It’s a thrilling and fitting end to such a remarkable run
THERE’S no game like football. There are few places like Tynecastle. And there is nothing quite like the Scottish game for its propensity to shock, surprise, delight, embarrass… and bring even the most high flying, all-conquering, unflappable of champions crashing down to earth.
What a game and what a spectacular way to end an unbeaten run that will live on, regardless, as testament to one team’s relentless domestic domination.
And what a shot in the arm for rivals conditioned to believe that Celtic really were invincible, untouchable, destined to continue unscathed until some fluke occurrence — an extinctionlevel asteroid or a return of the plague — put matters beyond even the influence of the blessed Brendan Rodgers.
What happened in Gorgie? The world, or our own wee corner of it, got turned upside down. Good fun, wasn’t it? Come now, Celtic fans. It really would be churlish of you to be too infuriated by the end of a 69-game sequence without a single loss.
You’ve enjoyed the greatest run of Scottish supremacy the game has ever seen, under the guidance of Rodgers. And you’re still odds on to be enjoying another title party come May. If not sooner.
But it does no supporters any great harm to be reminded that, even in a competition too often derided as hardly worth the name, there are days when the other guy is just better. In all departments.
Be honest, now. It feels right that a record of such magnificence should go in this manner. At one of Scottish football’s great venues, in a fixture that has always stood above the lumpen mass of ordinary league encounters.
And it’s fitting that Celtic should have their spell broken not by some scrappy, sloppy, blindly lucky 1-0 rearguard action on an easily-forgotten off night or uninspired afternoon in a game without meaning or import.
Live on TV, in front of a UK-wide audience rethinking their pre-conceptions about the Scottish game, they were undone by a performance of audacity and ambition, as much as dogged determination.
Because, if Rodgers could rightly point to his players being a few degrees off in their usual dead reckoning, what happened at Tynecastle yesterday was in no way down to Celtic merely losing their way. Hearts more than earned a victory that will instantly go down in club history as a classic of its kind.
In doing what no other Scottish team had for so long, Craig Levein’s men — and boys — would have guaranteed themselves a degree of fame regardless of how they actually did it.
But this? Wow. Just… wow. If there is a strand of DNA running through the make-up of every good Hearts team, here were the elements of that code writ large.
Aggression is always part of the mix, yes. But intelligent pressing intended to suffocate the opposition, bravery on the ball, plus the kind of cool finishing that fills the dreams of every coach in the game — all were evident on a day of utter joy for the Jambos.
Of course, now that the record is gone, we’re all blessed with perceptive hindsight about how Celtic had been flirting with just such disaster all season.
Dropping points, making hard work of what once came so easily, with Scott Sinclair struggling and Moussa Dembele looking oddly disinterested… ah, everybody saw this coming. Nonsense.
When, during the build-up to yesterday’s match, Hearts keeper Jon McLaughlin started chatting away about how Celtic weren’t really ‘invincible’, most of us shook our heads and wondered just how badly he’d be made to pay for such cheek.
Yet McLaughlin was proven right. And he actually made an interesting point, of wider interest, when he compared Celtic’s results this season with the absolute swaggering brilliance of Manchester City.
Ah, yes, there goes that most frequent criticism thrown at the Scottish Premiership by fans of the self-styled Best League In The World.
Not a proper competition? One team running away with it, beating absolutely everyone by three and four every week. Quite.
Rodgers has brightened the spotlight on our top league merely by being here. And his team being undone like this surely changes some wrong-headed impressions about how ‘easy’ it all is north of the Border. If anything, it reinforces just how good Celtic have been for so long.
Among other themes brought to the surface yesterday, redemption for Levein shone through.
PROVING that the Scotland experience did not break him, that he still has plenty to offer as a coach, that his early struggles on returning to the technical area were just rustiness, he got everything right.
It’s all too easy to say that his only option was to trust Harry Cochrane. Because he had no one else available, right? But it still takes guts to rely on a 16-year-old going toe-to-toe with Scott Brown. Moxie is required to throw another non-shaver into the fray in the second half.
Incidentally, what were you doing at 16? If you were putting in the kind of performance delivered by Cochrane yesterday, only for the local boys’ club, you’d been entitled to be talking about it to this day.
To Cochrane and his teammates go the plaudits, and rightly so. They deserve to wallow in the afterglow of this one for a while.
But let’s be fully aware of two things. Celtic have done something remarkable. And they will bounce back.
Perhaps, in time, they’ll look back on this dark demolition as the day when they redoubled their efforts, addressed the malaise that had been creeping into performances — and kicked on to even greater heights.
Hey, it’s football. Scottish football. Anything might happen.