should not erase the feeling many of us had at half time at Ibrox.

Because that moment was real and for a moment it seemed like our nightmare had taken on form and life and that did not arrive out of nowhere. It arrived after years of warning signs that too often went unheeded.

The revival we are watching now is real and it deserves credit. But it should not be mistaken for evidence that everything at Celtic is functioning exactly as it should.

Sometimes surviving the immediate crisis is the easy part.

Learning the right lessons from it is much harder.

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