Firm resolve the key factor

Kilmarnock v Celtic Who needs it more? There are more subtle definitions of a championship run-in, but very few that are more succinct.On TV: RTÉ 1 (3.0)Ian Bell sets the context of a duel encapsulating all that isright and wrong about Scottish football

The last man standing in the Scottish Premier League tomorrow afternoon will know most of what there is left to know about appetite, endurance, will and sheer good fortune. But neither Martin O'Neill nor Alex McLeish will need any lessons in arithmetic.

The dialectic that is the Old Firm has its perfect statistical expression this morning. Equal in points; equal in games won, lost and drawn; equal in goal difference: only the fact that Rangers have scored 95 goals to Celtic's 94 separates Scotland's dominant clubs at the death. Were it not for these contending halves of a divided city, forever hovering between drama and crisis, the game in Scotland would be sterile. Yet the irony is, arguably, that the Glasgow giants are the very institutions enfeebling the national sport.

Anyone who happened to catch a glimpse of the Celtic support in Seville's Estadio Olimpico on Wednesday night will understand the scale of the thing. Somehow a 15,000-ticket allocation became 35,000 hooped shirts. As many again were gathered in the city's squares and bars. By a quirk of history and fate, the football backwater of Scotland happens to house one of the biggest clubs in the world. Yet Rangers, whose fans suddenly became fluent in Portuguese for the night, are just as big.

So who needs it more? On one level, it hardly matters. Both teams will be allowed a crack at Champions League football yet again next season. Both face little in the way of serious competition at home. But Celtic, licking their wounds after succumbing to Porto in the enervating heat of Seville, confront the real prospect of emerging from an astonishing year empty-handed.

Rangers, having failed to make any sort of progress in Europe, will regard anything less than the SPL championship as a humiliation, not least because of O'Neill's majestic ascent over the past three seasons.

On paper, McLeish's side should have the edge. Dunfermline at home are somewhat less daunting than Kilmarnock away. The game at Ibrox means nothing whatever to the Fife club, whereas the Ayrshire outfit retain hopes of a UEFA Cup spot. Equally, Rangers must be calculating that O'Neill's team are both demoralised and exhausted after the battle of Seville. Even so, the Ibrox management team were this week pondering the psychological nuances of these last, decisive encounters: how and when should McLeish tell his players about the unfolding events in Kilmarnock?

The non-aligned can only look on with a mixture of weariness and fascination. Weariness because, despite the Old Firm's private war, the Scottish season is reaching another familiar, predictable conclusion: this morning 34 points stand between the Glasgow pair and Hearts, the third-placed club. Fascination because, yet again, the dimensions of these big fish serve only to prove that they occupy a very small pond indeed, and that fact invites some serious questions.

If football were rational - bear with me - and UEFA were open to persuasion, the Old Firm would be members of a British super league. They are global franchises, with fan bases approaching a million apiece. Both are able to attract more than 50,000 fans to home games. They constitute the only two reasons why Sky was ever interested in Scottish football and might be persuaded, furthermore, to throw a few more million at the Premiership.

Yet what is the reality? Celtic and Rangers currently earn barely a quarter of what they might claim in TV rights if they faced English opposition. The inevitability of their dominance stultifies the rest of a Scottish game asset-stripped, almost ritualistically, by the duopoly. And they are trapped by a familiar paradox: investing for success in Europe, they risk crippling themselves financially; dependent on revenues from Europe, their only means of preparation is a second-rate domestic league. So they are locked in the old embrace. At home, for them, derby games are the only games that matter.

The strain, inevitably, is beginning to tell. With four-fifths of turnover going towards wages, Rangers' debts are reported to approach £80 million. No one denies that the club will be forced to sell this summer, even if that means parting with the club captain, Barry Ferguson, for about £10 million.

Celtic meanwhile have picked up perhaps £17 million from their European adventures but, with £20 million of debt and a board disinclined to dip too far into the red, O'Neill will have to be at his eloquent best to secure urgent replacements for an ageing squad. Henrik Larsson, unflagging genius as he may be, is in his 30s, like several others, and unlikely to be around beyond the end of next season.

So will his manager stick by the club he supported as a boy? It has become the perennial question of Scottish football, partly because indecision has become O'Neill's middle name. Venerated by the Celtic support, demonstrably a coach of international calibre, he could hardly be blamed if his enthusiasm for yet another Scottish championship title began to wane.

If Ibrox is beset by financial uncertainty, the doubts at Celtic Park revolve entirely around O'Neill and the rolling contract he spent months failing to sign.

The big finale has a few sub-texts to it, in other words. After this last day of mathematically inspired tension, Rangers seem set to retrench. After their first European final in 33 years, meanwhile, Celtic could be in for a deflating anticlimax in which their manager, at his prime, will undoubtedly receive invitations to consider his options. Amid all this, Kilmarnock and Dunfermline are bit players.

For all that, and it is no small mercy, the season has ceased to be a procession. BBC Scotland is clearing the decks, preparing to broadcast both tomorrow's games simultaneously on television and radio. Outsiders will be reminded, not for the first time, that Glasgow's nasty sectarian secrets are matched by a passion for football that is almost without parallel. Among such fans it is impossible to say who needs it more. Defeat is unthinkable, almost physically painful. Celtic fans already regard the final in Seville as an honourable defeat in which they can take pride. There will be no such grace in the face of a title flag flying over Ibrox Park.

That said, you would have to bet on McLeish and his team. In recent derby games Rangers have more than equalled their rivals, yet Celtic are, for now, champions. That is incentive enough. Listening to some of O'Neill's players after the Porto game, meanwhile, you felt that they were at the end of their season. They talk persuasively enough about the importance of the Scottish title and what it means to the fans, but it is clear that the UEFA Cup was the championship that mattered.

That is how it should be, of course. Yet in that context, one last push at home might well be beyond Celtic. Jim Jefferies and Kilmarnock will be in no mood to make O'Neill's life easy, least of all at Rugby Park; Dunfermline, you feel, will not fight to the last. As of now the outlook seems blue.