The reality of beating Celtic….

It does seem like a long time since the Celtic win – and we have been guilty of living off it too long already.

Rangers have played four fixtures since that stunning win against the Eastern lot, and have not convinced in any of them. The underwhelming win over HJK, the depressing loss to Killie, the average win over a dreadfully poor Livi and now a patchy cup progression over the mighty Cowdenbeath do all point to one simple thing:

The Celtic win was a false dawn.

It’s that simple.

No, no no, we’re not saying sack Gerrard or sack the board or sack the squad – there is a semblance of something useful in all of these things.

But it’s become clear in all matches this calendar year that the win over Celtic which made us all think a huge corner had been turned was simply an illusion.

Rangers remain completely inconsistent, as they have for the past six years, and just when we think a corner has indeed been turned, the rug is pulled out from under us and we realise we’re still stuck somewhere on the progression ladder.

We like a lot of the players in this team, we do, and lord knows we’ve bored you all with plaudits about various members of the squad, but the reality is Celtic, for all their utter awfulness are six points ahead of us and Killie are level with us.

That’s where we’re at. Bear in mind Celtic have been beaten by Hearts and Kilmarnock this season, so it wasn’t really that special in the grand scheme of things for us to beat them, beyond the obvious bragging rights and gnashing of teeth down Parkhead way.

This is not to discredit the win either – it was a day everything went right for us and we allowed ourselves to be carried away by the performance and result. And so we should. We waited approaching a decade for that.

But January is almost over, our form has gone back to the way it was in December (wins, losses and draws) and it’s pretty evident that we still have a long way to go to even consider being title contenders.

Reality sucks.