THE Celtic team of season 1969/70 reached the European Cup final, losing to Feyenoord. They were managed by the peerless Jock Stein and had players of the calibre of Billy McNeill, Bobby Murdoch, Jimmy Johnstone, Tommy Gemmell and Bertie Auld. They also clinched their fifth successive league title against Hearts at Tynecastle. And that latter fact is where similarities between that distinguished group and the current Celtic squad begins and ends.

The Parkhead side are on a quest to win 10 consecutive Scottish league titles and events in Edinburgh yesterday ensured they are now halfway there. Questioning whether any team deserves to be champions is a futile business. Any side that can prove itself better than the competition over the course of 38 games has earned the right to wear the crown.

Few, though, will come back to reflect on this Celtic side with any great fondness. These have not been vintage years, their saving grace that they provided a means to an end should the club go on to clinch that much-cherished 10-in-a-row come 2021.

There will be a second and final league medal now for Ronny Deila. The Celtic manager is a decent, passionate, and humble man but he is unlikely to find an invite to join the club’s Hall of Fame among his mail at any point in the coming years. Taking a one-horse race into the final furlongs of a campaign that, based on superior financial and playing resources alone, should have been done and dusted by Christmas is not something the Norwegian will likely want to highlight to potential future employers. Rangers can have nobody to blame for themselves for their absence from the top division for four seasons but without that challenge, there was more chance a pantomime horse winning the Grand National than Celtic not finishing each season as champions. It is like Usain Bolt boasting about beating a pack of Girl Guides in the 100m Olympic final.

Only two players have excelled over the duration of this campaign. One is Kieran Tierney, the left-back whose assured performances and remarkable consistency demonstrate he has the potential to become a major star for both club and country. Handing the 18 year-old a debut at the end of last season and then allowing him to replace Emilio Izaguirre as a regular in the side this term will go down as one of Deila’s more significant achievements.

The other stellar performer has been Leigh Griffiths. Looking at the paucity of other strikers at Celtic’s disposal and comparing it with the abundance of attacking midfielders – like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife - begs two obvious questions: whatever happened to Carlton Cole? And how would Celtic have coped had Griffiths ever sustained a serious injury? Luckily for Deila that has not been the case and his star striker has gone on to plunder goal after goal. He will almost certainly be crowned PFA Scotland’s player of the year this evening and deservedly so.

This has been a largely attritional slog to the title but some games stand out as significant. The 3-1 defeat of Aberdeen on Halloween quelled the threat from the north – temporarily – while there have also been occasions, mostly in the first half of the season, when Celtic had their shooting boots on the right feet: 6-0 over Dundee, 5-0 over Dundee United, and 8-1 over poor Hamilton. Too rarely, though, have Celtic hit their straps, with the likes of Stefan Johansen, Nir Bitton and even Scott Brown – all key performers last season – all hindered by injury and/or poor form.

Celtic will celebrate this title success as enthusiastically as any other, and rightly so. The depth of the rebuilding work required in the summer, however, tells its own story.