One of the most frustrating things about last night, in fact, the most frustrating thing about last night, was that we learned again just how bad the club across the city actually is.

Hearts played them off the park for almost all of the game. The Ibrox club took the lead and they scored a late equaliser, but in between it was all Hearts.

Even Boyd, talking about it on Sky later on, said they stole their point.

In the aftermath of the game, Derek McInnes was in his typical snarky mood.

There was some issue with shaking hands with the Hearts boss, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. There were comments he made after the game which were bitter and sarcastic, about how he had thought the guy was going to thank him for leaving him such a good team, something which is absolutely preposterous considering the number of players Hearts signed over the summer.

This is certainly not a McInnes team. Overall, he is just an angry and bitter man.

Prior to the game, he brought up what happened last season and actually said he was disappointed that Hearts didn’t do more to contest the destination of the title flag.

I mean, this is the same question I put to every single one of the conspiracy theorists who’ve made the claim that they were somehow robbed of something.

Number one, where is your proof, other than the fact that you just didn’t like the outcome? And number two, what exactly were Hearts supposed to do about it?

You know why McInnes was talking as if this Hearts team was the one that he left?

Because if this Hearts team turns out actually to be good, if it turns out actually to be successful, he wants to lay some claim to that success.

It’s typical McInnes to try something like this, but Hearts fans should give it short shrift, as they gave him short shrift last night.

In the run-up to the game, all he did was talk about how proud he was, how brilliant the club was and everything else that you would expect someone to say if you wanted them distracted from the fact that you walked out of that club and left them in the lurch.

And this is where it becomes especially frustrating from a Celtic perspective.

We should have gone eight points clear when they came to Celtic Park. Even though we lost the cup game, we should have beaten them in the league game.

But right now, we’re in a bigger mess than they are, and that is hard to believe. Because McInnes is not a great coach, and they are not a great team.

It is awful to look at the league table this morning and see that there’s only a four-point lead.

Last night, we should have made it six.

Last night, Hearts should have made sure that it was seven.

Instead, the Ibrox club feel like they’ve got off. They feel like they’ve pulled something out of the fire. The sense amongst our people is frustration. The sense amongst theirs is relief.

It is a nightmare situation for us to know that we have blown a chance like this, because we are not playing well, and we are going into a spell where we could drop more points.

And when you know you’re facing that, you need to put as many points on the board as you can and widen the gap as much as possible.

There will be days when you will not get over the line.

There will be matches where you will struggle. And especially when we have a European schedule and they don’t, the possibility that we may have more of those games than they do is very, very real. They’re not that good. That’s what makes this especially hard to take.

But they don’t have to be that good if we keep on playing like that.

Hearts, as expected, have got something.

They were very well beaten at our hands at Celtic Park, and that makes it all the more frustrating, because they learned more from their defeat than we learned from our victory that afternoon.

They handled the Ibrox club perfectly. They didn’t get rattled when they went a goal down. They stayed focused and determined to get the job done, and they almost did.

So, they are going to be contenders, at least for that second-place spot, under this guy. He has good ideas. He’s a modern manager. He’s got modern thinking.

And I think McInnes’s bitterness comes, in part, from recognising that this guy might just pull off an 80-point season himself at some point, and that Hearts are moving in a progressive direction whilst his own club continues to believe the answer to every problem is just to spend more.

And as Hearts are adopting modern thinking, we continue to rely on players producing moments of brilliance and our 74-year-old manager with ideas from 20 years ago.

It is an atrocity. ou can look at Hearts and see that they are moving in a more positive direction than we are, because there is a plan there. Whether or not you think they can pull it off is rather irrelevant. They have a shot because they have a structure, and every single part of the football operation is geared towards making the best of that structure.

I could not tell you what it is that we’re trying to do, except that it is not all the way working.

My suspicion that they would concede a lot of points across the city looks well-founded. My horrible fear that we will concede a lot of points as well is obviously just as real.

Last night was not just a missed opportunity for us to move further ahead of the Ibrox club. It was a missed opportunity to move ahead of Hearts too.

Hearts are a coming threat. Ibrox may well end up a coming threat when they get rid of McInnes. McInnes is not going to be a success there.

I said that I didn’t think the Ibrox club would win the League Cup, and I still believe that. They’re going to have to get past Aberdeen. They’ll probably do that in the semi-final.

But the increasing likelihood that they’ll have to play Hearts at Hampden for silverware leads me more and more to believe that it is the Tynecastle club who will start the process of challenging us by winning their first trophy in a while.

Our performance last night was terrible. Our tactics are fixed and rooted in the past. This management team is not our club projecting into the future.

And I worry about how many points we’re going to drop and what the cost of that might be.

Hearts won’t win the title, and I don’t think McInnes is up to it.

But we could lose it.

I think we’re more than capable of that.

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