'Hearts & Motherwell the winners after damaging Old Firm stalemate'
BBC Scotland's chief sportswriter Tom English evaluates the impact of Sunday's draw at Ibrox.
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'Hearts & Motherwell the winners after damaging Old Firm stalemate'
Tom English - BBC Scotland's chief sports writer
Sun, March 1, 2026 at 4:47 PM UTC·
7 min read
The body language at the end was instructive; Celtic sprightly, Rangers stunned. Two goals to the good and utterly dominant in every department and they get caught by a team that has perfected the art of the 90th-minute blow.
Aggro in the aftermath. Pushing and shoving and pointing on the pitch. Stalemate. An infinitely better draw for Celtic than Rangers but, really, not a whole lot of good to either of them.
From Edinburgh, the distant sound of laughter. There wasn't a winner at Ibrox in this 2-2 draw, but there were winners elsewhere. Derek McInnes at the top and Jens Berthel Askou in fourth might have offered up a prayer before kick-off. A draw was what they would have wished for and their wish was granted.
Hearts and Motherwell finish the weekend in a stronger position. Rangers and Celtic? Well, they tore at each other's throats and did a lot of damage.
Their respective strengths and imperfections were evident, right until the end of a tumultuous afternoon. It made for a deeply compelling game; hardcore football that had everything. Brilliance and weakness from minute one to the very last act. The psychology was endlessly fascinating.
Moore shines in glistening Rangers first half
Rangers will need smelling salts. They were so good for the entirety of the first half that you could scarcely see a way back for Celtic.
In a break in play around the half-hour mark, Mikey Moore, exciting, dangerous and 18 years old, juggled the ball around the halfway line. Carefree and innocent, the calmest person in the cauldron. What a half of football he had.
In his keepy-uppy moment, Moore looked like a kid in a playground. When Julian Araujo, Celtic's frustrated full-back, ran over and wrestled the ball off him, it was just about the only one-on-one battle Celtic had won.
Rangers led 2-0 at the time. They had wiped the floor with their city rivals, out-scoring them, out-playing them, out-fighting them on the floor and in the air and out-believing them. Rangers looked the team who truly thought no side in the country could touch them - and not Celtic, as Luke McCowan had said on Thursday.
Ibrox was in thrall to them. They had an aggression and an urgency, but it wasn't just that. They had a speed and an accuracy, too. An appetite for work. A menace. A confidence.
The opening goal was a microcosm of all of those things. It began with a bit of honest grunt, a dispossessing of Araujo in the corner by the twin hunters, Tuur Rommens and Youssef Chermiti, and across the other side of the field they swept.
Andreas Skov Olsen floated in a cross and all hell was about to break loose. Chermiti hurled himself into the air. Araujo looked up at him in the manner of a person straining the neck to gaze at a skyscraper.
The connection was as sweet as can be. It flew past Viljami Sinisalo at a speed that reminded you of what the late, great Gordon McQueen said of his iconic goal against England from yesteryear. "Clemence didn't even save it on the way out."
It was a riotous finish (was it the greatest ever scored in the derby or even in the history of the league?) and, of course, the immediate and appropriate comparison was with Scott McTominay's spectacular effort against Denmark.
McTominay's boot was measured at 2.53m off the ground when he scored at Hampden, a new world record. If Chermiti's boot wasn't higher, then there can't be a whole lot in it.
This was Rangers in full flow. In their past two meetings with Celtic they had started slowly, but now they were moving at breakneck pace. Celtic's midfielders and attackers were miles off it. When they got it, they got hustled off it in quick order.
And then they fell two goals behind, Two goals in his last Old Firm game and now two in this one. Rangers folk have expended an awful lot of time and emotion analysing Chermiti since his £8m signing and the verdicts have been damning.
No more, possibly. He's still young, still learning. His ability is obvious. He might be something else when he matures. If his first was a miraculous thunderblast, his second was a thing of subtlety and cheek after Dane Murray took a swipe when trying to deal with Nico Raskin's cross.
Chermiti flicked it past Araujo and dinked it past Sinisalo, then wheeled away to drink in the adulation of his newfound fan club. Ibrox was rocking, literally. When they're rejoicing in this kind of performance, the place shakes.
'Celtic leveller brought sanity amid madness'
They were serenaded off at the break. O'Neill made changes, as he had to. On came Reo Hatate and Sebastian Tounekti and off went the new men to this fixture, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Junior Adamu. O'Neill could have pulled the trigger on many more, but he left it at two. And it worked. He got his team very badly wrong to begin with, but he righted the wrongs thereafter.
The mentality of sport. You could spend 100 years studying it and still not understand it. Yes, it was about new blood and new tactical thinking, but it was more than that. A team with all the belief suddenly started running out of it. A team with zero belief were suddenly reborn. Confidence is a fickle beast. From nothing, Celtic lorded the second half.
Hatate, a player who has looked a poor version of his best self this season, had a huge impact. He forced the first save out of Jack Butland after 55 minutes. Celtic were now on top. Rangers were in full retreat.
When Kieran Tierney pulled one back with a header it was just reward, Rangers were idling and Celtic were desperate. Where was this urgency earlier on? Daizen Maeda and Luke McCowan could and should have scored.
The thought occurred that after getting out of jail so often in recent times, maybe time was going to catch up with them again. Maybe all of this pressure was too little, too late. There was no act of escapology against Hibernian last week - and with a few minutes to go, you struggled to see one coming here.
It did, of course. The way this season is going - drama at every turn - a late, late penalty was never going to cut it in terms of theatre. No, no. There had to be more.
Hatate's penalty was saved by Butland, as was his shot on the rebound. Ibrox contorted itself as the goalkeeper performed heroics and then the place let out a guttural groan as Hatate made it third time lucky. The visiting Celtic fans away in the distance went berserk. Sanity plucked from the jaws of madness.
Celtic had their draw. Not what they came for, not what they needed, but it was more than they thought they were getting at the break. And a lot less than what Rangers thought they were getting.
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Both managers will need the comfort of a darkened room to figure out how they could be so excellent in one half and so poor in another, Danny Rohl most of all. If there was a relieved tone to O'Neill afterwards, there was a weariness from the German.
At the end, he scratched his head for a second and then walked on to shake his players by the hand. Maybe he would have wanted to shake one or two by the neck while he was at it. This draw must have felt like a loss to him.
The upshot is that the Glasgow two are still trailing in Hearts' slipstream while looking over their shoulders at a Motherwell team who are looming large behind them.
Sunday was about the blue and the green but ended up being more about those in maroon and claret and amber. More, please. This season has been a joy of joys. Nobody wants this to end.