Craig Beattie must wince as he looks back on the November day when he decided to share his views on the SPFL title race with Sky Sports News.
Barely a dozen games into the season the two Glasgow clubs were neck and neck with only goal difference putting Celtic in front.
There was a media frenzy going on about a return to the good old days, Neil Lennon was even asked at a media conference if he thought that the title could be decided on goal difference!
It had been a similar story in January 2019 when the two clubs were level coming out of the winter break, by the time the post-split fixtures were announced it was simply a matter of guessing when Celtic would clinch their eighth successive title.
Undeterred by that recent example of the gulf between the top two clubs, back in November, attempting to be thought provoking…
??ICYMI: Do Celtic have the bottle for a title race?
Craig Beattie questions if his former club could hold their nerve in a title race against Rangers!
Full story – https://t.co/jaxCqsmTxB
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— Sky Sports Scotland (@ScotlandSky) November 11, 2019
I discussed this yesterday with a very well-known journalist, who said ‘It will be interesting to see if Rangers have got the bottle with three or four games to go… if they’re in contention, will they have the bottle to stand up to potentially winning the league?’
I flipped the question on him and said ‘How do we know that Celtic have got the bottle?’, because with three or four games to go, nobody has been challenging them of late.
I get what he is saying from a Rangers perspective but from a Celtic perspective, they’ve been runaway winners for however many years now. So how will they cope with three or four games to go?
With three or four games left to play this season Celtic players are likely to be wearing party hats and 9-in-a-row T-shirts while Beats scoffs humble pie in a radio or TV studio.
At the time that he ‘flipped the question’ Celtic were on a run of winning nine consecutive domestic trophies.
Since then the League Cup has been added to that tally, a handful of wins are required to clinch the SPFL title with a fourth consecutive Scottish Cup two matches away.
Should Beattie be put in the same position at any stage in the future he might wish to consider the medal haul of Scott Brown, James Forrest and others before questioning whether Celtic have the bottle to survive a genuine challenge for the SPFL title.
