Celtic can end all this “McInnes revival” nonsense at the weekend.

It probably shouldn’t surprise me to read the Daily Record talking about Derek McInnes having his swagger back.

They were, after all, amongst the loudest cheerleaders for his appointment at Ibrox in the first place. They spent months selling the idea that he was the obvious man for the job, the Scottish football expert who understood the landscape, the guy who could put the whole thing back together.

Then the games started and the first few went badly, the doubts appeared almost immediately and some of the same people who had helped build the McInnes myth started turning the guns on him.

That didn’t take long.

But football’s media always accuses supporters of being fickle, and nobody is more fickle than a desperate hack clinging to the hope that his favourite team might finally have stumbled onto some coherence and form.

A few league wins later, suddenly McInnes has his swagger back. Suddenly the old confidence has returned. Suddenly everybody is climbing aboard the hype bus again.

It doesn’t seem to matter that some of those wins have been deeply unconvincing. Motherwell handed them the decisive goal with an extraordinary mistake. St Mirren took them into stoppage time at 0-0 before Bojan Miovski finally rescued them in the 91st minute. They have now won four league games in succession, which is obviously better than losing them, but this is hardly the irresistible march of a great team.

The media is happy to forget how some of those games were settled. Happy to forget how close they came to dropping points. Happy to forget that they are still not a particularly convincing sight. Happy, above all, to forget that McInnes is riding his luck.

Unfortunately for them, Celtic are next.

In fact, Celtic are next twice. And McInnes is going to need every bit of luck he has left if he wants to come through those games unscathed.

For every doubt I have written about in relation to our own team, you can magnify it considerably when you look across the city. Most Ibrox fans are not kidding themselves that they are watching some managerial genius execute a masterclass.

They watched last night’s game. They know how close it came to disaster. They know what they are seeing. A manager getting from one game to the next.

As regular readers know, I am not overwhelmingly impressed with Celtic at the moment either. Going forward, we look like we have more than we’ve had in recent years, although I wrote earlier today that we still don’t look particularly well coached and aren’t getting the best from all of it.

But at least there is the semblance of a plan. We are getting closer to Martin O’Neill being able to identify his strongest side. We can see what some of the combinations are supposed to look like. I still don’t think anybody at Ibrox really knows what McInnes is trying to build or what his best XI is.

He will point to injuries, and in fairness they have had serious ones. Lawrence Shankland and Youssef Chermiti are both long-term absentees, and their Japanese winger will also be out for several months. I wrote about that the other day when the injury problem was beginning to grow and asked whether there might eventually be questions about the physical demands being placed on the squad.

But injuries are only part of this. The bigger issue for me is that McInnes doesn’t appear to have a great deal in his coaching armoury which makes you think he can transform ordinary raw materials into something exceptional.

His answer has been to load up on expensive players and hope that enough individual quality will make the team look better.

That proposition has been tried to destruction in football.

Good players help. Good coaching is what makes a good team.

And the media is absolutely desperate for Derek McInnes to reinvent himself as some kind of elite coach. They badly want this story to work. They want the guy they spent so long recommending for the job to prove that they were right all along.

But a genuine coaching superstar does not need every problem solved for him in the transfer market. The best coaches improve what they inherit.

They identify usable pieces. They build partnerships. They organise. They create something which becomes better than the sum of its parts.

McInnes arrived and decided almost immediately that the place required a wrecking ball. Keith Jackson was still praising that approach this week, describing a squad supposedly “damaged beyond repair” and McInnes as having been “right” to tear into it.

That tells you something. Apparently, the manager who was going to prove his quality needed a vast reconstruction project before anybody could properly judge his quality.

That’s convenient. And now, because they have won four league games in a row, the media rehabilitation is underway.

The conqueror has returned. The swagger is back. The great revival is on.

The same team which crashed out of Europe not very long ago has apparently undergone another miraculous transformation.

Someone messaged me today asking whether I had seen McInnes celebrating on the touchline last night like a man who had just won the Champions League.

Well, give him a break. He doesn’t have much experience of actually winning things, so perhaps he is still working out the appropriate celebration.

But if I were McInnes, I would actually have been taking notes over the last couple of months. I would remember every journalist who was my mate when I got the job. I would remember every one who helped campaign for my appointment. I would remember which of them panicked when the first results went wrong. I would remember who started asking how long I had left.

And I would certainly remember the ones who, after a small handful of victories, are now scrambling back onto the hype bus and acting as though none of that ever happened.

Because that is football journalism in this country. Build them up. Panic. Tear them down. Get excited again. Repeat until somebody is sacked.

There is only one problem with McInnes keeping a list of all those names. It is really only worthwhile if, at the end of the story, you are going to be standing on top. Then you can pull it out. Then you can remind everybody what they wrote. Then you can rub their faces in it.

But Derek McInnes is not ever going to get that moment. I don’t think this story ends with him triumphant at Ibrox, waving trophies around and reminding the press pack that they doubted him. I think this is as high as he climbs.

This is the biggest job he will ever have, and ultimately, I think it will prove once and for all that there is far less there than his supporters in the media have spent years trying to convince us. And when it goes wrong, those same people will turn on him again.

Of course they will. They already have once. Which is why, if I were Derek McInnes, I wouldn’t burn the notebook just yet.

A guy in his position is going to need all the friends he can get on the way back down.

And when what’s left of his reputation eventually has to be picked up off the floor, the people who helped him get this job, complained when he started badly and are now telling us that his swagger has returned will probably be the same people trying to find him the next one. The only question is how long it takes before they have to start.

Celtic might have something to say about that over the next two weekends.

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