Blog

I firmly believe that Celtic are stronger than our rivals heading into the first Glasgow derby match of the season tomorrow afternoon.

Rangers are in good form themselves, but they have dropped points to Hibs already and lost 2-0 away to some random team from Belgium.

Celtic have won every game we have played so far, with our last game in the league being a 9-0 demolition of Dundee Utd on their own turf.

We have the better players, the better manager, we are the better team and we are at home in front of our own supporters. We are favourites with the bookmakers for those reasons and rightly so.

In my opinion, the biggest threat to Celtic taking all three points tomorrow is the man in the middle, Nick Walsh.

And no, not because I think he is a cheat and will do his best to help Rangers or anything like that, but there are two real areas of concern for me.

The first one is how he will referee the game, as in how strict he will be if Rangers do their very best at fouling us, injuring our players and breaking up our play with niggling fouls.

This is something that Walsh needs to nip in the bud right away, or else Celtic will be kicked out of the game.

I don’t expect Walsh to give Celtic any extra protection, but I do expect him to apply the rules and try to ensure that the best football spectacle possible takes place, and if that means a couple of early bookings for thugs like Jack or Lundstram to show that they aren’t allowed to kick and wrestle their way to victory, then that is what needs to happen.

The second point I am deeply concerned about is the Rangers players clear enthusiasm for employing in the dark art know as diving.

We already know that Kent is an expert at running past opposition players and sticking his own leg into them and falling over to win penalties or free-kicks in dangerous areas, and that Morelos also tries his best to play act and con the referee into getting opposition players sent off, but now Rangers have a new serial cheat in town.

Antonio Colak has already dived for penalties twice this season, and that is only the ones that I have seen myself.

Nick Walsh must have seen those incidents, particular his dive against Kilmarnock at Ibrox which was waived away by Kevin Clancy but not punished with a booking as it should have been, but also his dive against Hibs to win the penalty.

Walsh needs to be aware that this guy will go down in the box like a sack of spuds the moment he feels an opposition player’s breath on the back of his neck.

And if he does clearly dive, Walsh needs to be strong enough to book him, because the sooner this cheating is stamped out of our game the better.

If Walsh is strong enough to let the best football team decide the outcome of the game tomorrow, for me, there is only going to be one winner.