Tomorrow this Celtic team can start its redemption arc.

As most people are well aware, my sympathy right now is with players who are being asked to do impossible jobs. But there is no question that every one of them has to step it up tomorrow, and for some of them this is a real redemption opportunity.

Kasper needs a goal, and this would be a great time to get one. Callum needs a big performance as captain and as our number one midfielder, and tomorrow would be a great day for him to show this country why he has been the beating heart of successful Celtic sides for the last decade.

It is a dangerous day, but danger is also opportunity.

Everyone at Celtic now has a chance to rise again. Isn’t that what it is all about? A team takes knocks and hits in every title race, in every season, but it is how you respond to them that defines the campaign and defines how history will view you.

We can either meekly surrender again tomorrow and get punished for it, or we can throw off the shackles that have been put on us over the last few weeks, break those chains and come back hard and strong, as we know we can.

Everybody will have to give 100 per cent, because the opposition will give 100 per cent. That has nothing to do with mysticism and nothing to do with standing by the manager. He has built the siege mentality he wanted. He has turned tomorrow into an existential test of him and his team and got them thinking it’s all or nothing, and that’s just fine.

I still think O’Neill is a vastly better manager. I still think we have vastly better footballers in every department, and it is a test we should be more than capable of meeting. I worry about us, not about them.

They are coming to Celtic Park with a swagger. They think they are something. They think they are special. It is our job to disabuse them of that notion.

I would be less relaxed about this if I didn’t think we had the talent to do it. It is all going to come down to application, tactics and approach. If we play with pace and aggression, we will win. It really is that simple. If we are passive, too slow, too hesitant on the ball, then we won’t, and we will go through two more weeks of this.

I don’t know how you feel, but I’m pretty tired of feeling like this.

I’m tired of wondering why this club won’t function. The thing about you and I is that we personally cannot do anything to change it. We can comment on it, discuss it and rage about it after the fact, but actually influencing it is not within our power.

Only the people inside Celtic can do that. If they are satisfied with what they are seeing, if they think this is acceptable, then they are beyond help and so is this club. But I think there is enough anger inside Celtic, enough frustration and enough self-preservation that they will not simply lie down.

Obviously, if this does not go the way we want tomorrow, there has to be a serious conversation about what comes next. But for two hours, all of that can wait.

For two hours, it is about what happens on that green playing surface at Celtic Park.

It is going to come down to which version of Celtic shows up: the hungry, aggressive version capable of getting a result, or the version that turned up at Ibrox last weekend and then again at Celtic Park on Thursday night, timid and afraid, jumping at its own shadows and almost unrecognisable from the team that powered its way to the title.

Everyone who says this is simply about mentality did not watch some of these same players towards the end of last season, when they threw themselves into every tackle and gave themselves to every minute of every game.

We fell behind in the last three matches. That was a sign of what was coming in this campaign, a door we should have slammed shut and failed to. But we also came back and won all three of those fixtures when it mattered, when it counted, when the chips were down and when the stakes were high.

We rose to the challenge and to the moment.

Tomorrow, nothing less will do.

Every single person who walks onto that pitch wearing green and white knows what is required of them. Every single person on the touchline responsible for organising the team knows what is required of them too.

If they are in any doubt at all, they should look to their right at the smirking bastard sitting in the Ibrox dugout and ask themselves one question: do I really want that guy to spend the next fortnight the way he spent the last week, or do I want to send him out of Celtic Park the way we did last time — furious, despondent, embarrassed, humiliated and broken?

Because that is the version of him I prefer.

We have major problems at this club and those problems have to be tackled. There is no point pretending they do not exist. But for two hours tomorrow, they do not matter.

For two hours tomorrow, we remember who the enemy really is.

Cleaning house is still going to have to happen. It remains of critical importance because we are only talking this way because, once again, the usual suspects have failed this club.

They have no chance of redemption. That is gone.

But at kick-off tomorrow, the players and coaching staff can start theirs.

And by God, they had better do it.

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