Don’t get me wrong, it’s much better when there’s 7k/8k behind the goal. Just that reducing that baying mob to complete and utter silence is cool in a different (but not better) way.
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It is. If only they could audibly enhance the seethe.
The preview was crap.
For reports, I actually think it’s worth reading them both together because they both tell a similar story in terms of the character of the players and the difference between the two teams.
Devlin:
Too gung-ho? Celtic’s Old Firm win was about resilience
Ange Postecoglou used “character” three times to describe his team during his post-match press conference, and mentioned “resilience” twice.
He makes an apt point. While Celtic’s 3-0 victory over Rangers in February was a showcase of their attacking football at its most thrilling, they were never at their free-flowing best in the 2-1 win at Ibrox on Sunday. They were not exhilarating, nor even particularly entertaining. This was not vintage “Angeball”. Instead they created three “big chances” according to Opta, scored two of them, and then defended their box diligently. Centre-backs Cameron Carter-Vickers and Carl Starfelt were indomitable against wave after wave of Rangers crosses, but Celtic were also compact and disciplined as a team.
This was the team who scored dramatic, late winners away at Ross County and at home to Dundee United despite being down to 10 men in each game. This was the team who ground out important wins 3-2 away at Pittodrie and by the same scoreline at home to Dundee, and broke their winless hoodoo at Livingston by matching their physicality. This was the team that were criticised at the start of the season as being lightweight and fragile, too gung-ho for their own good, but over the months have proven themselves to be anything but. This was a team with resilience. This was a team with character.
“We’re in this position for a reason,” Postecoglou said, “and that’s because this group of players didn’t stop and kept working hard. We lost three of the first six games, and at that stage I didn’t make any excuses or allowances for them, they knew we needed to improve. But we’ve got to this point because of what you saw today. Our football’s been great, but today was about character.”
They might have lost three of their first six league games, but they also drew the seventh, meaning they had dropped 11 points by the end of September.
Celtic players celebrate at the end of the game (Photo: Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images)
When the pressure was greatest after drawing that seventh game against Dundee United, which left them six points behind Rangers and in sixth place, Postecoglou put on that gently frowning expression of his and replied to a question on Celtic’s fading title hopes: “You call things early here, don’t you? It’s quite remarkable that seven games in people are calling the title already. It’s just not how I work. I’m not pulling up stumps after seven games just because other people seem to think there is some sort of insurmountable challenge out there for us.”
At the time this was interpreted in some quarters as snark, prompted by Postecoglou feeling the pressure of Celtic’s wavering title ambitions, but the past six months of deadpan interviews suggests that the comment was instead typical of the manager’s disdain for overeager lines of questioning. He was also proved correct on prematurely calling the title race. Since that interview, Celtic have dropped just six points from their last 25 league games.
With six games to go, Celtic find themselves six points ahead of Rangers with a superior goal difference of 16. There are plenty of opportunities for slip-ups, and the painful memories of how they have lost past titles from a position of strength, not least 2004-05, should warn against any hubris or complacency. Postecoglou’s answer to what Sunday’s result means for the title race now? “Three points closer, and we have three more points to try and get next week.” This result does not matter unless they keep winning games, and as Callum McGregor said in his own presser, they have to “stay humble”.
While no one is getting carried away, it is still worth reflecting on how much progress has been made since last summer. This was supposed to be a difficult transition season after such a significant rebuilding job following Celtic’s disastrous 2020-21 campaign. Sixteen players were signed over the past two transfer windows, and eight of Sunday’s starting XI were not at the club nine months ago. But this was a topic addressed by McGregor as well: “The boys who came in didn’t want this to be a transition, they wanted to win.”
Carter-Vickers celebrates his winner against Rangers (Photo: Craig Williamson/SNS Group via Getty Images)
It harks back to Postecoglou and his conversations with prospective signings, and his need to recognise that character. Patrick Roberts spoke with Postecoglou in the summer about a return to Celtic Park as an option on the wings. Roberts is a popular former player after he spent two and a half years on loan from Manchester City, but Postecoglou was not convinced the player had the single-mindedness he looks for. Soon after, Filipe Jota was brought in, a player who has not only produced an abundance of flair, but has time and again delivered important actions in big moments.
If we began with “character” it is only right that we end on the Celtic player who typifies the concept. Captain McGregor dragged Celtic back into the game after their awful start, when he showed ambition, initiative and an excellent centre of gravity to dribble through midfield, before his cross and Reo Hatate’s resulting shot was spilled to Tom Rogic to stroke home the equaliser, steadying Celtic’s ship.
Asked after the game about how decisive that moment was, McGregor shrugged off any praise and instead highlighted how the space for his run was created by the team’s tactical rotations between full-backs and central midfielders. The implication was clear; fans and journalists might isolate individuals for their own man of the match, but this was a game won by a team unified behind each other, their manager and his vision.
Sevco:
Defeat for Rangers leaves a season brimming with potential just days ago now feeling somewhat deflated
Calvin Bassey, Fashion Sakala and Leon Balogun sank to the turf in despair, while others stood motionless as they processed the reality that a game they simply had to win — or at least not lose — had ended in defeat.
White smoke may as well have been billowing from the away corner where the 700 Celtic fans serenaded Ange Postecoglou, who is now odds-on to land a treble in his debut season in Scottish football.
A season that was brimming with potential just days ago for Rangers now feels somewhat deflated — even with a Scottish Cup semi-final and Europa League quarter-final still to come.
This season is the first in four that Old Firm have been embroiled in a neck-and-neck race heading into the home straight, but Rangers now trail by six points with six games remaining — a swing of 12 points since January. They also face a huge goal-difference deficit, which makes the gap as good as seven points and means that Rangers will realistically need to win all six games, including the final Old Firm at Celtic Park, while hoping that Celtic drop points in two other games.
To be instantly dethroned from such a position of strength in the summer would be a disaster from a sporting perspective, but even more so from a financial point of view due to the Champions League riches at stake.
They will always have last season, but April was bound to decide how this group will be remembered in the decades to come. “Last season is gone” was the message that Steven Gerrard kept repeating early in the season when performances were stale but, with glory so close, that was no longer an excuse.
This wasn’t about a lack of application, though, or major tactical weaknesses being ruthlessly exploited as it was in the 3-0 defeat in February. Instead, it was a repeat of a storyline that has played out too many times in big games where Rangers have felt the pressure and wilted.
The joy of Aaron Ramsey’s opening goal proved short-lived for Rangers supporters at Ibrox (Photo: Craig Williamson/SNS Group via Getty Images)
The 1-0 loss to Celtic in the 2019 League Cup final where they somehow did everything but score. The poor form after the 2020 winter break when they kept defying statistical logic by losing. And, this season, the abject performances that saw them dumped out of the Champions League and the League Cup by Malmo and Hibernian, making it one domestic final from 11 so far for this team.
It would represent huge underachievement if they did not add to that before the team is broken up in the summer. Bad luck, injuries and suspensions only go so far to explaining why a consistently good side has not been able to convert that promise into something more concrete more than once.
There is not a lot wrong with this team when you analyse it, and they have proven themselves capable of producing upset after upset in Europe. As such, fans came into this season believing that their breakthrough last term would have given the players extra confidence that they now knew how to get over the line.
But when trailing, they faced the same sniff test they had gone through in front of a packed Ibrox before. This, however, was a home support that displayed more patience than may have been expected, but the muted reactions in the final few minutes conveyed how many had accepted the result as inevitable some time earlier.
The only thing to explain this side’s proclivity for self-sabotage in defence and shrinking in attack is to look to the intangibles.
Postecoglou looked straight to them when he was asked what helped his team get over the line at Ibrox. He credited the “resilience” of his group of players, the vast majority of which has been put together in two transfer windows, but he also said that within the squad he and the players trust that they have enough players who “will step up when needed”.
Rangers simply don’t, and in a second half that should have seen shots raining down on Joe Hart’s goal, they were toothless. They could only really muster two decent chances with Sakala’s shot saved at the near post and Kemar Roofe’s volley being turned over the bar, but concerns that Rangers lack firepower without Alfredo Morelos proved well-founded.
They amassed 43 crosses during the game and very few were met by a Rangers player. It was indicative of a team — aside from John Lundstram, who was tremendous in midfield — waiting on destiny to reach out to them rather than taking ownership and being brave enough to try a different avenue to goal other than sending aimless crosses into a packed box.
Even if they did score a second, though, you felt Celtic were just as likely to go on and get a third after that. There is an inescapable feeling that they are never safe unless there is a hefty cushion that allows them to relax, and that feeds into the nervousness that can derail a strong performance.
It had not looked like this was going to be the case after a rapid start. The revenge-fuelled streak of a support embittered by the last decade can cook up a frenzy within a stadium that transmits itself to the players. The home crowd were stirring up a defiance that seemed to overwhelm Celtic as their players pressed high up with an insatiable thirst.
They had their goal inside three minutes as Aaron Ramsey turned Ryan Kent’s cut-back home and it seemed that the players were riding on the magnitude of the occasion, but they contrived to go in behind at the break.
How can Rangers be playing so well yet concede just three minutes later from Celtic’s first foray into their third? Scrappy defending from a cross saw Reo Hatate’s shot parried by Allan McGregor straight into the path of Tom Rogic, while the second came four minutes before the break after Balogun’s headed clearance ricocheted and fell kindly for Cameron Carter-Vickers to swipe home.
It was terrifically end-to-end and played at a breakneck speed. Both teams were guilty of overturning the ball too easily, but after the initial waves of attack from Rangers, it was Celtic who looked to have a more coherent route to goal with Jota and Daizen Maeda causing problems on the break.
There were moments of fortune after Maeda was played in behind twice before Liel Abada came on in the second half and immediately spurned a one-v-one before the Israeli winger forced a miraculous save from McGregor at close range.
Maybe this was the iconic turning point, the sequel to the Samaras penalty save in 2011 on the way to a third consecutive title, but Rangers did not do nearly enough to convince the fans that they had the same resilience that Celtic had shown to turn it around. In truth, Celtic could have won by more.
Success isn’t an accolade that is earned once and then kept for eternity. That mountain has to be scaled from the bottom again, and Rangers now face the possibility of last season’s title looking like a blip in Celtic’s domination rather than the start of a sustained period of success.
Embarrassment for Rangers had already come during the break when stewards and ground staff had to comb the pitch for shards of glass, thanks to the two brainboxes who struck a Celtic backroom staff member with a bottle and smashed another into Joe Hart’s penalty box at half-time, delaying the restart by several minutes.
The mood by full-time was funereal as fans stood still and vacant on the staircases, largely choosing to stare the players off in silence, but inside it didn’t take long for the music from the Celtic dressing room to start booming into the press area. Danza Kuduro was the song of choice — and it is hard not to see these final run of games now being a dance to the finish line for Celtic.
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Quick thinking by his buddy to pull him back. Looks like he had second thoughts as one of his legs went over.
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Just on the DART here listening to Danza Kuduro. 
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Spreading racist hate speech now is it?
Only 700 Celtic fans allowed into Ibrox yesterday. Celtic supporting teen secured part time job at food kiosk in ground in lead up to game. Reported for work at 9am, locked himself in toilets for nearly 2 hours, Celtic fans escorted in just after 10.30am ahead of midday kickoff so he bolted out & straight into away section…
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The seeth at the end of the match in this is superb 
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The Ratoath need to be bringing this in ahead of the next United game
As one wag said, “that’s a penalty for rangers”
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