All of us know what’s at stake today, so for God’s sake Celtic, win.

Look, let’s be honest. Everyone knows what we have to do today. We have to go to their ground, in front of a crowd with no Celtic supporters in it, and put them out of the cup.

As I said in the piece about Total Recall, we also have to remind them who they are, but we have to remind them who we are, too. We have to remind them not only that we are champions, but why we are champions. And not only that they are second-rate pretenders, but why they are second-rate pretenders.

Football is both brutally simple and brutally Darwinist.

It pays no heed to your fantasies or your dreams.

We have all gone to games with hopes and fantasies about how the result would go, only to see them crushed under the boot of better opponents and a simple fact of reality: out there on the pitch, there is no hiding place.

Once you step over that line and onto the grass, those who are not capable will get found out. Plans which are not coherent will be dismantled, and teams which are not united will be picked apart as individuals by teams that can play as a unit.

It is Sun Tzu who said that every battle is won before it is ever fought.

It is there in the preparation, in the psychology, in the minds of the leaders and in the shape of their strategy and tactics.

It is there in who makes the best use of the objective conditions. Who can use the environment itself; the lay of the land, the weather and the ground on which you stand? Is it rocky? Is it boggy? Is it hard? Is it soft?

All of those things can be used as weapons to defeat the enemy. Sun Tzu said that those who prepare are those who succeed, and that those who plan for contingencies and unexpected events are capable of turning a battle in their favour regardless of the balance of forces. Small armies have defeated large armies throughout recorded history following these very simple precepts. Fail to prepare, and you are preparing to fail.

The order of battle may be known to you before you read this piece. The teams may have been announced, the tactics may have been declared and the managers may have shown their starting hand.

But the starting hand does not determine who wins the game.

It is what you do with that hand, the cards you discard and the new ones you get. It is in the bluffing, the raises and the calls. Those are the things that determine who takes the money at the end of the game, not what you hold in your hand at the start.

So even when we look at the team sheets and think we know what is going to happen, we do not really know. The last time we were at Ibrox, we sent one of the weakest Celtic teams of the modern era there, and we still knocked them out of the Scottish Cup.

This is a much stronger Celtic team going there today, and we know that without ever having looked at the team sheet. There are unknowns, of course. We do not know half of the opposition players, and we do not know what they can do.

We have watched McInnes try to gel them into a unit, unsuccessfully and unconvincingly so far. But that does not mean he will not manage it today.

You just never know what the other guy has up his sleeve.

It brings us to Mike Tyson’s famous metaphor for just about any conflict: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

The trick is to keep going. The trick is not to mind it. Today, this team is going to need every ounce of its mental fortitude if it is going to win.

I have already spoken to a lot of people over the last 24 hours who are willing to forgo the League Cup as the lesser of the three domestic trophies we are attempting to win, and as far less important than the European game we have in the week.

Those people are only kidding themselves.

There are two elements to the day which cannot be denied.

The first is that, at least domestically, we have what is known as the Big Mo.

Momentum is on our side. It is the force driving the domestic campaign right now, and if we leave Ibrox having knocked them out of the cup, that momentum will carry us into next week on a wave of optimism. They will arrive on a wave of pessimism.

Not only do we materially boost the positivity around our own club, but we ratchet up the pressure on theirs. You do not give those things away cheaply.

Secondly, you do not want to give them any encouragement to think that McInnes will finish this season with silverware.

You may have absolute faith that Hearts or somebody else will stop them along the way, but after this game there is very little “along the way” left.

There are two games at Hampden, and the first silverware of the season is silverware you want for yourself. It does not matter that the League Cup is the lesser of the three trophies. It is still a trophy, and I would rather it was in the hands of Callum McGregor than the hands of Cammy Devlin.

I look at the battlefield and we know the battlefield well. We know the environment and we know how we can use that environment against them.

I look at the two sets of players as two prospective armies, and I know that we have more firepower than they do. I know that if it is properly utilised against that shaky defence, we will do them real harm.

My preference would be to launch an all-out offensive, break them early, turn that crowd hostile towards their own team and then cruise to an easy victory.

But as I said before, this is not a game that respects our deepest wishes or our fondest hopes and dreams. It is, in fact, a brutal game which has crushed those hopes and dreams among football fans over and over again.

So, you just never know.

Then I look at the two managers, the two generals who will do battle. On one hand, there is a general who is used to winning. On the other, there is a general who is used to losing. In the games that mattered last season, our guy won and their guy lost.

The press can go on all they want about a score to settle, and some of them have even called it a wrong to be righted.

But these things do not work that way. He was denied his fairytale ending last season. That does not mean he is going to get his fairytale this season. If a man has beaten you repeatedly, he is probably capable of doing it again.

And still, we are uncertain because our guy does not have an iron jaw. After all, Linz is not going to simply disappear from our minds. It happened. We watched it happen, and it happened not that long ago.

So even now, when we appear to hold the better cards, there is still a little doubt.

There is still an element of disquiet around this fixture. There are still things we do not know, and then there are those things Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns: the things we do not know that we do not know.

They are the things which always cause you the most trouble.

Even the known unknowns, the things we know can cause us trouble, but do not know if they will, are capable of ruining your whole day.

Things like the officials. Things like VAR. Things like injuries. The mistakes, the things that you know can happen and do happen.

You just do not know if they will happen today.

It all feeds into that overall disquiet.

Then I tell myself that we went through all of this at the end of last season, knowing that in those final seven fixtures we could not lose a single one. In fact, we had to win every single one to stand a chance.

I also knew that if we won every single one, we would be champions.

Knowing what it would mean did not alter how difficult it would be. We were living on our nerves in every one of those games.

We tell ourselves that, at least here at home, this team always shows up when it has to. It always seems to respond when the demands are highest and the pressure is most intense.

That is just another reason to believe we are going to win this. Yes, this one presents unique difficulties, but then so did the last one. I have never known a single one of these fixtures that did not present unique difficulties.

The question is what we do when they come around. At a little after two o’clock today, I expect we will know, and a lot of the questions we have in our heads will have answers.

One thing we do know is what we have to do, and why it is important to do it for our own sake. Yes, we want to win that first piece of silverware for ourselves, first and foremost.

In terms of what it does to our rivals, that is just the cherry on the cake. But it is a cherry that will have a big impact on the rest of the campaign in front of us.

It will either increase some of the uncertainty we feel around our own club, or plunge theirs into a dark, dark place from which it may not easily recover.

We will recover from what happens today. We will get over it, get past it and get through it because we have bigger fish to fry. That is the thing about the lesser cup competition. There is always something bigger to win.

But I want it. I want to win. I want us to go through, not just to knock them out but because I want to see us win the trophy.

I also genuinely believe that a win today increases our chances of winning next week. If we open up a gap that big this early and put McInnes under that kind of pressure, they will crack. McInnes will crack.

By the time they even get their act together, we will be over the hills and far away. As we have discussed here previously, the implications of that could be enormous.

So today is about winning. We have to win for our sake, for what it does to them and, because of what it does to them, for our sake all over again.

The lesser cup competition it may be, but this one can define our season, shatter theirs and provide a prize worth grabbing and holding on to.

One way or another, folks, I’ll see you on the other side of it.

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