What a night last night turned out to be.
Unfortunately, I’ve been in my sick bed since the start of the week but still had enough energy to tune into the action via the radio and a completely legal app I use to watch football online.
I predicted Celtic shouldn’t have any problems with Hearts based on the Tynecastle sides recent displays and so it proved to be.
We swept them aside 5-0 with a ruthless display where we never even really needed to go through the gears to be honest.
It was all a relatively tame affair for the first half an hour until an unspectacular effort from Odsonne Edouard from the edge of the box was rather feebly palmed away by Hearts keeper Joel Pereira into the path of Olivier Ntcham and he dispatched it into the net with ease.
Honestly how Pereira gets a game for Hearts is beyond me. He’s atrocious and it’s a real indictment on their other keepers that he’s keeping them out.
In the second half, the floodgates opened and a Griffiths corner was headed home by big Chris Jullien who got a free run into the box only one minute after the restart.
Jozo Simunovic’s acrobatic effort from another Griff corner came off the post as did Scott Brown’s follow-up but then moments later Edouard released Callum McGregor in midfield who strode forward before releasing Greg Taylor on the wing and then finished the left back’s cutback himself on 52 mins.
Substitute Ryan Christie made it four on 67 minutes with a strike off the turf after Hearts had failed to deal with a Taylor cross and then on 80 minutes big Simunovic netted a bullet header from a Chrisite corner.
There could have been more but five would do us.
To make matters worse for the visitors Hearts sub Marcel Langer was sent off in the final minutes for a needless two-footed lunge on Scott Brown. Madness really but makes no difference to us.
So a pretty resounding victory made all the sweeter and pertinent as news filtered through of Rangers late demise down the road to Kilmarnock with the Ibrox side shipping two goals in the final thirteen minutes in a 2-1 defeat.
As a result, we stretch our lead to ten points which would have been pretty unthinkable only six weeks ago but thanks to our imperious post-break form which has seen us win six consecutive league games and score an incredible 22 goals, it’s very much a reality.
The light blues have lost two and drawn one of their last six games and for many their title challenge is more or less over.
I don’t necessarily agree as we have difficult away games to come starting with Aberdeen on Sunday at Pittodrie and then in the coming weeks away at Livingston where we lost earlier in the season, at Ibrox in mid-March and away at Hibs where we were held to a draw back in September.
The thing is though that Rangers now need to win every game until the end of the season and hope we lose three which right now looks highly unlikely.
As Neil Lennon said in the post-match interview ‘don’t count your chickens yet’ but Steven Gerrard’s side are in a bit of a tailspin right now and his post-match interview last night seemed to indicate a manager who’s run out of ideas and patience with his misfiring players.
As for Celtic the stats really are incredible.
We’ve scored 77 goals in 26 league matches this term which is the same as what we scored in all of last season and means our goal difference is now +16 better off than the Govan side.
Indeed in all competitions, we’ve hit the net 95 times in domestic tournaments and scored 127 goals overall when you include European games which is pretty ridiculous.
By comparison, we scored 121 goals in all competitions last season which was not bad going so to already be well ahead of that with at least 15 games left to play is some doing.
There’s still a bit to go to match the 150 goals we scored in the domestically unbeaten 2016-17 campaign of course but eclipsing that awesome total is definitely a possibility.
The stats are hard to argue with but the most important one is that we’re ten points clear.
Long may it continue.
....Always A Tim! 