Rangers 1-0 Celtic: 'Old Firm landscape has changed in the blink of an eye'
- Published
Rangers' win put them 19 points clear of Celtic
There was a time, more of an era, when Celtic were so utterly dominant in Scottish football that the only thing they could see in their rear-view mirror was their own dust. Trophies by the bucketload, batterings of their Glasgow chums, the banter years.
Maybe some thought those days would last forever. The club is now getting disabused of that notion with every passing week.
Everything has changed in the relative blink of an eye. Now it's Rangers who are so far clear that they can't pick out Celtic no matter how hard they look behind them. It's not binoculars they need, it's a telescope. Nineteen points is the advantage and there can scarcely be a soul left who doesn't think the Premiership title is going anywhere other than Ibrox.
In the aftermath of the latest derby, Neil Lennon was left clinging to controversy like a man reaching for a raft. Sixty-three minutes into the game, Nir Bitton rugby tackled Alfredo Morelos to the ground wide on the left, a desperate act that wouldn't have been out of place had big Jonny Gray done it at Murrayfield.
'Denying an obvious goal-scoring opportunity,' concluded referee Bobby Madden as he sent Bitton off. 'Garbage' said Lennon as he argued an injustice.
The Celtic manager felt that Madden had "done us", but it was a convenient take. Larceny, it was not. Lennon might have been better off looking at his own players' shortcomings in that moment.
Bitton's poor decision-making was almost like Celtic's season in microcosm. Too many wrong moves on the pitch and off.
James Tavernier thumped a hopeful ball downfield and that simple punt sparked a crisis in Celtic terrain. From his position in footballing no-man's land, too far up the park and not hard-working enough to retreat, Diego Laxalt watched the ball float over his head to where Bitton grappled with Morelos.
The centre-back made a show of himself. He had no need to do what he did, no need to put himself in such peril. Had he let Morelos go, the striker would still have had a huge amount of work to do, still an enormous job on his hands to score.
The probability is that he'd have got a shot on goal - hence Madden's verdict - but scoring from that angle would have been a trick that only the pre-eminent goalscorers would have been capable of pulling off.
Had Bitton been thinking like a diligent defender, he'd been on the right side of the striker in the first place. Had he been thinking clearly, he'd have let him run rather bringing him down and creating such an issue for his team. His head went at a critical juncture - and so did the game.
'Mounting case for Celtic is mug's pursuit'
From relying on the excellence of Allan McGregor to keep them in it, Rangers then won it with the unwitting help of his namesake, Callum, deflecting a header into his own goal. Mounting a case for Celtic in the league is now a mug's game. Even if they win their three games in hand, they'd still trail by 10 points, they'd still need Rangers to start losing games when all they've done so far in the Premiership, pretty much, is win.
That's 22 matches and 20 victories. They've scored 57 goals and have conceded just five. Celtic have had two cracks at them, home and away, and haven't managed to score let alone win. There isn't a scrap of evidence to suggest that this Rangers team will implode.
For much of the season, they've had it all their own way, their defence unyielding, their midfield organised and energetic, their attack dangerous and goal-laden. None of these things really applied on Saturday. They had to show another side to themselves. McGregor hasn't been called on to win games in the league this season, but this was his stage.
Here was a new challenge for Rangers. It was the first time they'd been outplayed for such a prolonged spell in the league this season, the first time a side had put them under that kind of stress across an entire 45 minutes.
Those early saves frustrated Celtic, who played powerfully for an hour. They needed a goal, they needed to prove to themselves that they had the beating of their rivals and only a goal was going to give them that comfort.
And it never came. Odsonne Edouard and Leigh Griffiths were both denied by the goalkeeper.
Things turned on the red card. Seven minutes later, Rangers were ahead and everything petered out from there.
Lennon can rail about the red, but his team's travails this season did not begin with a referee's call. If Bitton failed to recognise the danger he was in when bringing down Morelos then that chimes with the performance of the club in not acknowledging that their neighbours across town were no longer the soft touches of before. Celtic never saw this revival coming.
They have spent money - but badly. They have changed goalkeepers, changed centre-halves, changed formations, rotated, recycled, but the errors keep repeating. Bitton's blunder was just the latest in a long line of self-defeating events, the type of thing that Rangers used to do so often in their grim years.
Gerrard on verge of history
On full-time, Steven Gerrard showed no emotion on the touchline. Had you not known the score, you wouldn't have had a clue whether he'd won or lost.
Even when the action ended, he looked focused. That kind of steel is in his team now. They have developed a habit of finding a way to win, be it a stroll or a struggle.
The job he's doing is hurtling towards the historic. Considering what he inherited, we're seeing a hell of a turnaround at Ibrox, from scattergun to purposeful.
Rangers finished third in the league in the season before he arrived. In the preceding years, they built a large tower of cash and torched it in the transfer market. Their recruitment and strategy was so bad it could have been conducted by Celtic chief executive Peter Lawwell in disguise.
So many things needed sorting and so much money needed to be spent, but wisely. They've done that.
In one window, he brought in McGregor, Borna Barisic, Connor Goldson and Ryan Kent. In another, it was Steven Davis, Jermain Defoe and Glen Kamara. Others arrived and most of the biggest decisions have worked out.
More than £30m has been spent on players. A massive sum. The losses in the last two sets of accounts stood at £27m. They've moved forward on the back of soft loans and cash for equity deals with supportive directors.
But there's a plan there - and the galling thing for Celtic is that it's a plan that's been taken from them, just like the title itself, perhaps. Look for value, improve it and sell it. That was the Celtic way in their best years of the nine-in-a-row. It has now become the intended template of their rivals.
Where Celtic go from here in terms of management and players is unsure. They look like a club in need of revitalisation on many fronts.
Where Rangers are heading looks more certain. Gerrard won't get involved in title talk until the job is done. He, more than anybody, knows how ruinous late slips can prove. Saturday was a seismic moment for him, though. He didn't show it, but he'll surely have felt it.