Nygren shows the spirit of Celtic. Focus and discipline makes champions.

It was good to see Benjamin Nygren putting transfer talk aside today and making it clear that he is focused only on the games in front of him.

What was not so good was that those questions came up in the first place.

People are already trying to talk about the future when there is business to be done right now. This is a classic attempt to give Celtic players a distraction from what we are engaged in, and it has not worked.

Watch out for this stuff all the way up to Saturday.

This is a standard media game, and it should not be allowed to interfere with the preparations the team is making or the focus the squad has found. It will not distract us, and I will tell you why. It is obvious that there have already been discussions inside the club about the future, and everyone now knows exactly where they stand.

The other day, I wrote about The Last Dance.

That is what this is for the current squad, for these players and for this management team. This is the last dance. We are in the home straight as far as the Celtic careers of some of these guys are concerned. A few of them have wanted to move on for a couple of years now and have been kept at this club because the club has not done its own basic work.

Right now, we are being rewarded by their loyalty and perseverance.

None of them has banged on the door openly and demanded a move away. None of them has made it impossible to select them. None of them has turned this into a personal drama.

These guys have dug in.

They know that if they want the next move to be the right one, they have to perform in the here and now. Nothing else will do. You have seen the results from Daizen Maeda. If this is his Celtic swansong, he is going out on a high. He is going out in style.

That is the way it should be.

That is why the media’s efforts to unsettle the squad by focusing attention on potential moves away will not succeed. Everyone at the club is focused on one goal.

Win the next two games.

Look across the city and you see the contrast. They have made major mistakes in this regard. The announcement that James Tavernier was going at the end of the season was criticised almost immediately by some former players, who said he had just made it about himself.

That was true.

That is why no senior member of the Celtic first-team squad has so far come out and said this will be their last game, their last series of games, or their last season at the club. No one at Celtic has broken the discipline. Everyone here is focused on the goal, which is to make us champions.

When people start talking out of class about how they are leaving at the end of the season, it upsets the fine balance these moments need.

As regular readers will know, I think Ibrox already broke that balance with the crazy decision, the now incomprehensible folly, of taking the players away for a week while Celtic were right here at home, right here in the trenches, right here in the war zone, preparing for a cup semi-final.

The message that sent to the Ibrox players was that this was their reward for failure.

How do you motivate men to be winners when you reward failure?

They have made every psychological mistake it is possible to make in a close race, and you can see the consequences. They are sitting in third.

At Hearts, you could argue that their break was a positive because it reinforced the team mentality and the idea that these players were entering the final stretch together. I still think that, too, was a mistake. These things can backfire very easily, and it is better to keep players here, focused on the job ahead.

But on the folly scale, what Ibrox did was almost off the charts.

They paid for it.

Three defeats in a row. They paid for it.

As I said in the articles I wrote when they announced it, you can run, but you cannot hide. The pressure will still be waiting when you come back. That is assuming it does not follow you over there and press down on you the whole time.

When you down tools like that, you also lose sharpness. You lose edge. You lose aggression.

Celtic stayed.

Celtic got on with football.

Celtic played under massive pressure, and it is because we stayed and played under massive pressure, because we faced that pressure head-on, that we are where we are right now.

That cup semi-final victory was massive in terms of the psychological impact it had on people. We conceded so late to send the game into extra time. We withstood St Mirren’s barrage as they tried to get a third when we were vulnerable. But as soon as extra time started, it was like watching a different team.

The goals came in quick succession.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

That changed the whole mood of the club.

It was only possible because we were still in the trenches.

The Ibrox club did not have a game to play, but they could have organised a closed-door friendly. The players could have been made to come in on cup semi-final weekend and work their backsides off, with the manager reminding them every step of the way that this is what happens when you do not succeed.

This is what happens when you allow your opponent to dominate.

This is where it all ends up.

Them playing a cup semi-final while you sweat it out on the training pitch.

That would have sent a better message than whisking them all away and giving them a couple of days in the sun.

There is so much lost focus over there. There is so much split attention. These guys never simply get on with the job. I am going to talk later about another example of that.

Celtic never do this stuff.

I am sure, as I said earlier, that there have been discussions behind the scenes about players’ futures. But that is it. The matter has been discussed. Everyone knows where they stand, and now everyone is focused on the job in front of them.

No distractions.

No competing narratives.

Just a relentless drive for excellence in these final days.

That is critical to why some teams get over the line and some teams do not. Some teams can maintain their focus and concentration on the next game. Others think too far ahead or look too far backwards.

There is no room for either of those things.

It is as I said earlier in the O’Neill piece, and as I am going to say later in the next one. If you are projecting into the past, if you are looking for reasons why you failed, excuses for failure and alibis for your own incompetence, you are not doing the job.

You are imitating the job.

You are not performing it in the real sense. You are performing it in the acting sense.

O’Neill performs it in the real sense, and he makes sure everyone around him lives up to that same standard.

It would have been easy for this team to get disheartened after Dundee United. It would have been easy for players to down tools. It would have been easy for this whole squad, this whole team and this whole club to stop.

Nobody did.

They dug in.

They worked harder.

They performed to an even higher standard.

They did that because we did not dwell on it. We did not look back on it. We did not beat ourselves up over it.

We focused on what came next.

Tomorrow night, once it is over, no matter the outcome, we will do exactly the same thing again.

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