Naderi strike stuns Celtic as McInnes' Rangers seal second Old Firm win in a week
Rangers silence Celtic Park to complete a derby double
If ever a stadium can be rocked by silence, this was the moment. With no visiting fans allowed at any of this season's Glasgow derbies, Ryan Naderi's winning goal at Celtic Park was met with nothing but the banging of fists on the clear plastic of the Rangers bench and the shouting of the broadcast commentators – a screaming void of apathy and atrophy, the sound of a title race blowing open and a team slowly breaking apart.
The 1-0 league victory, sealed when Viljami Sinisalo parried Kim Min-su's long-range effort into Naderi's path for a bundled finish from close range, followed last Sunday's 3-0 League Cup success at Ibrox and completed a miserable week for Celtic. Martin O'Neill's champions now sit on three straight defeats, with their lead at the top of the Scottish Premiership cut to just two points. Rangers, by contrast, have strung together six consecutive wins and back-to-back derby triumphs.
That Rangers could not celebrate with their own fans inside the stadium was a source of lament, as well as a measure of just how ugly this fixture has become over the years. It has become a day no longer relished but dreaded – a failure not just of the two fanbases but of the authorities who have allowed the ugliness to fester, who have talked a tough game on sectarianism but done little in practice to combat it at source. Nothing, though, could spoil the mood of Derek McInnes's team, hummed after a tough start to the season and now able to toast a second victory over their rivals in the space of a week.
O'Neill: 'It's a matter of whether I can help the team'
For Celtic, the international break will be filled with plenty of noises and voices: awkward questions and painful decisions that last season's dramatic double may have forestalled but which can no longer be avoided. The drop in standards over the opening weeks of this season has been alarming, and at 74 years of age O'Neill is wise enough and self-aware enough to know that he may be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.
"It's a matter of whether I can help the team, and I'll have a look at that this week. Every time things don't go so well, age plays a part, and you know what, they may be right. I'm 110 in two years' time. That may be time to wrap it up. But I'll see how it goes."
"Let me generalise a little bit. I got an opportunity to come back last October which I never thought would happen in my life. Winning the league, the game against Hearts, was one of the great moments of my managerial time. But even then, I was still thinking about whether you can still have the energy, the desire. There's nothing great about getting old, I'll tell you that."
What is true of O'Neill may also be true of several of his players. Is Callum McGregor, club legend but now 33 years of age and increasingly off the pace, still fit for purpose? Does Liam Scales need replacing? Does Kieran Tierney still have the legs? What exactly is James Forrest still doing about the place? And in the meantime, would you remotely trust the Celtic board – still essentially hollow of footballing expertise – to oversee the required transition? Not on this evidence. The summer signings – Kasper Høgh, Mika Baur and Camilo Durán – largely disappeared from view. O'Neill gambled on a back five with Luke McCowan in a sort of withdrawn winger role, discarded it at half-time and rolled through his substitutions, but the plan never really emerged from the fog.
Finally, a Derek McInnes team
"I like putting my name to this team at the minute," McInnes said after the game. It is a remarkable turnaround for a manager whose side looked completely lost a month ago, after humiliating exits from the Europa League and Conference League against Jagiellonia Bialystok and Jablonec raised alarm bells among Rangers fans as they fell off the pace set by Celtic.
"Take it back a month when Derek McInnes was under real pressure," former Rangers midfielder Andy Halliday said on BBC Scotland's Sportsound. "A big thing that was quite confusing to people is: 'it doesn't look like a Derek McInnes team'. They don't look organised off the ball, they don't look aggressive, they don't look athletic.
"How that narrative has completely changed over the last three, four weeks. That for me is a Derek McInnes team, what we watched today. Front foot, aggressive, making contact with people, when they win the ball back playing forward, running forward and putting Celtic under constant pressure for large parts of the game."
Defensive solidity is the platform. Dujon Sterling, playing in his best position of right-back, has formed a physically imposing unit with Emmanuel Fernandez and Olwethu Makhanya inside him, with that trio's solidity allowing James Penrice to maraud forward from left-back and add numbers to the midfield. Fernandez still has lapses in concentration – he was lucky not to be sent off after an early booking for hauling down Camilo Durán was followed by a dodgy, unpunished challenge on Benjamin Nygren – but once settled he repelled everything that came into Rangers' box, making 11 clearances. Makhanya brings calm authority alongside him and was named man-of-the-match. Celtic were restricted to one shot on target at home.
In front of them, Dan Neil and Nicolas Raskin have stepped up in midfield. The pair made the most passes in Rangers' ranks, always showing for the ball and getting stuck in; Rangers made 75 fewer passes than Celtic overall, but 50 more than their rivals in the opposition's half. While Celtic's passes were often between centre-backs, Neil and Raskin found each other and players in more advanced areas.
"My midfield were terrific again," McInnes said. "Celtic filled the midfield. We filled it with even more bodies, we just made sure we weren't going to get overrun in there. We look far more calm, far more settled in everything that we're doing. The players deserve so much credit for that."
Naderi leads the charge
When captain Lawrence Shankland pulled a hamstring against Motherwell having just started scoring regularly, it only raised concerns around Rangers: could Naderi and new £9m signing Kevin Kelsy fill the void? The former failed to wholly convince last season after a January switch from German third-tier side Hansa Rostock. Now he has four goals in 13 games – more than he managed in the whole second half of last season. At Celtic Park he lurked to pounce when Kim Min-su's shot was parried out to him, got his knee over the ball and finished smartly. Beyond the goal, the 23-year-old German helped set the tone, involved in an astonishing 34 duels – 18 of them in the air – winning 11, and he had the most shots and touches in the Celtic box, working so hard he was still panting for breath in his post-match interview.
"His all round play was really, really good," former Rangers striker Kris Boyd said on Sky Sports. "Him and [Kevin] Kelsy didn't have much link up play but they were working together. If one went short, one went long. Naderi's running power was really key for Rangers. When he came in at first there was a rawness about him. But there is a lot to like. If Derek can get a hold of him and work with him and make him that complete striker, because he works his socks off and he can finish."
'We've come a long way from Jablonec'
Celtic's explicit threat here was minimal: Emmanuel Fernandez got a rough ride early on, Tierney clipped the bar from distance and Ivor Pandur made a fine save from Colby Donovan early in the second half. Donovan's header was the only Celtic shot on target. With an average age of 24, Rangers have one of the youngest groups in the league, and being shorn of their experienced captain Shankland only adds to that sense of rawness – yet it is the same rawness McInnes believes is fuelling the growth.
"For a young team, it's brilliant that they can take the good from this," he said. "Coming to places like this, it won't get much more difficult. It's only three points, but in the context of the season it was important for lots of reasons."
McInnes conceded he is still "embarrassed" by the European exits and said the criticism was hard to respond to earlier in the season, but he has shown over 800 games as a manager that he can organise and motivate a team to be difficult to beat. His Hearts side that went so close to winning the league last season conceded the fewest goals of any team in the Premiership, and Rangers have now conceded just once in their last six games after keeping one clean sheet in their first seven. Becoming the first Rangers manager since Graeme Souness to win his first two derbies gives him a strong platform.
"There's a lot of growth in the team, and winning in places like this only helps. But there's plenty of league games to be won and we have to concentrate on that. It was hard to defend the criticism [at the start of the season]. We're on a strong run now, six wins in a row, which is the kind of consistency we're searching for. But at the start we didn't look ready, for whatever reason, we didn't look settled as a team, didn't carry an attacking threat. But we've knuckled down and worked hard, and hopefully that winning habit is something we can keep working towards."
McInnes knows, of course, that Rangers are not the finished article. But right now there is a power vacuum at the top of Scottish football – and after a horror week, it is Celtic staring into it.