The defeatist Ibrox teams is always looking for someone to blame for failure.

In the aftermath of the game at the weekend, Celtic simply carried on preparing for the next one.

We did not take a curtain call.

We did not take a victory lap.

Nobody at Celtic seemed interested in basking in it for too long. The club just focused on the next thing on the list, the next game down the line, the next challenge we have to face.

That means Motherwell away.

With Celtic, it is always the next job. The next task. The next thing. This club has a perfect focus on what matters, and that is one of the great geniuses of Martin O’Neill.

He never lets people dwell.

He never lets people worry.

There might have been a tendency, in the aftermath of the game against Dundee United for example, for everyone to switch off. For everyone to stop playing. For people to accept defeat and let the season drift away. But Martin very calmly told the team that the focus had to move to what came next.

Do not dwell on what has happened.

Focus on what you can do about it.

That is the kind of focus you need to become champions.

We talk all the time here about psychology, and psychology is why we are here. Almost everyone agrees with that. This is not a vintage Celtic side playing vintage Celtic football. This is a team getting by on fractions, a team getting by through being just good enough to stay in front of everyone else.

It is not beautiful.

It is not the kind of football that makes you the envy of Europe.

But it does not have to be, as long as it is effective.

Celtic are invariably effective, and that is where other clubs end up having the problem. They are not as effective.

But effectiveness only gets you halfway.

Focus is the other part.

Without focus, you are done.

You only have to look at the social media pages of the club across the city right now, and their fans right now, to see that they are not focused. They are never focused, except on all the wrong things.

Do not get me wrong. They know their manager is a problem. Every one of them knows that.

But most of them are not focused on that.

Instead, you will read mad theories about referees being out to get them, officials screwing them, a red card that was not given to Celtic, an offside goal that should supposedly have been chopped off, and on and on and on.

Every general who has ever lost a battle knows the best way to avoid losing the next one is to analyse what went wrong and fix the problem.

In their case, referees have not done them in.

They absolutely have not done them in.

Their problems are not referees. Their problems are not Celtic cheating. Their problems are in their own house.

Their problems are strikers who cannot score goals, defenders who cannot defend and midfielders who cannot pass a ball from point A to point B without making a mess of it. Their problems are a manager and coaching team miles off the pace required for a club that is allegedly their size.

The more they focus on outward issues, conspiracies and grievance theories, the less they look inside.

They are not fixing the real problem.

As long as they do not fix the real problem, Celtic could just go on and on winning this title for the next twenty years.

Because that is the thing about blaming everything on external forces. You never take your own mistakes into account. You never reckon with the problems you have created for yourself. You never count the cost of your own errors in judgement.

So you never get better.

They have had years of this, and what their forums tell us is that they are perfectly willing to have more years of it. More time spent navel-gazing and worrying about the Unseen Hand and how it is supposedly playing a role in holding them down.

They are looking at all the wrong stuff.

Looking to Hampden.

Looking to Celtic Park.

Looking to some sinister combination of the two.

When in fact, they might want to look inside their own dressing room.

But that is hard to admit.

There will be no telling these people that they finished third because they are simply not good enough. Some of them are already taking stock and drawing up fictitious league tables which show they would be top if only all the decisions they think they should have got had gone in their favour.

It is like those old 80-minute league tables that became so famous over there.

If we had not conceded all those late goals.

If Celtic had not scored all those late goals.

If only games lasted 80 minutes, we would be top.

But games do not last 80 minutes.

They last 90 minutes, plus whatever gets added on. As long as you are thinking in terms of 80-minute games, you are not preparing for every possible scenario. You are not learning. You are not adapting. You are not improving.

This is not advanced stuff.

This is ABC.

I do wonder how it is possible to struggle with that. It is almost as if this is what they take comfort in. But it seems like a strange thing to take comfort from, the idea that you are constantly being cheated, that your club allows itself to be constantly cheated, and that all of Scottish football is laughing at you.

There is no sympathy out there for them.

Why would there be?

What is it Jack Nicholson says at the start of The Departed?

No one gives it to you. You have to take it.

They do not get that. If the grand conspiracy really exists, the only way they are going to beat it is by forming their own grand conspiracy or being too strong for it to matter.

Instead, they talk endlessly about not being allowed to win.

The stink of defeatism that wafts off them is hard to credit.

How can a club that defines itself as special be so defeatist in its overall outlook? How can a club that prides itself on being the best sound so pitiful and weak that it talks about not being allowed to win?

Because if the problem is that you are not allowed to win, then it does not really matter what you do.

You can have the best manager in the world. You can sign the best players. You can spend whatever you like. But if the Unseen Hand decides you are not going to get there, then you are not going to get there.

No matter what you spend.

No matter what you spend it on.

Tell me there is a more defeatist attitude anywhere in football than that.

This bunch are incredible.

They are their own worst enemies.

Meanwhile, Celtic are focused on Motherwell.

That is the difference.

We are not sitting around drawing up imaginary league tables. We are not building conspiracy walls with bits of string and newspaper cuttings. We are not obsessing over the last decision, the last complaint, the last excuse.

We are looking at the next game.

The next task.

The next step.

That is what serious clubs do.

That is what champions do.

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