Will Old Firm raise bar of mayhem another notch at Hampden?

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So, a stock take since the last time Rangers and Celtic met in the goalless snoozeathon at Ibrox on the final day of August...

A game in which Celtic required 71 minutes to get a shot on target, and a stalemate that confirmed Rangers had made their worst start to a league season since 1983.

Martin (Russell) is out at Rangers and Martin (O'Neill) is in at Celtic.

Danilo, the £6m Rangers striker, has scored in back-to-back games for the first time in almost a year. Youssef Chermiti, the £8m Rangers striker, has finally scored after two-and-a-half years without a goal.

On Wednesday, Johnny Kenny became the first Celtic striker to score twice in a game since Adam Idah in April.

In the match against an admittedly obliging Falkirk, Celtic scored four times in 90 minutes having scored only 12 in the 810 league minutes that went before.

On Sunday at Hampden, when the teams go head-to-head in the League Cup semi-final, there will be a new/old Celtic manager and a rookie Rangers head coach, a 73-year-old in one dugout and a 36-year-old in the other.

O'Neill has managed in 27 Old Firm games, the first of them when his Sunday counterpart, Danny Rohl, was just 11.

After Martin, Barry Ferguson and Philippe Clement, Rohl will become the fourth manager to lead Rangers into an Old Firm game this year.

O'Neill, who since his return has been going around calling everybody "young man", is basking in the adulation of the Celtic fans. He got off to a good start with that 4-0 win against Falkirk.

Celtic have now won 53% of all games this season. Desperately poor, but at least O'Neill improved matters a tad.

Rangers have won 33% of their games. Hopeless, but getting better under Rohl, who has tweaked his formation, going three at the back with more tempo in the team.

The German, who logic says should be eaten alive by the horrible rigors of his job at Ibrox, also looks like he's revelling in the gig. He's now won two league games in a row, something that was beyond his predecessor.

Rangers also kept a clean sheet on the road on Wednesday, having failed on that front for 25 games on the bounce dating back to December. They had a late Jack Butland penalty save against Hibs to thank for that, of course.

All season long, these clubs have been basket cases, full of internal strife and external noise. It's been ugly.

The Rangers' motto is "READY", which has begged the question - ready for what?

The Celtic equivalent is "A Club Like No Other" and, to be fair, as the club threatened to eat itself earlier in the week, that was a hard one to argue against.

These Glasgow institutions reduced Martin to marshmallow and Brendan Rodgers to a grim spectacle banging on about Honda Civics and Ferraris after a defeat at Dundee.

On the theme of a changing landscape, Celtic major shareholder Dermot Desmond, who could give lessons in reticence to a Trappist monk, appears to have turned into a human loudhailer.

Statement o'clock was once the exclusive preserve of a troubled Rangers (and how Celtic mocked them for it).

But even in their darkest days, when Charles Green was claiming that one-eighth of the world's population were, or could be, turned into Rangers supporters, they never produced anything remotely close to what Desmond delivered on Monday when arguing, in a jaw-dropping way, that the now departed Rodgers wasn't a Celtic Messiah after all, just a very naughty Bhoy.

Celtic like to talk about the Celtic Way, as in their way of doing things. They see themselves as unique, which Desmond's hit on Rodgers most certainly was.

For all his faults, did the much-decorated manager deserve such brutal treatment?

For his 27 years at the club as player and assistant manager, did John Kennedy deserve a bit more than a perfunctory sentence of farewell from the club upon announcing his exit?

The Celtic Way is a moot concept right now.

And now the Glasgow giants are back in each other's face again. This could get grisly, but let's hope there's a modicum of football played at Hampden.

Old Firm games of recent vintage have thrown up some belters - Rangers beating Celtic 3-2 at Celtic Park in March, Celtic beating Rangers on penalties at Hampden in December after drawing 3-3.

That 0-0 at Ibrox was a blight. The only memorable thing about it was how utterly forgettable it was. Rangers ran around like mad dogs in a meathouse and got a draw having just conceded six to Brugge.

Celtic passed backwards, hesitant and unthreatening having just been knocked out of the Champions League by Kairat Almaty. It was the third time in four matches where they failed to score.

The game produced a combined xG of 0.32. We can't be certain - stats vary - but there's a serious chance that this is the lowest xG ever recorded for a game in Britain since records began.

It certainly felt like one of the most stultifyingly dull encounters in the modern history of the fixture.

This game remains a curiosity. Celtic lorded it over Rangers in the league table last season, beating them by 17 points, outscoring over the course of the Premiership campaign by 112 goals to 80, out-defending them by conceding 26 goals to 41, with a goal difference of plus-86 for Celtic and plus-39 for Rangers.

And yet, in Old Firm games, none of this dominance was reflected. In the four games in the league, there was a 1-1 draw, a 3-2 Rangers win at Celtic Park, a 3-0 Rangers win at Ibrox and a 3-0 Celtic win at Celtic Park.

The League Cup final ended 3-3 after extra time, Celtic winning it in a penalty shootout. So, including the 0-0 earlier this season, in the last six meetings - two victories for Rangers, two victories for Celtic (counting the shootout) and two draws. In goals scored, Rangers shaded the six games 10-9.

The concept of form going out of the window in derby matches is a bit of a cliche, but sometimes cliches can be true. Nothing else explains why Celtic, so much better than Rangers last season, found it so fiendishly difficult to get the better of them.

So much has changed at these clubs in recent weeks, but some things never change. The emotion, the bonkerdom, the ridiculous high of winning this game and the awful low of losing.

Both clubs have set an impressively high bar for mayhem this season. Don't be surprised if that bar goes higher still with so much on the line at Hampden.

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