Brendan Rodgers won’t say it and the Celtic players won’t say it, but if they walk out of Ibrox today with all three points you can rubberstamp an eight successive title.

Celtic won’t go popping any champagne corks at this stage but for me a win would enable them to start properly accelerating out of sight.

They’d be six points better off with a game in hand and psychologically I just don’t know that Rangers would have the mentality to claw that back. It is too big.

Celtic’s biggest threat today will come from Alfredo Morelos. I liked him as a striker last season but this season he looks fitter and sharper.

It is his temperament that goes against him but he is the one player that I think is a genuine threat to Celtic.

I do, though, think that Celtic will prevail in this one.

I just think that the way they played at Pittodrie on Boxing Day had all the hallmark of a team who know they are champions. Being pegged back to 2-2 with a penalty that never was as the clock runs down can knock the stuffing out of you but the manner in which they pulled themselves together and ran our pretty comfortable winners tells you everything about the mentality within the team.

And that is the thing with Brendan Rodgers’ side.

Whenever there has been any adversity or whenever there has been a danger of them being pulled back, they seem always to be capable of turning up another gear and going again. Under pressure they are able to turn it on again and we have seen that time and time again.

I also think that these type of games are the perfect platform for Scott Brown to go and show all of his experience.

We talk of Morelos and his temperament and Brown was guilty of that in the very early years of his career. But I think for a long time he has been trusted to go and play om the edge of that and he has done it very well.

His leadership and ability to keep things together in the middle of the park are vital in games such as this in what will be a strange atmosphere at Ibrox.

Historically I was always used to a 50-50 split of tickets and then more recently of that being diluted but still healthy enough. I firmly believe that it does detract from the game as an occasion and a spectacle but more than that, if I was a player going into the kind of environment I would be all the more determined to go out and get a result.

You need your support there and I think if I was in the dressing room before the game I’d be pretty focused on making sure that as a team we would quickly be quieting that support down.

In that case it can actually work the other way where you start to have a large home support turning on their own players and putting them under pressure.

I think the whole thing with the tickets was absolutely unavoidable but it is what it is now and it is up to Celtic to go out and put on a performance that silences the vast majority of those within the stadium.

The pressure is all on Rangers. At the very least they need to come out of the game with a point to preserve any chance of catching Celtic.

That is not to say that there is not pressure on Celtic because there is always pressure going into a derby against your biggest rivals but I think they know they have the players to be able to go and cause problems for Rangers.

We all know that Tom Rogic had to head to Dubai for international duty but guys like Ryan Christie and Callum McGregor have been outstanding over the last few months and Odosnne Edouard really just showed his class when he came on at Pittodrie.

I actually think that Rodgers will start with Edouard. I know he won’t last the full game but I think it makes sense to patch him up and get him out and then close the game down whenever you think you’ve had what you can get from him.

I fully expect him to have a pretty big day in how this pans out.