Sutton’s latest blast at the Celtic team sounds a little contrived, doesn’t it?

Another day, another headline where Chris Sutton denigrates this Celtic squad and its chances of winning the title.

I know a lot of Celtic fans are getting increasingly fed up reading him doing that.

It has gone beyond the point where he is simply making a prediction. He is now talking about the mentality of the team, the quality of the players, the quality of the manager’s decision-making and everything else besides.

A lot of people think that can only have a negative effect.

But there are two schools of thought here, of course. It is worth looking at both of them, because they both come to bear in different ways.

I found it curious that last week, at his press conference, Martin O’Neill had to comment on remarks by Frank McAvennie about his tactics, the style of football and the fact that it was boring to watch.

I don’t really know anybody in Scottish football who listens to or cares that much about what McAvennie says. To me, that was an easy ball for Martin O’Neill to bat away. Had someone asked him about Sutton’s comments, that would have been a different question.

That is less easy for him to simply hand wave.

I hope that today, in his presser, someone asks him to comment on what Chris Sutton has said. I hope he has to address Sutton’s general prediction that we will drop points in every one of the five games. Although Sutton is sometimes not half as smart as he thinks he is. He actually said we would scrape through the game at the weekend before then saying it would end in a 1-1 draw.

We’ll leave that one aside.

Sutton’s prediction that we will collapse completely over the course of the next five games should give Martin O’Neill an easy answer. All he has to say is, “talk to me in 36 hours about Chris’s prediction, and we’ll see where we are then.”

But maybe, on a deeper level, O’Neill would welcome the question for reasons other than that. Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Because the first school of thought, of course, is that when you have a former professional and a former Celtic player talking about standards in the way Sutton does, it cuts through. When he implies that these guys don’t remotely meet those standards, or that they would not have got near his version of the Celtic team, that will have some kind of negative impact.

That will penetrate the dressing room, no matter how much players pretend social media does not reach them. It reaches all of them to a certain extent. That kind of talk is a little too aggressive and a little too loud, especially coming from a top former player, not to get through.

Sutton repeats it far too often, and far too belligerently, for it not to be ringing in their ears a little bit. That may make a few heads go down. It may make a few people look around the dressing room and ask whether this really is a Celtic team good enough to win this title.

A player who has been over this course has looked at the squad and judged it not up to that standard.

Well, that has to hurt. For some people, it may even demoralise them.

But the counter to that argument is simple enough. Any player who lets Celtic getting stick demoralise him doesn’t have the right mentality to be at Celtic.

Because we are always getting stick. Getting stick is the natural state of play at Celtic. It is the natural way of life here. If this club is not getting stick, it is because we are so pitiful, weak and out of it that we are not really worth the media’s time or effort.

The reason we’re getting stick right now is because we are still in this race. If we were the hopeless irrelevance they all say we are, they would not care enough to talk about us as much as they do.

If you can’t handle the heat of being a Celtic player, and it comes in all shapes and sizes, then you probably aren’t supposed to be here at all.

I think the dressing room already knows who those guys are. The stronger characters will have marginalised them within its walls. Those are the players who know how to handle that sort of stick and that sort of pressure.

That’s the flip side of this.

That is why I wonder what Sutton is really up to.

Does Sutton really believe we won’t win any of those five games? Does Sutton really believe we don’t stand a chance?

Because I wonder if what we’re seeing instead is a bit of psychological gamesmanship. I do wonder if, in fact, Martin O’Neill is nodding along with it to a certain extent. It may be exactly what some of the people in that dressing room need to hear.

Those who do get a rise out of being poked with a stick. Those who do find an extra 10% of motivation and dig from hearing people write them off and mock them.

Those guys, the ones with enough professional pride and enough discipline to hear Sutton’s remarks and want nothing more than to ram them back down his throat, are a weapon that O’Neill can mould into something really savage and dangerous.

The way Sutton is going about it taps into my deepest suspicions about the motivations here. He is pressing the case a little harshly, a little hard and a little too often.

He has already said he doesn’t think we’ll win the title. Why go further than that, far less this far? Why go to this extreme?

This is an extreme position.

The thing is, it could not matter less whether he and Martin have cooked up some elaborate plan between them. It could not matter less whether Sutton himself is trying to give these guys a turbo charge, or whether he means every single word of it. All that matters is whether it has an impact.

As long as there are people in that dressing room who know what Sutton and people like him are saying all across the media. As long as some of them are determined to prove them wrong. Just so long as some of them are dedicated to making them eat their words.

Because listen, I think it’s a little bit OTT from Sutton. I think he could do with paring it back a bit.

But there is also a part of me that recognises a much deeper truth here.

There is no real harm that Sutton can do with that talk.

The players in our dressing room who already think this is game over are not going to change their minds if Sutton suddenly turns around and says that he thinks we’ve got the stuff after all. Those players have already largely written themselves out of the story.

But those players who are pissed off and angry at the way people are writing them off? They’ll respond, no matter what the intent is.

The board has already done the real damage to this club, and Sutton himself has called them out on it.

It stifled the manager who was here at the start of the season. It starved him of the resources for the proper summer rebuild we needed.

Ego, vindictiveness, pettiness, whatever you want to call it, those were the driving forces behind the early part of this campaign. That has harmed Celtic more than any words from any pundit ever could or ever will.

So, this isn’t even a flea bite compared to that.

So, I don’t mind it.

I was a little surprised to see it in the papers yesterday until I thought a little more about it. But at no time did it concern me. At no time did it anger me, because that kind of talk can have a useful function.

This team shouldn’t need extra motivation, and I keep on saying that.

The idea of being champions again should be enough. The idea of silencing the critics should be secondary to that. But sometimes there are players who do get an extra jolt of juice from reading these kinds of remarks.

Callum McGregor yesterday, who I will be saying a lot more about later, seemed to be coming at the criticisms the right way.

If that is the general mood in the dressing room, then this has done more good than harm.

Maybe at the end of it, Sutton will be grinning from ear to ear.

Not because anyone proved him wrong, but because he, like all of us, loves it when a plan comes together.

Don’t be surprised.

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