Hearts and the Ibrox club can run but they can’t hide. The pressure will be waiting.

If you follow the media narrative around the Ibrox club and Hearts and their little week away, you could be mistaken for thinking this is some kind of masterstroke. In fact, some in the media have presented it that way, as if both clubs have found a clever psychological edge. Celtic, on the other hand, are still at home.

We are still at home because we have a game to play.

There is no relaxing for us. There is no time to gather our thoughts. We came out of a game last weekend and are straight into another one this weekend. But all the way through this campaign, some of us have talked about the one advantage Celtic genuinely still have. The one area where we are still genuinely strong. That is mentality.

Our players have been over the course before. The manager has been over the course before. He knows what it is like in a close title race, and so do they.

They know what it is like to win a title. No matter how much the media wants to ignore that, it cannot be wished away.

The whole point of going away is to do some team bonding and relieve some of the pressure. But all that pressure is waiting for those players the moment they get back off the plane. It does not disappear just because they took some time out.

As I have said before, every minute those players from both of those clubs spend sitting poolside, one thought should dominate everything else. The only reason they are there and we are not is that we are in a cup semi-final and they are not.

From the moment people started to take Hearts seriously, I felt confident their bubble would burst. Even if they took it right to the wire, I expected them to sweat. I expected them to drop points in crucial games as the finish line came into view.

That was not just hopeful thinking or wishful expectation. It came from something real. Pressure affects people. It affects teams. Sometimes it makes them stronger. Sometimes it exposes them completely.

Football offers countless examples. Liverpool once collapsed with only a handful of games left. Arsenal have produced their own case studies over the past couple of years. Across sport, pressure builds and some teams crack at exactly the wrong time.

In Hearts’ case, the pressure is greater because they built a substantial lead and then watched it shrink to almost nothing.

You saw a smaller version of the same phenomenon with Falkirk at Ibrox last weekend. Their two-goal lead should have sent them in at half-time floating on air. Instead, conceding late in the half cracked their confidence. They then lost another goal straight after the restart, then another two in quick succession. That is a classic example of a team cracking under pressure.

You can see this across sport. Tennis players have talked about it. It happens in baseball and basketball. It happens in American football. But one of the clearest examples comes from golf, where one player with a commanding lead shattered in only a few moments.

In 2016, Jordan Spieth was competing in the Masters and defending his title. Going into the final nine holes, he had a five-shot lead. Then it all went wrong.

He bogeyed the 10th. He bogeyed the 11th. His lead was cut. Then came the 12th, and disaster.

By then, the psychological cushion had gone. That cushion matters. It gives you room to play without fear. You can drop a shot, miss a chance or lose a game when you have a commanding lead. But once that lead is whittled down to virtually nothing, the stress hits like a sledgehammer.

That is what happened to Spieth.

On the 12th, he hit two shots into the water and another into a bunker. By the time he put the ball in the hole, his five-shot lead had turned into a three-shot deficit. With only six holes left, it was effectively over.

That is why pressure can have such an outsized impact on professional athletes.

Whether you are a footballer, a golfer or anything else, you develop muscle memory. Your body acts ahead of your brain. That is why a player who can normally score at will, strike a ball cleanly on the volley or execute a pass perfectly can suddenly go through a slump. Instead of simply doing the act, he starts thinking about the act first, and that interferes with performance.

There is even a term for it: paralysis by analysis.

You overthink. You start to stress about every decision. Every pass and touch and run. Every time you come for the ball. When that spreads across a team under pressure, it can be annihilating. That is why people talk about bottle, psychology and mentality over and over again across professional sport.

Players who have been part of winning teams learn to live with that pressure. Teams that have won multiple trophies understand it. It does not affect them in the same way because they know how to shut it out and concentrate on the game. They are more relaxed and less afraid of mistakes. They do not overthink every little thing.

You saw a little of that in our penalty shootout against the Ibrox club in the last round of the cup.

We were by far the more confident side taking those penalties. All the pressure had built up on them during the course of that game. They were the home side. They had the advantage of facing a weakened and injured Celtic team and they even got the first penalty. The penalties were in front of their own supporters. All of that pressed down on them like a weight.

Under that pressure, they broke.

That is why we are in the semi-final.

And that is why it is reasonable to think Hearts may not even be a major factor in the title race by the time they come to Celtic Park. Their commanding lead has already been whittled down to virtually nothing. There is no real margin for error left. This is a team that never expected to be in this position, so it has no built-in psychological mechanism for dealing with it.

They either rise to it or crack under it.

Nothing is guaranteed. But history, psychology and everything we know about professional sport tells us that the greater likelihood is pressure will take its toll.

That is to say nothing of the Ibrox side, a team full of perennial losers who have cracked under pressure time and again. Maybe this time is different. Maybe this is the one they finally get over the line. Perhaps.

But all I know is that those two sides can run, but they cannot hide. They can go away, enjoy a week by the pool, tell themselves they are resetting and refreshing, but they still have to get back on the plane. Yet they still have to come home. They still have to face the music.

They still have to face the pressure.

We, on the other hand, do not get a break from it.

And the irony is that this may actually fortify us.

Dealing with pressure is like dealing with anything else. The more you are exposed to it, the easier it becomes to bear. The more often you rise above it, the more confidence you gain that you can do it again.

We are not playing well. Nobody should pretend otherwise. But the fact that we are still in this should scare the living daylights out of both our so-called rivals, because more than anything else it proves that we can stand up to this kind of strain.

Tomorrow we will try to reach another cup final. Another chance to win silverware. That is expected of us, even with this version of Celtic. Some of these players are used to that expectation. They are used to meeting it.

That is our advantage. It may be our only real advantage in this title race.

But it may also be the only one that truly matters.

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