Tom English hands the momentum to the Ibrox side and says Celtic ‘look lost in a haze of confusion and uncertainty’. You write us off at your peril…

Tom English wrote a piece for the BBC yesterday that will have gone down very well in certain parts of this city.

‘R*****s look like they know where they want to go – Celtic just look lost’.

It was his closing line that got passed around all evening.

Rangers look, at the moment, like a club that knows where it wants to go. Celtic, by contrast, look lost in a haze of confusion and uncertainty.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that he’s wrong.

Because he isn’t.

We were out-played, out-muscled and out-coached at Celtic Park on Sunday.

Again.

Four bad defeats inside a month now.

LASK, Ibrox in the League Cup, Ferencvaros, and then Sunday in front of our own support.

There is no spinning that.

So am I going to argue with the man about what he watched?

No.

But there is a difference between describing where we are today and telling everybody where we are going to end up.

And that is where I part company with him.

You write Celtic off at your peril, and the history of this club is littered with men who found that out

I have watched this happen my whole life, and every few years the very same article gets written.

Celtic are finished, the Ibrox side have found their man, the momentum has switched, the natural order restored.

And how many times has it actually been true?

Now, in fairness to the man, he has written a good one here, because the stats he used are genuinely damning.

Eight shots to one in the first half.

Aerial duels won 67.6% to 32.4%.

Every one of those numbers is a stick to beat this board with, and he is entitled to use them.

But read the piece again and you will notice something.

He leaves himself a door open.

Even English concedes the power ‘could switch back again if Celtic get their act together’

That line is buried in there near the end, and it is the most important sentence in the whole article.

Because it is an admission that none of this is settled.

And if it is not settled, then what exactly is everybody so certain about?

Momentum in Glasgow is not a trophy.

It is a mood, and moods change.

Derek McInnes has won two games against us, and he was the one telling everybody not to go overboard, insisting it was just three points.

When the manager of the Ibrox side is more cautious about his own position than our media is, what does that tell you?

We were written off last season as well, and I seem to remember that one ending in a double

This club was a shambles, we were a laughing stock, and there were people queuing up to tell us the title was gone.

Then Martin O’Neill walked in and delivered the lot.

Nobody saw that coming, least of all the men writing us off at the time.

Do you remember a single one of them coming back to correct the record?

So forgive me if I do not take a September verdict as gospel.

Now, I am not going to insult anybody’s intelligence here, because this does feel different and I would be lying if I said otherwise.

The LASK humiliation took something out of this club that has not come back.

In fact, I’m actually going to flesh that out a bit later on.

It removed the confidence, and it looks to me like it removed the heart and soul along with it.

A lot of us believe it will take a massive change of direction to recover from the battering we have taken.

I am one of them.

But not dead yet is not the same thing as dead.

We are still top of the League, whether that suits the narrative or not.

The board have two choices now, and only one of them leaves us with a football club worth watching

They can do the right thing.

They can go and get a proper manager, a serious one, with a track record of turning a shitshow like this around.

That would cost them money, which is why I am not holding my breath.

Or they can do what they always do.

They can reach into the black book, pull out some no name nobody has heard of, sell him to us as the next big thing, and burn the whole place to the ground.

And it is not only the no names that worry me here.

Because there is another version of this that a lot of people seem strangely comfortable with.

Neil Lennon, Robbie Keane, Roy Keane

Familiar faces, safe hands, names that will get a cheer out of a certain section of the support.

And then what?

Every one of them would do nothing but compound the situation we are already in.

If Martin O’Neill walks away this week, the man who replaces him has to be the right one.

No messing around, and no sentiment.

So which one do you think they will go for?

We all know which one of those is cheaper.

And we all know which one this board finds easier.

That is the actual crisis at Celtic, and it is not Tom English’s to write about.

It is the men upstairs who gutted a Champions League squad and handed the manager a team that cannot press, cannot run, and cannot defend.

So by all means, write your pieces about a club that looks lost.

We are lost.

But a club that is lost can be found again, and this one has been found more times than anybody in Scottish football cares to remember.

Get the next appointment right, and this article ages very badly indeed.

Get it wrong, and Tom English will look like a prophet.

Over to you, Dermot…

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