Today was the wake up call Steven Gerrard’s Rangers have needed.

You’re a deluded fool if you think Rangers have been good since New Year – Gerrard knows we’ve not, and we’ve been stumbling to the wins.

And let’s take a moment of reflection – Walter Smith’s Rangers did NOT play great football and often grafted out the wins to many of the titles in 9IAR and 3IAR.

So we must take context.

However, whenever his teams played badly, they still rolled up their sleeves and dug in. They ground out the results, and even when they did occasionally slip up, they’d left everything out there and could hold their heads up high.

Aside Allan McGregor, and maybe Steven Davis, not a soul in Rangers XI, even those scoring 7, can hold their heads up high and say they gave everything.

McGregor confirmed what we’d said, in his after-match interview. He was deeply scathing and said Rangers didn’t want to win.

Gerrard pretty much echoed this.

And that will to win, that effort, that graft – we’ve not played well since the turn of the year, as always under this manager, but criminally we’re not trying hard enough as a unit either.

And today was the wake up call that sloth-like approach needed.

Too many players were lackadaisical today – the defenders were not on their game (all four, incidentally), midfield was slow and ponderous, and the attack line was flat.

And if we needed a bit of a shock to the system that we can’t just show up and expect a win, being matched and frankly outplayed by the bottom side was the jolt we needed.

Forget your comments about the pitch, we’ve been playing this subpar for weeks now, way too many players below their best.

And today it cost us.

Let this be the big big warning to the squad, and to the manager, who got his selection wrong and admitted his errors:

Celtic will not now lose the title – we have to go and win it.

And the way we win it is not capitulating with that complacent arrogance we showed today.

Rangers fans expect a lot better than this, and an awful lot of our heroes in blue should be thoroughly ashamed of their wishy-washy displays recently.

Get a grip, the lot of you.