This Ibrox side is the worst in a decade. Still, Celtic cannot be complacent.

In spite of some of the media coverage suggesting that Derek McInnes has saved himself today, that is still a man with one foot in the grave.

The Ibrox club won by a single goal, a Lawrence Shankland penalty, and Aberdeen had an equaliser chopped off right at the end.

Both decisions were correct, and I am not going to do what they do and complain endlessly in spite of the evidence, but none of that changes what I watched. They were woeful for long stretches and extremely fortunate to get the three points.

We are far too late to save ourselves in the Champions League, and I think we have been far too lax to properly save ourselves in the Europa either. We are not going to build the European-capable squad we should already have built because there are simply too many gaps to fill in the tiny amount of time remaining.

All of us warned about that from the moment it became obvious this window was taking far too long. But we can still add quality to this squad, and if we do that there is absolutely no reason why Celtic cannot storm away with this league title.

Because having watched the opposition across the city again today, I genuinely don’t see who is going to stop us.

I have watched some bad Ibrox teams over the last decade, but this is the worst one I have witnessed with my own eyes. It is astonishing how poor they are, how little coherence there is in their play and how little danger they present when they have the ball and try to attack.

It is incredible that a side which has had so much money spent on it can offer so little in return. McInnes does not know how to fix it. Other than the penalty today, I never really believed they were going to score.

There were periods last season when Celtic were so denuded of firepower that you simply could not see where the goals were going to come from. That was not merely because we didn’t have strikers capable of putting the ball in the net. We were not creating enough chances, we were not forcing opponents into mistakes and there was a lack of quality in areas of the team beyond the forward line.

That is what I see when I watch Ibrox now.

They are apparently looking to improve their options up front and reports suggest they are close to spending another substantial amount on a striker. But if they cannot get the ball to him, if they cannot create chances for him and if the structure behind him continues to function as badly as it does now, then that is simply more money being thrown into the void.

And there is already plenty of waste in that squad.

In some respects, there is almost nothing but waste, because it does not present as a cohesive whole. It looks like a collection of disjointed pieces which do not fit naturally together as a football team.

There is a great deal of relief in some sections of the media tonight and amongst some of their support because they finally won a league game. Fine. Enjoy it. But even sympathetic reports described this as a scrappy, low-quality contest in which Aberdeen pushed them all the way and had a late equaliser overturned by VAR.

That is not evidence that McInnes has cracked it. That is evidence that McInnes survived another afternoon.

Don’t get me wrong here. Celtic has a world of work to do, and we have put ourselves in an unnecessarily awkward position because of our own squad planning.

The fact that the Ibrox side are out of Europe completely means they will have far more free midweeks than we do. They have also assembled a squad large enough to carry them through a busy domestic schedule.

It may not be a squad capable of winning enough games, but they are unlikely to find themselves in the position we could easily find ourselves in, where half the first team is exhausted because the alternatives simply are not good enough.

We have the opposite problem. We have quality, but nowhere near enough depth.

So now you have two deeply flawed teams heading towards an extraordinary double header against each other. We play the League Cup tie at Ibrox, then Celtic begins its Europa League campaign against Ferencváros, and then the Ibrox club comes to Celtic Park for the league meeting. Celtic’s European campaign begins on 17 September, with the league derby following on 20 September.

That is three enormous matches in barely a week, with the European game sandwiched into the middle of the domestic rivalry.

If we can juggle that, fine. If we have the squad to cope with three high-pressure games in that space of time, great. But if we don’t, then we are unnecessarily taking our chances even against this extraordinarily poor Ibrox team.

I watched them today, just as I have watched them throughout this season, and they are awful. They are easily the worst Ibrox side I have seen in a very long time.

But our threadbare squad is going to have to raise itself for three huge games in a brutally short period, and that makes the battle tougher and the fight more even than it has any right to be. That is the infuriating part.

Celtic should be in a position to crush this team.

If we could add five proper players before this window shuts, a couple of quality options in midfield, another centre-back, a left-back and a goalkeeper, there would be no reason whatsoever to believe we couldn’t steamroller them.

I genuinely mean that. There would be no reason to believe that Celtic could not roll over this Ibrox team like a tank because, right now, there is almost nothing there.

There is a void where a Derek McInnes team is supposed to be. There is no identity. There is no real attacking threat. There is no obvious structure. There is no sense when you watch them that some great plan is gradually coming together and merely requires time. This is the least intimidating Ibrox side I have watched since the Charles Green era.

And yet Celtic still frightens me more.

Therein lies the dilemma.

Because the biggest threat to Celtic winning this league is not the quality of the team across the city. It remains what it was last season; our own leadership.

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