WHO would have thought that the best laid plans of the SPFL would go awry, eh?

Their attempts to avoid an Old Firm fixture in which Celtic could clinch the title were always on dodgy ground given the champions were travelling to Easter Road last week, and it was hardly a shock to see it all pan out exactly the way they didn’t want it to.

It is doubtful if too many Celtic supporters were overly upset about the defeat to Hibs though, and it sets up the tantalising prospect from their point of view of holding an almighty title party in front of their rivals.

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For Rangers fans, of course, that eventuality is far from appealing. If you are a Rangers supporter going to Celtic Park, you are probably expecting the worst and hoping for the best. The best being that your team can at least show a bit of fight and pride in the jersey, and possibly even delay Celtic’s coronation as champions to avoid having your face rubbed in their superiority once again.

The expectation will simply be that their team roll up their sleeves and show a bit of passion for the fixture, because although the destination of the league title is a formality, there are ways to lose a game and the semi-final was certainly not that.

In all likelihood they will lose to Celtic because Celtic have far better players, but if they lose because of that and not because they are lacking in desire, then most fans will hold their hands up and accept that because they made Celtic work for it. And I think they will be made to work for it. It can’t be like the semi-final again, and if it was, I’d be astonished. But Graeme Murty will have to do much better tactically.

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It has been shown that there are two ways to go about beating Celtic this season, with Hibs and Hearts doing it by pressing the life out of them and Kilmarnock beating them by playing a compact, counter-attacking game.

For me, Rangers don’t have the defensive personnel or the resolve to carry out the game-plan that Kilmarnock managed, so they have to go for it. When Rangers have had success, if you can call it that, against Celtic this season it was in the first half during the last game at Ibrox when they did press high and play on the front foot. That was as close as they have come to getting a result, and with everyone expecting that they are going to lose anyway, they may as well go down swinging or even give themselves a puncher’s chance. For Rangers, the best form of defence is certainly to attack.

It’s a risky strategy, but after losing so emphatically in the semi-final playing a really low risk game, the fans would surely more readily accept it if they went down by at least taking part in the game rather than going down as meekly as they did at Hampden.

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Hibs showed the way to press high against Celtic last weekend, and it was hugely impressive how every player in the team knew their role and responsibility to a tee. Neil Lennon deserves great credit. It’s very easy to say ‘go and press them’, but to do it properly it is key that every player works in unison.

When I was at St Mirren, Tommy Craig was so obsessed with pressing to the point that he talked about it on a daily basis, and it became a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke in the changing room. His tagline was ‘do you want to press?’, and we would answer back ‘aye, we do,’ to which he would shoot back ‘well do you want to f*****g press?!’ We used to work drills on it all the time, and the whole point was that if one person got their job wrong, it completely falls apart.

You are basically sacrificing your shape, and if one person does the wrong thing at the wrong time, then a team of Celtic’s quality will simply pop it around you. It has to be drilled into the players in training, and every one of them has to take that responsibility when they step onto the pitch.

To do it properly without getting cut open takes hours of preparation, and Murty and Jimmy Nicholl will need to have been drilling that into their players all week if they are going to play that way.

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And they simply cannot afford to let Scott Brown run the show as he has done in the vast majority of Old Firm games of late. I am backing the Celtic captain for player of the year, and he has had a great season, but it was easy for him to look good as he was strolling about Hampden with the cigar out.

Putting Jason Holt on him may be the most logical move because of his energy, but it’s hardly a match-up. Graham Dorrans could play up one, but that leaves Holt and Greg Docherty sitting, and if I was in the Celtic midfield I wouldn’t be overly concerned about facing up to that. It’s an area that Rangers really need to strengthen if they are to have any pretensions of stopping 10-in-a-row.

That debate is for another day though. In the here and now, Rangers have to at least show some pride as Celtic get set to collect the prizes.