Rangers making Celtic wake up to danger as title race takes a twist
- Published
'We have a serious title race on our hands'
It is worth taking a closer look at Rangers' opening goal in their 2-1 win at Celtic Park on Sunday, scored by Ryan Kent and illustrative of the very serious title credentials Steven Gerrard's team now carry with them.
We think of how it all ended, the excellent Borna Barisic playing it into Kent and the midfielder sweeping it first-time past Fraser Forster, but it was how it started that made it such an impressive thing.
Rangers were pegged back in their own right-back position, level with their own penalty area and facing a Celtic throw-in.
Ryan Jack won it off Callum McGregor and 28 seconds later the ball was in the back of Celtic's net. Jack, Steven Davis, Glen Kamara, Joe Aribo, Alfredo Morelos, Barisic and finally Kent all got touches.
Seven Rangers players taking it virtually the length of the pitch in the backyard of the champions and then finishing clinically and brilliantly - if that goal didn't make Celtic people gulp at the battle ahead to achieve nine in a row then they haven't yet woken up to the danger coming at them from the other side of the city.
Celtic boss Neil Lennon said in the aftermath that there was no need for his team to panic - and there isn't. There's a long way to go. He also said that Celtic were in this kind of position after losing the Old Firm game last December and went on to win the title. That's true, too, but things have changed since then.
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When Rangers won this fixture a year ago they won it at Ibrox not Celtic Park. That's a big difference right there. They also lost their next league game to Kilmarnock and immediately handed the momentum back to Celtic.
They went on to drop more points to St Johnstone, Hibs, Kilmarnock (for a second time), Celtic and Kilmarnock once again. They shipped 15 points from January onwards, eight of them to Killie.
There are no signs that they're about to do the same. Rangers are a lot better this season than they were a year ago and those other teams - Celtic apart - are worse, and therefore less likely to catch them out. If Rangers win their game in hand and match Celtic result for result then they're champions. They'd need to show all kinds of steel and nerve to get over the line, but they haven't been lacking in those departments this season.
Rangers were emphatically the better side on Sunday and not even a goal awarded to Celtic in error and another red card for Morelos could stop them.
Last month they lost the League Cup final to their great rivals in the most painful circumstances but they looked like the team that had taken more from that day at Hampden. They had more edge, more physicality, more intent. They looked fitter and stronger. They over-ran Celtic in midfield.
Ryan Christie, James Forrest and Odsonne Edouard have 49 goals between them this season. There was barely a peep out of any of them. Christie, a major influence in most of the games he's played, missed a penalty, Forrest was anonymous and Edouard, so impressive for so long, got lucky with his goal and didn't do a whole lot else.
Gerrard figured out how to cut their supply and negate their impact. This was surely the biggest day of his managerial career.
There's been talk about Celtic being a tired bunch of players and there's some - but only some - merit in that. Last season only Derby's Richard Keogh played more minutes for club and country than Callum McGregor, and this season McGregor has played more minutes than any other player in the world (3,714 minutes across 42 games). Kristoffer Ajer is second on that list, Forrest is ninth and Scott Brown is tenth. Connor Goldson and James Tavernier are fifth and eighth. That's four Celtic men and two Rangers men in the top 10.
The individual match-ups show that McGregor has played almost a thousand more minutes than Jack this season and Brown has played 552 more minutes than Davis. Of the 12 players who played middle to front in both teams, Celtic players occupy the first five spots in the most played category.
When you look at the overall picture, 11 versus 11, the numbers this season narrow considerably. Celtic's starting line-up have now played 28,645 minutes; Rangers are on 28,372 minutes.
The difference in energy was noticeable on Sunday, but if some of Celtic's key men were tired then that's an issue for Lennon. He has a big enough squad to rest some key men. And it doesn't explain why Rangers have played better football in this fixture over the past year.
Celtic's struggles with Rangers didn't start on Sunday or even last month at Hampden.
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Should there be surprise that they could go to Celtic Park and win so well? Yes, a little, but the signs have been there for a while now.
If you take the past six games between them, Rangers have won three and Celtic have won three. In two of the games the Celtic goalkeeper was their best player - Craig Gordon last December at Ibrox and Fraser Forster last month at Hampden. In three of the six games Celtic managed just one shot on target in the 90 minutes.
Celtic were dominant in just one of them - the 2-0 win at Ibrox earlier in the season. Last December, Brendan Rodgers admitted that the "best team won" while talking about his own side's unforced errors and poor decision-making. In the next derby, Morelos got himself sent off after 31 minutes and still Rangers looked the better side for much of it. Before Forrest grabbed the winner with four minutes to go, Lennon was getting stick from his own supporters. We might forget that now, but Celtic Park was an unhappy place until Forrest did his thing.
The next one was a 2-0 Rangers win at Ibrox, a template for what happened on Sunday. Davis, Kamara, Jack and Scott Arfield were the main forces in midfield that day and Celtic couldn't handle them. Then came Celtic's convincing 2-0 win at Ibrox. After that came the League Cup final and we all know about the smash-and-grab that took place there.
It's instructive to think back to the early stages of that final and the menace that Rangers possessed from corners and free-kicks. Three times in the opening minutes Goldson and Filip Helander won headers around Celtic's six-yard box.
The same aerial threat happened on Sunday, only this time Rangers made it count. Christopher Jullien and Ajer weren't always alive to the movement around them. They got away with it before, but not this time.
No wonder Gerrard reacted the way he did on full-time. Some demons from Hampden were exorcised in that moment. Gerrard will have known that the only way to hurt Celtic - truly hurt them - was to go to their own place and beat them. He has done that now.
Over the past eight and a half years when Celtic looked over their shoulder they saw no challenger in the distance. If they look behind them now they still won't see anything because their danger is right beside them, shoulder to shoulder.
Years have been spent talking about whether the gap between them was closing. It's closed. This race looks like it's going to the wire.