The most brutal assessment of Celtic and Rangers ever written came from the pen of Irish footballing legend Johnny Giles.
Giles was part of a hard-as-nails midfield partnership with Billy Bremner in the Don Revie Leeds United team immortalised by author David Peace in The Damned United.
Renowned for never shirking a tackle, the softest part of his physique were his teeth. He was equally fearless as a pundit and newspaper columnist.
Annoyed by Peace portraying him as a “winking, scheming leprechaun”, Giles described both the book and the film as “rubbish”. He also put the boot into Scotland’s most successful clubs when he used his column in an English newspaper to brand them the “mediocre rulers of a pygmy football kingdom”.
Tackles become vicious when they’re mis-timed. And none were quite so misjudged as Giles going in high and late on Martin O’Neill’s Parkhead side the night before they faced Blackburn Rovers in a UEFA Cup tie in November 2002.
O’Neill’s men dispensed of Graeme Souness’ team then made the Irishman look mildly ridiculous by doing the same to Liverpool en route to the final in Seville.
That was a Celtic side with players like Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton and John Hartson rampaging around up front. A Rangers team with Ronald de Boer, World Cup winner Claudio Caniggia and Barry Ferguson, meanwhile, won the treble. Watching yesterday’s flabby, out-of-shape, sweating heavyweights swap fresh-air blows in a low-quality slug-fest, you began to wonder if Giles simply went too soon.
The feeblest Celtic attack since 1994 were a timely tonic for a Rangers team which struggles to keep kids from a bouncy castle. Russell Martin’s side had given up 164 shots in 10 games before kick-off but strolled through this one until Nasser Djiga started shanking clearances out of Jack Butland’s reach in the closing stages.
The panic was misplaced. A failure to craft chances or score from open play is becoming a pattern of this Celtic team. Failing to muster a shot on goal for 60 minutes – or win a corner until 20 minutes from the end – you have to go all the way back to the days of Wayne Biggins and Willie Falconer to find a team in green and white as pallid or toothless in the final third as this one.
Brendan Rodgers has been banging on for weeks over the need for more power and pace in his team. That Celtic have contrived to make nine new signings without adding either is damning. Further evidence – were it needed – of a dysfunctional approach to transfer windows.
They’ll scramble around in the final day of the window, haggling over Kasper Dolberg, making hail-mary phonecalls to friendly agents. It’s all too late now to salvage the £20million they lost when they sold Kyogo Furuhashi and Nicolas Kuhn without signing adequate replacements and failed to make the Champions League.
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In recent days, the fingers of blame have shifted from the boardroom to the manager’s door. The legendary Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann had a theory that a manager’s tenure at a club peaks and then declines after three years, becoming “fatal” once players grow bored or complacent or opponents learn to counter their tactics.
A manager who rarely lasts anywhere beyond three seasons, Rodgers is the classic case-in-point. For long enough he couldn’t lose to Rangers. After the latest stalemate you have to go back 12 months to the last time he managed to beat them.
As a team, Celtic have lost the knack of winning big meaningful games. They lost the Scottish Cup final to Aberdeen and the way they finished that game should have come as a wake-up call to Dermot Desmond and Co to sign some decent players.
Gripped by a classic case of buyer’s remorse over Adam Idah, Arne Engels and Auston Trusty, they reverted to type. They went back to £3m “club signings” the manager didn’t especially want or need. They somehow contrived to sign nine players while weakening to the starting XI. They handed a team of journeymen from Kazakhstan a free pass to the Champions League, then turned in an Ibrox display so toothless punters were almost pining for the much-maligned Idah at half-time.
They’ll finish up over-paying for a 27-year-old Dolberg or some other striker to plaster over a crack they should have filled weeks ago. While heads should roll, no one is holding their breath waiting for the guillotine to fall.
For Rangers, the game was a strange mixture of emotions: better, but not great. Sky commentator Ian Crocker summed up the mood of the home support heading to Ibrox when he described it as “a day when you fear the worst and hope for the best”.
When Russell Martin was still a defender at Ibrox, they witnessed a couple of gruesome hammerings. While that was never on the cards here, neither was any hint of a Rangers goal. They failed to muster a single shot on target.
In Andrew Cavenagh’s America they take the view that the first hundred days define a leader. They offer the chance to set the tone, build momentum and set people swimming in the same direction. Start well and buy-in becomes a whole lot easier.
In his 88 days as manager of Rangers, the tone set by Martin has been horribly off-key.
Three wins from his first 11 games is a gruesome record for an Ibrox manager.
For the first time since 1983 they’ve gone the first four league games of the season without winning a game and, given how bad Celtic were yesterday, they missed a real opportunity to give the Sky stats man a day off.
While the boos at full-time were quieter than they might have been if they’d actually lost the game, Martin has fostered the kind of unity no new leader wants or needs. Fans are universally committed to seeing him off the premises as soon as possible and the players don’t seem terribly sold either.
Ahead of the first Old Firm game of the season he axed Nico Raskin, a Belgium internationalist good enough to be in the same squad as Kevin de Bruyne, Leonardo Trossard and Jeremy Doku, but apparently no good to the culture Martin is trying to create.
Like football’s answer to Red Adair, Cavenagh had flown to Glasgow with a water cannon under his arm. Dousing the flames licking around the manager’s ankles the new owner spoke to the players at the training ground and offered assurances that Martin will still be in a job long after the hundred days has passed.
That’s a hard line to hold if a revitalised Hearts give Rangers a harder test after the international break than Celtic did yesterday. Above the Ibrox boos at full-time, the audible sound of cackling from Tony Bloom’s Brighton man-cave was difficult to miss.
