Celtic McDonald striker hopes someone else can spoil party

AFTER the tears they shed as their team capitulated at Fir Park in May 2005, Celtic supporters know anything can happen on last-day, title-deciding afternoons.

Scott McDonald knows that too, of course. Not just because he caused those tears four years ago, but for the fact he also shed them. In the dressing room after his late, late scoring double sent the silverware Rangers' way, the Motherwell striker is reputed to have been inconsolable, only then it truly sinking in what he had done to the team he had supported growing up in Australia.

McDonald isn't keen on raking over these events. Little wonder, when he will never be allowed to forget the day he was supposed to have won a championship that, in reality, Celtic themselves surrendered by failing to hold on to a one-goal lead. Even two years, two winners' medals and 50 goals into a thus far superb spell for Celtic, his contribution to the club's last league loss remains a major tagline in the tale of his career. So much so, there was barely disguised glee from among us Sunday scribes when he walked in to the press room at Lennoxtown last Thursday. McDonald could only be considered the perfect man to discuss today's scenario, wherein Celtic need to beat Hearts and hope Rangers slip up against Dundee United to win the championship. For that is simply 2005 all over again with the roles reversed. While the prospects of the Ibrox men blowing it are slender, McDonald hopes because he knows better than anyone that sort of unexpected slip-up can be induced.

"I really don't want to talk about that," he said, when it was put to him his personal experience is evidence strange things can occur on days like today. "What's in the past is in the past. Things happen. It's certainly not going to be. Well, it might be Scott McDonald scoring goals at one side, but it might be someone else putting their name in history for other reasons. We'll see."

Essentially, Gordon Strachan's side need a player in tangerine on Tayside this afternoon to enter Scottish football folklore just as McDonald, to his subsequent discomfort, did the last time Rangers won the league. They also need the Ibrox men to fail to put the game beyond doubt. It was this inability to add to an early lead that proved central to Celtic being paralysed by fear at Fir Park in 2005. Yet, until the travelling support's edginess transmitted to their players in the final ten to 15 minutes that day, McDonald didn't detect any particular tension in Celtic.

"You could sense it in the crowd more than anything; I think the crowd has a lot to do with it," he said. "They are the world's worst, more than the players, because they are not in control of it. So they panic every time the other team goes up the park."

Even though he wants a "nice, relaxed mood with a lot of support and a lot of volume" at Celtic Park, McDonald is well aware "people have emotions and it's hard to hide them". The emotion the Celtic support might struggle to hide is anger over their team squandering a seven-point advantage to find themselves the outside bet to claim a fourth consecutive championship. For McDonald, all Celtic can do today "is worry about our end and do our job, and hope the people at the other end that we want to do their jobs, do". He stressed it is no "foregone conclusion" that Celtic will beat Hearts. But the fact that Rangers expect them to do so, and that most view the title as the Ibrox men's to lose, has McDonald believing that Celtic Park denizens might not be twitchy from the start. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

"OK, we have a lot to lose but we are going in as underdogs anyway," he said. "There is pressure on us to win the game but there is less pressure than if I was going to the other game. Then I would be saying 'it is in my hands, whatever I do here could make the difference'."

McDonald is unwilling to enter into a post-mortem for a league season still alive. But the fact Celtic enter the last afternoon of it ailing many attribute to travel sickness not helped by weaknesses in the goal-netting department. McDonald, with a haul of 19, is a third down on his tally for last season but still the club's top rigging-rippler by a distance.

"Scoring goals at times in important games has been difficult," he said. "Funny how it works, though, that we have a better goal difference because we have scored more goals than anyone else. Of course, not scoring in the last two away games (the 1-0 defeat by Rangers and 0-0 draw at Easter Road last Sunday] has created a problem. Going to away grounds has been difficult for us, no question of that. We haven't won two games on the trot away for a considerable time and that's been disappointing. That's probably the reason we are where we are now."

It was in November that Celtic last won two consecutive away league games – and even then the victories away to Hamilton and St Mirren were far from convincing. Then, as with many away performances, the fragility of the defence was as much a concern as the efforts of the forward line. Indeed, for all that the strikers have borne the brunt of criticism recently, Rangers have drawn blanks in more SPL encounters this season. What Walter Smith's men have not done is endured a mini-collapse in the second half of the season as has befallen the champions. Strachan's side haven't won three consecutive league games this year and have dropped 20 points out of a possible 48.

McDonald contends that Celtic's shortcomings will be irrelevant should matters go their way today. "If you don't win you'll think you could have done better. But if you win the league you are not going to think things like that," he said.

Perhaps more wishful thinking. Strachan accepts his team should have gained more points. Growing numbers of Celtic supporters are becoming less accepting of him because they have not done so. Even a championship would not mask the fact that Strachan's side have been on the slide in a fashion that does not square with their resources in an otherwise ultra-modest Scottish environment.

Celtic have become a blancmange of a football team. They can look good, deliver a certain sweetness but are decidedly wobbly and ultimately unsatisfying. And today might be when they receive their just deserts.