Whether Martin can make it last is another question. Given their respective predicaments, it was a better point for Martin than it was for Brendan Rodgers even though it took Celtic back to the top of the table and extended their run of clean sheets to four in the league.
Rodgers has not won an Old Firm game in his last five attempts now – and this was the most feeble effort of all. He said it himself afterwards, bemoaning the standard of his team’s attacking game, lamenting the absence of creativity while concluding that this is “not the way Celtic play.”
Well, it is now. Celtic’s inability to create much of anything was remarkable. In the first 45 minutes they went backwards in their passing almost more often than they went forward. They had nothing out wide and nothing through the middle. They had no shot on goal, no corner and an xG – expected goals, if such things float your boat – of 0.00 in the first half. That’s quite a feat.
It was the first time this season that a domestic team had failed to get an attempt on goal against Rangers in an opening half. In the league, Motherwell had two, Dundee had three and St Mirren had eight, In the League Cup at Ibrox, Alloa scored twice against Martin’s team.
So Rodgers has a whole lot of work to do in clearing out the myriad of players in his squad that are not good enough while bringing in new blood. And he doesn’t have long to do it.
Things move at a glacial pace when Celtic enter the transfer realm but if this powder-puff performance doesn’t light a fire under the backside of the hierarchy – major shareholder, Dermot Desmond, in other words – then nothing will.
Celtic got their first shot on target after an hour and their first corner after 71 minutes. Rangers were full of fire and brimstone – Connor Barron, Mo Diomande and Mikey Moore taking the lead with Bojan Miovski offering plenty of edge on his debut – but Celtic were so flat in trying to deal with it.
For a club that has seen the likes of Kyogo Furuhashi, Jota, Liel Abada, Nicolas Kuhn, Matt O’Riley, an in-form Daizen Maeda and others light up this fixture with their pace and their class and their goals, a frontline of Benjamin Nygren (not a winger), Maeda (not a natural centre-forward and badly out of sorts) and Michel-Ange Balikwisha (not in the city a wet week) was poor.
As the game went on, Rodgers changed it. Now he had James Forrest, Shin Yamada and Maeda as his three. Still there was no penetration, no cohesion. Celtic finished with an xG of 0.17 in a game that had a combined xG of 0.32, the lowest stat for a game in the Scottish Premiership – and possibly any other league – since records began. Embarrassing.