Ibrox thinks it can power itself with hate … because that’s what they think Celtic do.

Last night I wrote a piece about how the Ibrox club is going staunch. Now I’m going to explain why, again, it represents a fundamental misreading of Celtic.

They think they are going to catch us. They believe that what they are doing is going to work because it is what they think we have been doing.

As hard as that is to believe, they see the world through the prism of their own hatred. They cannot imagine that Celtic does not.

They have identified a group of players in this Celtic team and, in their view, those guys are the power behind our success because they hate the Ibrox club. The players they have identified are Tierney, Forrest, Ralston, McGregor, McCowan, Scales and a couple of others.

In short, the Celtic-minded brigade. The guys who grew up with the club in their hearts and would run through walls simply because they hate the club from Ibrox.

What astonishes me is that they appear to believe we indoctrinate people.

They seem to believe that if you sign for Celtic, you are immediately told you must hate them. Part of the rationale for this is that they dislike the fact we don’t use the term Old Firm. They believe that is hatred because we want nothing to do with the phrase.

It amazes me how completely wrong they are about this. They have not just missed the point. They have wandered into another postcode.

Look at the recent game at Celtic Park.

The goal scorers were South Korean and Japanese. At Ibrox, sure, Tierney scored the first, but Reo Hatate, another Japanese player, got the equaliser.

In the Scottish Cup at the weekend, our scorers were Maeda, the Japanese forward, Engels, the Belgian midfielder, and Iheanacho, the Nigerian striker. At Celtic Park against Hearts, we got the job done through an Engels penalty, Maeda and Callum Osmand, a young kid from England, running the length of the pitch to put the ball in the net.

The guys we have been gutted to lose and not properly replace over the last few years include Adam Idah, an Irishman, but also Matt O’Riley, English and Danish, Nicolas Kuhn, a German, and Kyogo Furuhashi, another Japanese player. Before that, two of our iconic strikers, Edouard and Dembele, were French. Our right-wing attacking superstar Liel Abada was Israeli. Jota was Portuguese.

Are they seriously trying to suggest we indoctrinated all those guys? That we made them hate Ibrox before they played a game of football?

I could go further back. But the point is obvious.

They think what makes this Celtic team win things is hatred of them. They think that hatred is driven by a Scottish core group, and this group apparently has such influence that it can turn our United Nations of players into a functioning machine dedicated above all else to stamping their club into the dirt.

It’s crazy, isn’t it?

It’s madness.

But that they believe this is not in doubt, and they appear ready to build an entire transfer policy around the idea.

They don’t get us.

They are never going to get us.

It is like a mental block for them because, and I hate to say it again, they see the world in a fundamentally different way from us. They look through a different lens. They let hate define them in ways we do not.

We don’t use the Old Firm term partly because it no longer applies. The club it once referred to at Ibrox no longer exists, and we are not going to endorse that lie.

But the real reason we don’t use it is that we rejected it years before 2012. We don’t want to be judged as one half of that coin. We don’t want our identity tied up with theirs at all.

Their identity is built around hatred, and it is toxic.

We do not see the world that way.

That is why “not half of anything” has such resonance for us. That is why it is important to us. That is why it is so absurd that the media and others continue to use the old term.

We want to be judged by our own standards. We don’t want to be dragged down to theirs.

It has nothing to do with hate.

We are proud of our identity. We are proud to stand alone. There is nothing wrong with that.

There is now an entire generation of Celtic supporters growing up who do not even consider that rivalry to be the defining one in their football lives. We have a term for what they have become to us: Espanyolification.

That is who they are now.

They are the Espanyol to our Barcelona. Barcelona’s real rivalry is with Real Madrid.

Maybe one day we will have a proper domestic rival like that. Right now, we don’t. It certainly isn’t them.

This is why I reacted in disbelief at all the people who believed throughout the season that my disdain for Hearts was based on a fear that they were going to become a major player. They are not going to become a major player. Not at the speed they think. Not the way they are going about it.

A major contender does not emerge overnight. That task takes years. Hearts will have to do what they did this season for the next three or four years before they can even be considered in that bracket. They will have to prove they can juggle a domestic schedule with a continental one at the same time.

Even then, I have my doubts.

But I would love to see a major rival emerge. I would love to see a serious challenger from outside Glasgow. I don’t know how many times I have written and said that.

I always thought it would come from the north of Scotland. Probably Aberdeen, as it did before. They have the infrastructure plans. They have a long-term blueprint, although it keeps getting screwed up by short-term considerations.

In that way, the Ibrox club keeps making the same mistake. That is helpful to us, because they never get to have long-term stability. They keep chasing the short-term high, and that high is all about Celtic.

Because that is all they think about, they assume that is all we think about.

But Celtic does not win things because it wants to beat them.

Celtic wins things for itself.

Almost every Celtic fan simply wanted to win this title for its own sake. Because we had been ruled out of it. Because we had inflicted major wounds on ourselves and knew how special it would be if, in spite of all that, we got over the line anyway.

I barely heard anyone mention 56 as a number which eclipsed their claimed total. That is why I have barely written about it. It is just a number. To be honest, 57 and 58 are just numbers too. This one felt special because it was hard, not because we beat some claimed record of theirs.

Since we equalled their claimed trophy haul a couple of seasons ago, I just assumed we would eventually pass it. Then I assumed we would pass their claimed league titles record. I assumed we would continue to add trophies and titles every year and move further ahead.

It has no special significance in itself. It is a by-product of success.

There was a presumption on their forums that we were thinking about their game against Hibs last Wednesday night.

I didn’t even know how that game had ended until half an hour after ours did.

The moment they were no longer a factor in the title race, every Celtic fan I know stopped caring what they were doing. The moment they left Celtic Park, our focus was solely on Hearts. In truth, our focus had been solely on Hearts since Hearts beat them at Tynecastle, because that ended their challenge.

On their forums yesterday, they were debating whether they wanted Dunfermline to win the cup, even though that would have relegated them to the third-tier European competition and perhaps denied them European football altogether had they lost one of the qualifying games.

They were willing to accept even Neil Lennon hoisting the trophy if it meant we didn’t.

You will not find a more screwed-up way of looking at the football world than that.

A lot of us in the blogosphere were very clear when the post-split fixtures were announced that we would not countenance any scenario where Celtic laid down to deny them a title. We believed the team in third place would still be competitive for second. We thought it would be that close. We were thinking of our own needs, not theirs.

None of us anticipated that the Ibrox club would be so bad by then that they would not even be a factor going into the last two games.

They were not in our thoughts at all after they were out of the title race.

I can tell you right now that our players, while the title race was ongoing, were not thinking about them week to week or game to game either and that is where the real blind spot is.

We have won these titles and built this trophy haul because we do not spend every minute of every day thinking about one other club.

We beat the team in front of us every week. Our players are not concerned with what is going on across the city until we come up against them. You know who our biggest opponents are? The next one.

That is why we are so consistent. That is why we beat teams, amass points and win leagues.

If your entire club is being structured to beat one team, there are ten other teams in the league who are going to clean your clock on a semi-regular basis. They will all take points off you. They will knock you out of cup competitions. They will treat you with the same disdain you treat them, but only after they have hurt you.

The idea that any of our players are motivated to win because of hatred for them is preposterous. It is one of the most idiotic and infantile ideas in football. You have to question what planet the people thinking that are living on.

The irony, of course, is that while they accuse us of indoctrinating people, theirs is the one club which does that more than any other.

All their talk about people not being sufficiently staunch tells the story.

It is difficult to know how they can miss the blatantly obvious here. Managers who go into that building often go crazy in very short order. They stop using Celtic’s name when referring to us. They bristle at every single statement that comes out of our club, even when those statements have nothing to do with them.

Rohl has been in the job less than a year, and already an off-the-cuff remark from Luke McCowan drove him nearly out of his head.

That is a measure of what we do to them.

That is a measure of how we crawl inside their skulls.

Look at the bitterness of Derek McInnes. I guarantee you his reaction to the late penalty at Motherwell was not just what it meant to his side’s title hopes. Hearts only had to come to Celtic Park and draw to be champions.

He was furious because Celtic got the decision. Had he been going to Ibrox where their club had got that late call, he might have been frustrated.

But it would not have been days of rage.

McInnes had the needle with Celtic all season long, possibly because he saw us as the greater threat and possibly because he spent too long in the environs of Ibrox and is already half crazy. Because that club does things to people.

It changes their mentality. It alters their perception of reality. It warps them.

Only a handful have ever been able to resist it. Giovanni van Bronckhorst is an excellent example. There have been players too. Terry Butcher, an Ibrox fan to this day, has never been a bitter one. The reason is that he resisted all that cultural indoctrination, partly because his wife dragged him out of it and said, “This isn’t you.” He agreed.

That is what it takes. It takes an act of will to escape that cesspit, and a lot of people who get sucked into it do not have the will to resist.

The screwed-up thing is that they should understand on some level how perverse this idea is. Their heroes of the last decade have included Dutchmen, Germans, Danes and Italian Catholics. Their neddish, thuggish little midfielder Raskin is Belgian, and he hates us every bit as much as Barry Ferguson or Ian Durrant ever did.

It hasn’t helped, because he just isn’t that good a player.

That is the real blind spot.

The power of Celtic does not lie in hatred of Ibrox. It does not lie in a core of players who hate their club. It lies in combining players with a winning mentality from all corners of the globe. It lies in being better than everybody else by having players who can do what no other players in the league can do.

The minute you start talking about prioritising players because they are Scottish, or because they come from this league, you are closing down your options and narrowing your focus.

To nobody’s benefit.

If they really believe they are going to build an engine powered by hate, they are crazy.

That will win them nothing.

It would not have won us anything even if we had been stupid enough to try it. Except they think that’s exactly what we did.

In believing that this is the secret of Celtic’s success, they have shown how completely they fail to understand Celtic’s success. They have lost themselves inside their own heads.

The Americans do not know enough about this stuff to recognise the gravity of the mistake they are about to make. But they will. They’ll learn.

By then, we will be another two or three titles further along, because we are just going to focus on winning games and doing it for ourselves.

We don’t need any bigger motivation than that.

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