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Highlights: Kilmarnock 2-1 Celtic
Before Sunday's tumult at Rugby Park, you'd have been hard-pressed to make a connection between the penny-wise world of Kilmarnock Football Club and the filthy lucre of Paris St-Germain, but Stuart Findlay's late, late winner against Brendan Rodgers' Celtic provided it.
Celtic had played 135 competitive games under Rodgers leading up to Sunday. Only once had a team come from behind to beat them - PSG in the Champions League in Paris in November. After Moussa Dembele's early goal gave Celtic the lead, PSG responded seven times through Neymar (twice), Edinson Cavani (twice), Kylian Mbappe, Marco Verratti and Dani Alves.
In the bragging rights for scoring his come-from-behind winner, Findlay has a world of material should he choose to use it, which you sincerely hope he does. 'Aye, fair play to Neymar, he was on the blower earlier congratulating me for emulating him. Told him I couldn't talk for long 'coz I had wee Mbappe on hold'.
As Kilmarnock manager, Steve Clarke has gone up against Rodgers four times and has won two and drawn two. It's a record that defies belief when you consider the jaw-dropping financial gap between the two clubs.
A one-off result is one thing, but a run of four? That's quite another. At a conservative estimate, Celtic's playing budget is 14-15 times greater than Killie's and yet they can't buy a win against them.
Clarke has displayed a fantastic ability to improve the players he has through his coaching and his leadership. The turnaround has been quite something.
A few months before Clarke got the job, a soulless husk of a Kilmarnock side got blasted 5-0 by Celtic in the Scottish League Cup. Eight of the Kilmarnock players who featured that day were in the starting line-up on Sunday.
It was only right that Killie get their due, but the flip side of what happened at Rugby Park is unavoidable. When Celtic toiled their way to a draw at St Mirren the previous week, Rodgers attempted to deflect the narrative away from the weakness of his team's performance and onto the officials.
On Sunday, he didn't have that option. He had no other choice but to face up to reality. Should the Celtic fans be alarmed, he was asked. Yes, came the reply. It was the lowest point of his reign so far.
Steve Clarke (right) has led Kilmarnock to two wins over Brendan Rodgers' Celtic'Putting on an unconvincing brave face'
Nothing is easy for Celtic any more. Rodgers no longer walks on water in the eyes of the support.
On the field, they look a team who have, for now, run out of energy and ideas, even against teams with a fraction of their luxuries. Domestic losses to Killie and Hearts, a goalless draw against lowly St Mirren, a joyless grind in getting past Hamilton 1-0, another struggle against Partick Thistle in the League Cup.
It's their worst start to a league campaign in 20 years - and it runs deep. Over the summer, the irresistible force of Rodgers' ambition to strengthen his squad met the immovable object of chief executive Peter Lawwell's fiscal prudence. And things have been strained ever since.
In an attempt to move forwards, Celtic have somehow contrived to go backwards. At one point, we heard Rodgers refusing to comment when asked if the club's ambition matched his own while saying, rather pointedly on another day, that "being comfortable was the enemy of progress".
The inference was that Celtic needed to get a whole lot busier in the transfer market. What they needed to do was get a whole lot more ruthless. A club that was a relentless winning machine now looks distracted and lacking in confidence.
The public spat between Dembele and Rodgers before the striker was allowed to join Lyon for £20m, the rancour over Dedryck Boyota wanting to leave for Fulham, the exit from the Champions League at the hands of AEK Athens, their dismal handling of the pursuit of John McGinn, their failure to land Cristiano Piccini and Scott McKenna and Fabian Schar.
In late August, as Lyon started to flutter their eyelashes at Dembele, Rodgers laid it on the line with words that rebounded on him and damaged his once total authority. "You can't let your top striker move on without even having anyone to come in and replace him. We need three strikers."
Dembele did move on and Celtic now have only two strikers. Rodgers has done an unconvincing job in trying to put a brave face on it all.
'Celtic weren't ready for offers'
When Celtic are on their game, on and off the pitch, they make good decisions. In their pomp, they would have sold Dembele earlier and then used the money to bring in other players from their list of targets.
When Fulham offered £9m for Boyota, if they were operating at the peak of their powers, they would have done the same thing. Take the money for a player who wanted to leave and use it to revive the squad. Quickly and decisively.
None of this happened because, on and off the park, Celtic's standards have dropped. Maybe they've been so dominant for so long that it's all getting a bit samey and dull.
Maybe they think, in their heart of hearts, that they'll win the league, and maybe even a treble-treble, at 70% of their capacity and so they can afford to take the foot off a little.
They might be right, or they might be disastrously wrong. They showed against Rangers that they still have powerhouse performances within them, but if you're only producing them once in a while, does that not scream complacency?
There was talk also of Olivier Ntcham attracting interest from Porto. The fee mentioned was £14m. You don't want to lose Ntcham, and you wouldn't necessarily have to, but that's not the point.
The extraordinary thing - or one of them - is that Celtic had no viable alternative lined up for Dembele, Boyota, or Ntcham, even if they wanted to sell. Dembele had been the subject of transfer talk from his first few months in Glasgow and Boyota had just come back after playing a few games for Belgium at the World Cup.
You didn't need to be Nostradamus to foresee some offers. Somehow, Celtic weren't ready for them.
You have to wonder what head of recruitment Lee Congerton has been up to this past while. One of the players that was eventually identified was the former Kilmarnock midfielder, Youssouf Mulumbu, who had been out of work for three months before Celtic signed him. They didn't get a third striker to plug the gap left by Dembele, they didn't get a right-back to usurp the ageing Mikael Lustig, they didn't get a wide player to do what Scott Sinclair used to do.
They didn't re-energise and go again. They brought in Filip Benkovic on loan. They now have five centre-halves on their books.
Celtic have spent money, no doubt about it. The outlay on Odsonne Edouard was a historic high and securing other players on new and vastly improved contracts has not come cheap. Celtic's annual player wage bill is £59m for goodness sake. It's an astonishing number.
In a financial and infrastructure sense, they are rock solid. Huge revenues, plenty in the bank, certainty and security. They have spent millions on fees and wages on players that Rodgers was keen on, but they're built to withstand that.
The last three months have been the rockiest of the Rodgers era though. On Sunday, when he was saying that, yes, Celtic fans should be alarmed, he looked tired. That snapshot of the manager was like the club in microcosm right now. A little bit weary, a little bit stressed, a little bit unsure of where they're going.
Source: bbc.com