I watched Rangers beat Celtic and noted bilious song, Kasper the Ghost and Steven Gerrard return

A double from Dan Neil and a strike from Kevin Kelsy earned Rangers a spot in the Premier Sports Cup semi-finals, where they will face Aberdeen, and the bragging rights in a one-sided encounter in Govan.

Alan Pattullo was at Ibrox to cover proceedings for The Scotsman and picks out four talking points:

A continued blight on this fixture

If it weren’t so seriously depressing, it would be laughable. One vignette in Sunday’s Old Firm fixture summed up how ridiculous it is that in 2026, 37 years after the breakthrough moment when Mo Johnston signed for Rangers, sectarianism remains so deeply rooted.

New Rangers signing Kevin Kelsy has just given Rangers a 2-0 lead with a well-worked goal, his first for the club in his first Old Firm game. On the way back from celebrating near the corner flag at the Copland Road End, the Venezuelan striker looked to the heavens and made the sign of the cross by tapping his chest and forehead.

Not the first Rangers player to do so in these (supposedly) more enlightened times, and he won’t be the last. A personal and private gesture, it should also be a measure of how far we’ve come since the very, very dark days of sectarianism. And maybe it is. Maybe the fact that no one raises a peep these days when Rangers sign a Catholic is something to applaud. I mean, it’s a low bar, but…

But it’s hard to feel very optimistic when, within moments of spotting this, the racket of “Cheer Up Martin O’Neill!” fills the air at Ibrox. You know the one. To the tune of "Daydream Believer", that jaunty No 1 for the Monkees that has been repurposed.

It’s a song – or at least it’s a version of the song - O’Neill heard in the early 2000s, when he came north to manage Celtic first time around. It’s still being sung. Now 74-years-old, and having missed a game last month after being admitted to hospital, he’s still being called a “sad Fenian *******” by a not insignificant number of people in the 51,212 crowd.

He anticipated this situation with a weary acceptance in the run-up to the clash, telling reporters that he really ought to be sipping a latte in a café on the King’s Road in Fulham rather than being the target for such bile. What on earth possesses a grandfather to willingly put himself in such a situation?

It’s an addiction, he acknowledged. It’s also an eternal embarrassment that this should still be happening. What must Kelsy, this new Rangers hero, be thinking? What lies in store when Rangers head to Parkhead? We don’t have long to find out. The current Ibrox manager Derek McInnes will know what’s coming. Few Rangers bosses going back to Graeme Souness have been so disliked by Celtic supporters. He knows he will get the full “Orange *******” treatment. And so it goes on.

Kasper Hogh

No one ought to be writing this striker off, not yet. But he endured a miserable afternoon at Ibrox on Sunday, stumbling when trying to make the best chance of his afternoon count following Colby Donovan’s fine ball into him from the right early in the proceedings.

A big muscular striker, it is some going for him to remain otherwise almost completely inconspicuous. It’s far too difficult to resist making a reference to Kasper the Ghost. He has scored in just one of seven games so far, although of course in that particular match, against Kilmarnock, he struck three times. Three goals in seven games wouldn’t be considered bad if they were spread out across three of those seven games rather than a single half. But as it is, the jury is still out. When Celtic needed him, against LASK and now Rangers, he’s been posted missing. Good players do not suddenly become bad players. Some Celtic fans are uneasy about how he’s being used. They argue, possibly correctly, that he’s a penalty box striker who plays off defenders’ shoulders rather than an out and out target man. It’s quite something, however, when a No. 6, in this case Dan Neil, makes a bigger impact in front of goal than an actual striker signed for £11 million.

The Rangers skipper, roundly written off in the opening weeks of the season, is also a reason to believe it’s very likely Hogh will start showing what he can do when he’s had the chance to find his feet.

Wise words

The indispensable Rangers matchday programme included an interesting article from historian David Mason remembering a series of explosive Old Firm encounters in 1949. These included a League Cup tie that saw “an avalanche of bottles hurled from their (Celtic) fans into the main stand” following a robust Sammy Cox challenge on Celtic’s Charlie Tully. Rangers won 2-0 but, as ever, the ramifications rumbled on. “The Scottish FA agreed to hold an enquiry, at Celtic’s request,” the author recalled. Tully and Cox were reprimanded and recruiting referees from another British association to oversee the fixture was considered.

Another meeting shortly afterwards, this time in the Glasgow Cup, was similarly explosive. The Celtic players argued that a winning goal from Rangers’ Willie Findlay came when they were still organising themselves after the award of a free kick. Celtic wrote to the SFA requesting that their next two games against Rangers, including the New Year fixture, should be suspended until tensions had subsided. This was rejected by the authorities. The game went on although the attendance was down by around 30,000, with the Celtic end at Ibrox “noticeably less populated” than usual. Rangers won 4-0. The author notes that “there was no repeat of the disorder” of the recent encounters. “The passions might be intense, but the contest remained sport, just sport,” Mason writes. Wise words.

All’s Del that ends Del

Paraag Marathe was spotted taking in the action at Ibrox. No surprise there, really. After all, he has recently returned as Rangers vice-chairman having stepped down earlier this year. It also emerged later that another very special guest was in the stadium – Steven Gerrard.

The former Ibrox manager posted pictures on social media of him at the stadium with Andy Halliday and Scott Arfield, who played under him at Rangers. Gerrard was clearly trying his best to go under the radar – he had a baseball cap on and, unusually, he was not highlighted by the Premier Sports cameras, as normally would happen.

If things had gone awry for Rangers, his presence might have been considered unhelpful, by McInnes especially. One remembers Michael Beale turning up for a game v Aberdeen when the pressure was on Giovanni van Bronckhorst – at the time Beale was cast as Gerrard’s tactics man, and support was building for him to return to Ibrox. Beale was in place in the Rangers hot seat within weeks.

McInnes might have viewed Gerrard’s presence somewhat suspiciously had his team not won handsomely to further strengthen his position following a torrid start to the season. Given the positive result, Gerrard clearly felt happy to circulate news of his presence.