Safe to say, it has not been a great week for Scottish football. The European exits were bad enough. Then, there was this.
The Premiership’s showpiece league fixture is held up as the USP that sells the league to broadcasters, but this was as much a poor advert for the Scottish game as it was a good advert for hysterical blindness.
It has always been the case that the renown of the Old Firm derby owed as much to the rivalry in the stands as it did to the action on the field, but rarely can the disparity between what these two facets of the fixture bring to the party have been so wide as they were here.
In the stands, the atmosphere was crackling beforehand. It felt like the real deal. But a closer look at the banners and flags on display in both ends laid bare the displeasure that both sets of fans are currently feeling with their clubs and the state of their teams, and it wasn’t long before we found out why.
There were also loud choruses in support of the absent Nicolas Raskin, who had been instructed not to attend Ibrox as his complicated relationship with his manager unspooled further, with the fans nailing their colours to the mast in terms of where they stood on that particular subplot.
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Not that it was all sunshine and lollipops in the away end either. Among the 2500 Celtic fans wedged in the Broomloan corner were placards taking aim at their own cast of pantomime villains – principal shareholder Dermot Desmond, chief executive Michael Nicholson and chairman Peter Lawwell.
And anyone watching the game would agree wholeheartedly – we all deserved better than this.
Prior to the game, Sky tried to whet the appetite by showing reruns of classic clashes from down the years, and the contrast between watching players like Brian Laudrup and Henrik Larsson strutting their stuff in their pomp to what we were served up here was enough to make you weep.
Ibrox legend Michael Mols was spotted making his way around the pitch before the game too, with some of the home fans asking him if he fancied a game. Maybe only half-jokingly. Even now, he might have done better than some of the current crop. As the embarrassing midweek Champions League qualifying results suffered by both sides reminded us, these are two teams at present who are miles off it.
The Rangers line-up smacked of a manager still throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something would stick, with the likes of Connor Barron brought in from the cold and Bojan Miovski thrown in for his debut. But the real change from Martin was in his approach.
Out was the rigid adherence to his preferred philosophy, and in was a more direct style that at least allowed them to place an element of pressure, however primitive in its construction, on their rivals.
There was nothing much coming the other way, with the visitors unable to string together anything of note and their midfield unable to exert the influence on this game they once did routinely. Callum McGregor went through a long spell of dominating these occasions, but the Celtic captain was peripheral here. At best.
He wasn’t alone, though. Neither side really threatened to score outside of John Souttar’s first half header that was disallowed for offside after a VAR review, much to the relief of Kasper Schmeichel, who had charged into no-man's land.
In fairness, with the transfer deadline at 11pm tomorrow night, there has to be an acknowledgment that these are two teams who are clearly still works in progress. Just how much work they have left themselves to do in this final 24 hours of the window though was written all over the paucity of their performances and the poverty of quality.
So, where does this outcome leave the managers?
For Martin, it maybe bought him just a little respite. This was not enough to turn the tide of opinion that remains dead set against his place in the Rangers dugout by any stretch, but it was at least a little better than what had gone before. Which says a lot about what had gone before.
It was the first clean sheet Rangers have managed domestically, and with chairman Andrew Cavenagh in attendance, enough to spare him an agonising dilemma over what to do with his manager over the international break. For Martin’s critics, the consolation of a thumping defeat may well have been the end of his short, tumultuous reign.
If they fail to deliver, the uneasy relationship developing between boardroom and dugout will be exacerbated, and an unhappy marriage over the remainder of the season before what looks to be a conscious uncoupling in the summer awaits.
In short, a thoroughly unsatisfactory outcome all round, for most parties. Particularly those who had to watch it.
