I have said about this board that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

But our board aren’t the only people in Scottish football who are the beneficiaries of tremendous amounts of luck at the moment.

The club across the city has a very good claim to being a major beneficiary of luck all on its own. And that feeling is hard to shake when you consider Derek McInnes and just how lucky that guy is.

McInnes got lucky last night, for example, not only in the fact that his side got a late equaliser, but in the fact that our side didn’t get a late winner. If either of those things doesn’t happen, Celtic extends the lead and McInnes is under real pressure.

McInnes is lucky in his choice of opponents.

He happens to be taking on Celtic at a time when we are pitiful. It was our own failings that enabled their title challenge last season when he was at Hearts. It is our own failings which continue to prop him up right now. Celtic is a mess.

McInnes could well be the prime beneficiary of that mess, except that I think he’s shown an incredible propensity for staying one step ahead of us in the shambolic stakes.

McInnes is also lucky in that we have a governing body which is pitifully weak.

His comments this week about the sense of injustice he still feels over last season, about the contentious decisions which he believes cost Hearts the title, have dragged that argument back into the public domain again.

He continues to talk as though something happened which prevented Hearts getting what they deserved. He said before returning to Tynecastle that there remained a “real injustice and a grievance” over how last season ended and that, but for contentious decisions, he believed Hearts would have won the league.

This is a guy who is already carrying a suspended disciplinary sanction for his comments following Celtic’s late penalty against Motherwell last season. His appeal reduced the immediate element of the original punishment, but left two matches suspended until the end of this campaign, applicable if he breaches the same disciplinary rule again.

I think the governing bodies should at least be looking very carefully at what he is saying now. I don’t expect them to.

That is another area where Derek McInnes continues to be a very lucky man.

And this subject has not disappeared elsewhere either.

The Hearts chairman has spoken this week about the ending of last season, criticising the decision which sent Hearts to Celtic Park on the final day and the circumstances surrounding the end of that match.

The grievances are still being aired. The arguments are still being reheated.

Scottish football’s authorities should have found a way long before now to draw a clear line under all of this. They didn’t. And McInnes benefits from that too.

If you’ve ever been on a winning streak as a gambler, you know that it feels good and bad at the same time. Because as long as you’re winning, why should you stop? But you don’t know when the winning ceases to be until it ceases to be.

Let me give you an example.

You put on a bet and it comes up. You take your original stake back out, so now you’re no longer gambling with your own money, only with winnings.

You put those winnings on another team, and they also win.

Maybe you take half of that money and put it in the bank, then put the other half on the next game where you fancy a winner. That comes up too.

And maybe you do it again. And again.

You could have the good fortune to just keep on winning.

But it only takes one blowout. One misjudgement. One bad break of the ball in a game you’ve bet on. Something completely outside your control and completely unexpected. And suddenly, money that ought to have been yours is gone.

Whilst you’re in the winning streak, it feels like it will never end.

But that nervousness, that thing at the back of your mind that says this might be the time to stop, is worth listening to.

Because luck always ends.

McInnes has now drawn two of his last four league matches. So, any hope they had of building another uninterrupted run of momentum has been checked yet again.

And the thing with momentum is that it’s very easy to dash.

In the same week that some people were promoting the idea that we had 18 wins on the bounce in domestic football, if you excluded the Glasgow derbies, we’ve gone and shown what a stupid statistic that is, a statistic I wrote about earlier in the week.

It’s not a real statistic if you’re subtracting the parts of it you don’t like.

And now we have a perfect counterpoint to it.

That run is over. Our luck ran out. And so will McInnes’s.

Because I felt that Dundee were the better team for significant parts of their game against the Ibrox club and probably deserved at least what they got out of it. At Tynecastle, Hearts were the better team by a distance.

Even Kris Boyd said afterwards that the Ibrox club had stolen a point.

That wasn’t some partisan Celtic interpretation of the game. Even one of their own most prominent former players was saying it.

McInnes has been very lucky up until now, and part of that luck is that Celtic simply haven’t been that great, that we’re contending with multiple problems on multiple fronts.

But his luck won’t hold out.

If we can even improve by 5%, we’ll leave this guy in the dust.

He is managing one of the best-resourced clubs in the country. Of course, you would expect some improvement from the position they were previously in.

But I wonder just how much improvement there’s actually been.

The guy who was supposedly going to win the league in a walk, the guy whose side were being talked about as though they weren’t going to drop points anywhere, has now watched them do it twice in four league games.

And it could have been worse. They don’t lose any ground on us because we were woefully inept in our own right against Dundee United.

That is the maddening thing about this. Every time they offer us an opportunity to hurt them, we seem determined to decline it.

But if McInnes is pinning his hopes on Celtic continuing to be this dysfunctional, if those fans across the city are pinning their hopes on us continuing to stumble around making their lives easier, then they are placing an enormous bet on circumstances remaining exactly as they are. And circumstances never remain exactly as they are.

I don’t expect the SFA suddenly to grow a set and challenge this guy over his latest remarks, although, as I’ve said, he is already carrying that suspended sanction because of what he said last season.

I think they should scrutinise what he is saying.

I don’t think they will. He’ll get lucky in that respect. Whether he gets lucky in other respects remains to be seen.

I think we probably will win this league. I think we have enough about us in the final third to cover a multitude of sins elsewhere once Martin O’Neill stops pissing around with the team and settles on a style, a system and either a single striker, or finds a way to play Duran and Kasper Høgh together as a two-man forward line.

I think we’ll have too much for most of the other clubs in this league on a week-to-week basis. I can’t say the same about McInnes, because I don’t think there’s enough about him or his team to do it. So if I’m not screaming confidence from the rooftops, I at least have a sense that we will get it done.

McInnes has been very lucky so far.

The question is how long that luck lasts.

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