Celtic should not allow Ibrox to pressure officials. We should be doing it.

You know what the biggest problem with being in a chaotic situation is? It’s the chaos itself. You don’t get time to think. You don’t get time to take a breath, look around and do proper analysis because, amidst chaos, you are naturally trying to do multiple things at once.

It takes real personal discipline to stop and look around the landscape, not only for possible solutions but for the problems that are emerging just across the way.

I don’t know what the situation inside Celtic is right now. I don’t know what Martin O’Neill is dealing with on a daily basis. I do know this: whatever it is, it’s not good. Whatever it is, there has to be some measure of chaos, and in that chaos it is a simple fact that things are going to get missed.

And one of the things he missed today, which Martin O’Neill would once not have missed for a second, is the pressure that the Ibrox club is already putting on the officials for Sunday’s game. If you watched their press conference, it was clear.

You have Derek McInnes complaining about Baur’s tackle on Naderi. You have him confirming that the club went and spoke to the SFA about it, and you have the suggestion hanging over all of this that their players need more protection going into Celtic Park.

That is a standard tactic before these games. It is nothing new.

The opposition does not want to come and play in front of a full Celtic Park without first applying whatever pressure it can on the officials. They are obviously concerned, and they are leaning on those officials for a little help.

As I said, it is not a new strategy.

But there was a time when O’Neill would never have let them away with that.

Part of it is the media. There are lazy people in the media who don’t want to ask O’Neill those kinds of questions. But O’Neill, once upon a time, would have found a way to bring it up regardless of what narrative the media wanted him to discuss.

There was a time when Martin would have made sure he knew what his rival’s comments were before walking into a press conference. If his first press conference was scheduled at the same time as McInnes, he would have made sure to know what was said before he went into the second. He would have understood immediately what McInnes was doing, recognised it as pressure and hit back at it without even having to be asked.

It’s just another thing that is getting missed right now amidst all the noise.

The Ibrox club really is willing to deploy any weapon that it can here, and to a degree that means we are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.

And I don’t know why we are.

It’s needless. It’s stupid. And it’s going to have consequences.

Those comments from McInnes today should have drawn a response from us, and they should still draw a response from us even now.

Since Martin clearly likes the idea of giving Celtic TV a little boost, perhaps he should get in front of the cameras and do a short video where he starts talking about one aspect of the game at the weekend and then switches to this.

But let’s be honest, back in the day, O’Neill would never even have waited for a rival manager to make those kinds of remarks. O’Neill would have been putting the pressure on himself from our direction.

He would have been telling the referees that Celtic expected a strong performance from them. He would have been making it clear that he realised VAR could play a major part in this game and that he wanted to see VAR get the big decisions right.

He would have said that he expected the officials on the pitch to get the big decisions right as well. And that would have had just the same effect.

Because the run-up to these games is always psychological, and you play every advantage you can get. The opposition knows this. They are willing to press every button they think they can get away with pressing, and it’s Celtic who look like we’re dragging our feet.

And really, it’s high time someone tackled this grotesque misrepresentation that McInnes is always pushing, obliquely or otherwise, that Scottish football as a whole is somehow dominated by this club. It is nonsense.

We all know it is nonsense.

But this club has never aggressively challenged that narrative, and O’Neill needs to stop with all the stuff about being happy with the officiating simply because we were, until recently, in the habit of winning games.

We have been too passive on all fronts this season so far, and what McInnes has shown to date is that he has no intention whatsoever of being passive. His club has no intention of being passive either.

How long is it going to take before people at Celtic realise what that means?

They are on permanent offensive. And if you’re not also on permanent offensive, you’re going to find yourself on the defensive very, very quickly. We do not look like we’re set up as a club right now for a whole lot of that kind of pounding.

There has always been a sort of unwillingness at Celtic to utilise every potential weapon. The last person I saw do it at this club was Brendan Rodgers, particularly in his first spell, when he understood the value of keeping his foot on the throat of the opposition and attacking them from every conceivable angle.

We don’t do any of that any more.

And it should be a point of policy at this club to do it.

That means, by the way, that nobody at this club should be permitted to mouth the words “Old Firm”. Nobody should be permitted to allow those words to come forth because every time I hear them from O’Neill, I want to scream.

We are failing on so many levels right now, but failing to use communication as a weapon, failing to use the manager’s words to bludgeon the opposition when they are quite clearly doing exactly that to us, is really poor.

That doesn’t require an awful lot of forethought. It doesn’t require an awful lot of effort. Across the city, they know exactly what they’re doing right now.

And we don’t seem as if we do.

They are deploying the full arsenal while we have spiked our own guns. I cannot understand it at all.

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