This should be a gift… No fun for Ibrox cheerleader McFarlane as Brendan prepares for the last dance

Following his team’s 4-1 win over Kilmarnock last Sunday Jonny McFarlane certainly had the Battle Fever on.

A three letter word beginning with f mentioned by the Celtic manager the previous day had got under his skin with A Proper Football Manager about to put Brendan Rodgers in his place, something that has been overdue since 10 September 2016 when the Warburton Revolution! crashed spectacularly into reality.

At that time McFarlane was the tea boy at the Daily Record Sports Desk, today he is the Digital Editor of Newsquest which says more about the rapid demise of legacy media than his skillset.

That classic Barrie McKay v Kieran Tierney observation has a recent challenger with big Jonny raving about how influential James Tavernier has been over the last five years compared to Callum McGregor.

To be fair, Tavpen has also witnessed first hand the greatest period of domestic domination in Scottish football history.

Rodgers made a throwaway comment about fun to deflect the fervour in the media room as they began the overkill to the biggest O** F*** clash in a generation, again.

Bad enough that the brains behind Newsquest Sport had been drawn in by that comment but the man himself, Phil Clement was equally irked as he repeated in various interviews after the win over Kilmarnock.

The Rangers Review, Glasgow Times, Herald and The Celtic Way were all hyping it up but on Saturday afternoon reality returned with the bitterest of after tastes.

This week the Newsquest titles with the exception of the Rangers Review will be celebrating Celtic’s title success, possibly as soon as tonight but there is every likelihood that it will be tomorrow.

Pull-outs and supplements will be the order of the day as they explain how Celtic won the SPFL title despite seven months of gushing praise for Mister Clement. A Proper Football Manager.

The key matches will be relived which will be pretty uncomfortable for Sports Editor McFarlane as he plots through how Celtic took 10 points out of 12 from the Derby clashes.

Back at the Rangers Review they are trying to follow the party line that the gap isn’t that big and that the right recruitment under Clement will wipe away the misery of the 2022 and 2023 transfer windows.

The contributors to the that website know the reality, since launch in July 2021 they have watched Celtic crush three Ibrox bosses by dominating the Derby fixture and winning the trophies. There could soon be a fourth victim.

This season was as good as it is likely to get for Todd Cantwell, Nico Raskin, Cyriel Dessers, Ben Davies, Ridvan Yilmaz, Sam Lammers and the rest of their celebrated Gladiators.

Competent recruitment by Celtic this summer under Rodgers will bring forward the day that they dread as a certain number of titles comes into view, without any being shared with Dumbarton or claimed from clubs that disappeared in the summer of 2012.