IT was an Old Firm game in which the madness-ometer did not register a single flicker.

English and foreign media showed up at Hampden yesterday and the VIP seats had some outsiders too, rubbernecking at the Glasgow tribes. They'll all be able to boast they've been to the famous derby but none can say they witnessed a memorable or wild one. After almost three years Celtic and Rangers got together and served up, well, a non-event really. Celtic delivered an unfussy win and Rangers were spared a battering. Red cards? None. Bookings? Not even half-a-dozen between them. So much for two sets of savages going at each other. Referee Craig Thomson will have had tougher Sunday afternoons trying to get a wasp out of his front room.

A couple of his bad calls were puffed up by some into bigger deals than they actually were - he should have played advantage and Leigh Griffiths might have made it 3-0, and when John Guidetti was on the ground with Lee McCulloch's studs on his back the ref absurdly gave a foul in favour of the Rangers man. None of it mattered but the game was so lacking in flavour that a controversy vacuum formed, and in an Old Firm game one of those must always be filled. Scott Brown saying Celtic won easily was hardly inflammatory to anyone who saw the game with functioning eyes.

For those who revel in the darkness of an Old Firm game there was plenty of nourishment. The rituals were all dutifully observed, the two sets of supporters regularly baiting each other as if locked into a sequence of call-and-response. Once there were sufficient numbers in both ends of the ground it started up, Celtic fans gleefully chanting "zombies" and doing their stiff-armed zombie move. Rangers fans responded that the Celtic end was only there to see the Rangers. Predictable, too, was the subsequent descent into all the familiar religious and political muck which forever pollutes this derby. "Ooh, ah, up the 'RA"," came a chant from the Celtic end, and at half-time a message was raised which said "at the going down of the hun and in the morning we will remember them." There were "go home ya huns" chants, too.

Back it came at them from the Rangers end: "We hate Celtic, fenian b*******". In the second half "The Billy Boys", The Famine Song" and "No Pope of Rome" - numbers on Police Scotland's "banned list" - were belted out by thousands. Celtic and Rangers had not played each other for 33 months and plenty of Celtic fans will argue until they're blue in the face that there is no Old Firm game any more, no Rangers, and that yesterday saw the first ever fixture between these clubs. Yet the atmosphere and the rituals were as old as the hills. Those English and international reporters will have filed their reports to inform their readers and viewers that Scottish football can still be a diseased place in which to hear chants in support of the IRA and denigrating popery.

The lucky ones were those who were blessed with ignorance about exactly what was being shouted or chanted, or what some banners meant. The managers also can be given the benefit of the doubt in that respect, given that they were asked about the atmosphere after the games and give it fulsome praise. In truth that can always be an awkward moment around managers after these games, but Ronny Deila and Kenny McDowall had enough on their plates without pausing to consider precise lyrics in that constant backdrop of noise.

Above all there was the sense that supporters enjoyed themselves. Not just the Celtic fans savouring a comfortable illustration of their on-field superiority, but the Rangers crowd too. Here they all were again, 50,000 gleefully shouting abuse at each other across the garden fence, enjoying the release of letting rip against the enemy they spend so much time thinking about.

Rangers' team was too limited to create any "get-it-up-you" moment for their half of the stadium to rejoice over (and generally the players were disciplined enough to not play to the gallery by taking out some bodies). That nothing happened for them on the pitch probably explained why the Rangers songbook turned more triumphant and abusive in the second half.

Mercifully it all passed relatively peacefully in and around Hampden itself. It was not a controversial game or a provocative result, which would have had a generally calming effect on the day and the west of Scotland as a whole. Seasoned Old Firm watchers even called it boring or tame, which are the sort of descriptions Police Scotland would have been praying for last week. A routine Celtic victory was always going to do less to stir passions than if they won by five or six goals or if Rangers had won at all.

Those voyeurs who had secretly hoped to witness some riotous pandemonium at Hampden, and those English and foreign reporters expecting to be present at some truly extraordinary spectacle, were united in their disappointment. But given its suppressive effect on violence and disorder, a dull Old Firm game is no bad thing.