Scottish Premiership: Celtic v Hearts, Celtic Park, Saturday, 12.30pm – Live on Sky Sports
Scotland’s wait, Scotland’s fate. Soon it will be over and Scottish football will know if the most compelling season in two generations has brought a first league title since 1960 for Hearts or a 14th in 15 years for Celtic. The latter would take Celtic to 56 league titles; Rangers have 55.
The stakes are historic and that Celtic and Hearts meet at lunchtime at Parkhead is a theatrical piece of engineering by those who organise the Scottish Premiership’s post-split fixtures. It is unmissable drama, something said rarely as Celtic’s seemingly inevitable annual victory amounts to a dulling procession.
After 37 games dating back to the first weekend of last August, when Brendan Rodgers was in charge of Celtic for a third consecutive season, and Derek McInnes was the new face at Tynecastle, Hearts lead by one slim point.
It is an advantage, of course, even if it appears vulnerable. It means a draw will be enough to ensure McInnes’s unforeseen challengers get across the line to make history for Hearts and the modern Scottish game. Not since Alex Ferguson steered Aberdeen to a third title in six seasons in 1985 has the league had a non-Glasgow champion. A Hearts triumph would be disruptive and rejuvenating.
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But Celtic must be held at bay in a stadium containing 60,000 fanatical Hoops and just 750 clad in Midlothian maroon. And if the visitors from Edinburgh are to claim the champions’ flag, they must also pass Celtic’s 74-year-old shield, Martin O’Neill, the Kilrea Cú Chulainn in his retro tracksuit.
Hearts’ stimulating tilt at the title has been the tale of the season. They won that first game in August at home to Aberdeen and in defeating Falkirk 3-0 at Tynecastle on Wednesday night ensured an entire season unbeaten on their home turf. It is a significant achievement for a team that won less than half its home games last season. It is a reason Hearts have 80 points, a club record. They will have a Champions League qualifier to start next season.
But Hearts are away. They have been to Parkhead once this season, in December, and won 2-1. Former Ireland under-21 international Oisín McEntee scored the winner. It was Wilfried Nancy’s first game, the first of eight.
Nancy lasted 33 days and was part of Celtic’s chaotic managerial churn. It first consumed Rodgers after a defeat at Hearts in late October, ushering back O’Neill from writing books, radio punditry and trips to theatres. Celtic were eight points adrift of Hearts and these things simply do not happen in Scotland.
O’Neill returned, steadied things, then again in January, following Nancy’s departure, to push Celtic forward while putting out fires. His inspiring return has run parallel to Hearts’ impressive determination to keep pressing on themselves, to keep proving doubters wrong.
“Martin” has re-emerged. In Scotland, references to him frequently omit the surname; it is just Martin. Even on Wednesday night, which was a riveting sporting spectacle teeming with controversy and conspiracy, a night when McInnes described the awarding of a debatable penalty kick to Celtic in added time at Motherwell as “disgusting”, among other terms, the Hearts manager still had the will and composure to say: “Martin has done a brilliant job.” Just Martin.
O’Neill likes to give the impression he is just bumbling through. He is self-deprecating about his mental faculties, his eyesight and modernity. It is a bluff. He is as sharp as a broken bottle, as the old scribes used to say. He may have delegated coaching to Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham, but O’Neill retains that personal authority. You would not mess with him, even players who know little of his galvanising of Celtic at the turn of the century. Or “some long-gone yesteryear”, as he put it this week.
O’Neill paid his respects to Maloney and Fotheringham via his old mentor – “To quote Brian Clough, who once said that he felt like the shop window while Peter Taylor was the goods at the back, I feel that about this coaching staff.” He said of pressure, he is “not so sure you can enjoy it”, that his anxiety levels are the same as they have always been and that the fan-club-player unity witnessed last Sunday during the victory over Rangers might be temporary: “Who knows if it’s just respite?”
That is for Celtic’s future. For now, this will be O’Neill’s last match in the home dugout at Parkhead. There will be one last match, the Scottish Cup final against Dunfermline – managed by Neil Lennon – next Saturday.
Without O’Neill, Hearts would be champions already. Just eight weeks ago, he saw his charges beaten 2-0 at Dundee United to fall five points behind with seven games to play. “Of course it’s a concern, of course it’s a big blow to us,” O’Neill said that day. The mood was low, the Celtic directors were the target of more fan ire.
Celtic have won the first six of those seven games and from Tannadice then to Paradise now, from discontent to anticipation, O’Neill has steered Celtic into a position where one more win clinches one more title.
It will be remembered only partly for that. This is My Story is Hearts’ anthem and so much of the season has been theirs. Acknowledging their outsiders’ appeal, O’Neill said on Friday afternoon: “Everybody outside Celtic and the Celtic diaspora wants Hearts to win.”
That was about 36 hours after McInnes said: “It feels like us against everybody.” They both can’t be right.
McInnes’s “disgusting” remark came with intimations that, in fact, it is not just Celtic and the green diaspora seeking a Celtic triumph. In his defence, McInnes was speaking in the emotional minutes after his side’s energetic win had Hearts three points clear with a superior goal difference of five. Celtic were drawing 2-2 when the whistle blew at Tynecastle. Then came the latest of late penalties.
Hearts players were out on the pitch, injured McEntee among them, staring at his phone. When news landed that Kelechi Iheanacho had successfully converted the penalty, maroon deflation was palpable.
McInnes felt it and could feel it descending on all around him. He knew immediately Hearts cannot afford to go to Parkhead on a low. So his verbal barricades were assembled, injustice raised. An angry siege mentality will accompany Hearts across Scotland.
A multitude of cameras will follow, as will angst. Hearts have played Celtic three times this season, winning twice and drawing once. They have scored seven times. But this is different. This is the last game on the last afternoon. This is it. There will be a champion. Scotland, and far beyond, is gripped.
