2 hours ago
34
Rangers will need smelling salts. They were so good for the entirety of the first half that you could scarcely see a way back for Celtic.
In a break in play around the half-hour mark, Mikey Moore, exciting, dangerous and 18-years-old, juggled the ball around the halfway line. Carefree and innocent, the calmest person in the cauldron. What a half of football he had.
In his keepy-uppy moment, Moore looked like a kid in a playground. When Julian Araujo, Celtic's frustrated full-back, ran over and wrestled the ball off him, it was just about the only one-on-one battle Celtic had won.
Rangers led 2-0 at the time. They had wiped the floor with their city rivals, out-scoring them, out-playing them, out-fighting them on the floor and in the air and out-believing them. Rangers looked like a team that truly thought that no side in the country could touch them, not Celtic, as Luke McCowan had said on Thursday.
Ibrox was in thrall to them. They had an aggression and an urgency, but it wasn't just that. They had a speed and an accuracy, too. An appetite for work. A menace. A confidence.
The opening goal was a microcosm of all of those things. It began with a bit of honest grunt, a dispossessing of Araujo in the corner by the twin hunters, Tuur Rommens and Youssef Chermiti, and across the other side of the field they swept.
Andreas Skov Olsen floated in a cross and all hell was about to break loose. Chermiti hurled himself into the air. Araujo looked up at him in the manner of a person straining the neck to gaze at a skyscraper.
The connection was as sweet as can be. It flew past Viljami Sinisalo at a speed that reminded you of what the late, great Gordon McQueen said of his iconic goal against England from yesteryear. "Clemence didn't even save it on the way out."
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