The euphoria at Ibrox over their two Celtic wins is astonishing and delusional.

Isn’t it interesting looking across the city and seeing the parallel reality in which they live? And isn’t it just as interesting looking at sections of the media and seeing the parallel reality in which they live too?

On our side of the city, we are lamenting the appalling state of this Celtic team. We are lamenting one of the most inconsequential midfields we have seen at the club in years, the complete absence of power and physicality, an incoherent playing system and a coaching staff which does not appear to know how to arrest the slide.

Here we are talking seriously about the possibility of removing a manager who brought us back from the dead last season, won a double and currently has Celtic sitting two points clear at the top of the SPFL.

In short, we are talking about a club in deep crisis.

This is not something Celtic supporters have invented after a handful of poor results. It is a crisis which has been several years in the making, which has brought the management team to the brink, fractured confidence around the dressing room and dragged the whole club back into the kind of turmoil many people hoped we had finally left behind.

We are dreadful to watch. We look badly coached. We look unfit. We look tactically confused.

And yet across the city they appear convinced that their two victories over Celtic had nothing to do with any of that.

They seem convinced that those wins happened because they are brilliant.

Even I, having watched that club say and do things over the years which have almost defied belief, can only marvel at the cognitive dissonance on display.

Our biggest win of the season was the 5-0 victory at Kilmarnock. Every Celtic supporter with the slightest grip on reality understands that result has to be contextualised by the fact that Kilmarnock are dreadful, their manager looks hopelessly out of his depth and they already look like serious relegation candidates.

So, when exactly do they contextualise their victories over Celtic?

Every one of us knew Celtic were vulnerable. Every one of us could identify the areas where opponents might hurt us. Anyone who has watched this team recently has seen that our attacking play is one-dimensional, predictable and badly thought out.

On the basis of exploiting things every Celtic supporter could already see, Derek McInnes is now being hailed in some quarters as some sort of tactical genius.

Meanwhile, one of their central defenders, signed from MLS, is apparently being talked about by some hacks as a potential £50 million player.

It is incredible.

Celtic supporters are not overreacting to a handful of bad results. We saw those results coming down the road.

After Austria, the defeats against the Ibrox club were exactly the kind of results many of us feared. The European defeat which followed was hardly some enormous shock either. The warning signs were everywhere.

Yet, I knew they would overreact to those two victories. Of course they would. That is what they do. I just did not expect the reaction to become quite this ridiculous.

They are carrying themselves like swaggering conquerors who have just beaten a Celtic side at the absolute peak of its powers. They haven’t. They caught Celtic at precisely the right time. If they were being honest with themselves, they would look at the enormous deficiencies in our team before deciding those victories suddenly transformed them into something special.

Theirs is a club which is out of Europe entirely. They were eliminated by two teams nobody is going to mistake for the elite of the continent. The week before one of the Celtic games, they needed a last-minute winner simply to secure three domestic points.

Two victories over a demoralised Celtic side do not suddenly make them world beaters.

Their manager merely identified what European opponents had already identified before him and what Celtic supporters could plainly see for ourselves.

Celtic is vulnerable. McInnes doesn’t need to be possessed of major skills to see that. Just functioning eyesight. And I will say this again because apparently it still needs saying: theirs is not a particularly good team, and I do not suddenly regard Derek McInnes as some brilliant manager because Celtic made his life easy twice.

Then we get into the valuations.

Apparently, their new central defender might now be worth £50 million. Not so long ago Fernandez was being discussed in terms of £30 million. Weren’t Arsenal and Real Madrid supposed to be sniffing around that guy?

So, what are we saying? That they have an £80 million central defence? Can they even hear themselves? Why aren’t they cringing with embarrassment?

There is a level of absurdity here which has to be admired. What amazes me more is that they never learn. This happens constantly.

Barry Ferguson convinced himself he deserved the job permanently in large part because he had managed to beat Celtic.

That is what the rivalry does to them. Beating Celtic becomes the proof of everything. It validates the manager. It validates the recruitment. It validates the players. It validates the entire project. That is why supporters were celebrating outside Ibrox after the weekend’s match as though something seismic had occurred.

For them, beating Celtic often becomes an end in itself.

The context disappears. It apparently does not matter that the Celtic team they beat is so poor to watch that its own supporters are practically considering gouging their eyes out.

They will not contextualise that. They will simply decide that beating this Celtic side proves something enormous about them.

And one thing summed up the current state of Celtic better than almost anything else for me. When do you ever see Celtic Park beginning to empty with twenty minutes remaining when Celtic are only one goal behind?

That is how little confidence supporters currently have in this team.

People did not leave because they believed one goal was an impossible deficit in football. They left because they had watched enough of this Celtic side to believe there was almost no prospect of us scoring it.

That should tell anyone evaluating these games something fairly significant.

When your rivals are conducting a full-scale autopsy on their own club, not simply because of the results but because of what they are watching every week, perhaps you should hesitate before treating victories over that team as proof that you have suddenly become magnificent.

If they cannot see the enormous problems at Celtic right now, and cannot understand how their two victories fit into the wider picture of those problems, then they are the dumbest kids in the class.

Talking about £50 million defenders, enormous future transfer profits and players suddenly worth fantasy numbers while your club has already been humiliated twice in Europe and still sits behind this Celtic team in the league is embarrassing.

They have beaten a Celtic side which its own supporters currently regard as badly coached, physically weak, tactically confused and painfully predictable.

Twice. Congratulations.

And all of this is being encouraged by a media which desperately wants the fantasy to be true. That may be the most pathetic part of all.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.