Celtic Can Neutralise The Lie Today And Set Next Season Up To Completely Shatter It.

Today is history. It might not seem like it. It might seem like just another cup final.

But today is history.

It is history because we are going to rewrite the record books, even those which Ibrox is making up as it goes along. It is history because if we win our current football landscape will split into two separate phases; before this and after this.

Ibrox’s arrogant boast about being the most successful club in football is patently ridiculous, let’s face it.

For one thing, it is factually inaccurate. But even if you ignore the two clubs who have won more trophies than them, are they really claiming to be more successful than Real Madrid or Barcelona or the other multiple European Cup winning clubs?

Still, this is their claim and it is the one at the centre of their club’s arrogance and supremacist philosophy. So much of their club is built around it.

Last year they opened a museum; what a thing to be able to boast about when you do that, right? The most successful club in football. What are they going to say in five years? That they have the museum of the second most successful club in Glasgow?

This is the genesis of their favourite term “the Famous.”

Famous for what? For the former club’s sectarian signing policy, or the years of EBT doping, or the Britishness Days? No, they’ve been cruising on this “most successful club” claim for as long as I’ve been alive. We all know the history ended when the OldCo died, but they claim it and they still act as if they are. Today we can neutralise the Lie. Next season we can remove its reason for being.

Do not underestimate this or what it means. It’s not just about bragging rights. This is significant. For one thing, this represents a marketing bonanza for our club and we can do it at their expense. That’s huge for both clubs.

We can actually mock them even as we rip their most prized thing out of their hands and make money doing it.

That’s a delicious prospect.

But there is a deeper significance to this, and they are only half aware of what that is.

Once we have taken this away from them, and made the Lie redundant, we should have a discussion about what their club is now and what it represents and why it is such a disaster area, one which never seems to improve or grow but remains stuck in our shadow.

When they crawled out of Rangers’ grave in 2012, they had an opportunity to do things differently, and to be something better than they are.

That opportunity was lost the moment they claimed to be Rangers.

In one of the first ever articles I wrote on this site I compared them to Norman Bates; he was crazy enough to start with, but in assuming Mother’s identity he took on all Mother’s madness and paranoia on top of his own, which is what led to disaster. In refusing to grasp the chance for a fresh start they ported over the bigotry, the egotism and the lunatic spending. No lessons were learned. No changes in their thinking were made.

And why did they assume the identity of Rangers in the first place? To protect “the history.”

And what is the history but the trophy haul?

What is their trophy haul worth when you break it right down, except for that claim about being the most successful club in the game? That’s what the Lie was built for; to safeguard Rangers honours, and the reason that was important enough to construct not one but two bizarre fictions is that it protected this claim of theirs.

Well, all of that is gone if we win the cup today. We draw level with the lie, and that will neutralise it because what’s the point in claiming to be the “joint most successful” club when they have to share that with us? That, alone, will destroy some of them.

And if we win one more trophy than them next season, we will take the last thing they have left.

Today we can tilt the whole table.

That’s what’s at stake above and beyond the Scottish Cup itself. We can get right in their face after this and tell them what a waste the last dozen years have been. All they thought they had protected and secured, all they believed they have safeguarded … those things will exist in the Lie, but they will no longer matter.

So that’s what I mean when I say that today is history.

Today is the moment we separate the game here into what came before and what comes after. Today the Celtic era might definitively begin. Dominance so complete it’s reflected in the record books … even the ones which include their comforting lies.

So go out and grab it Celtic.