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The Scottish Premiership champions faced THREE qualifying rounds to reach the Champions League. The runners-up and our fourth placed team had to play three rounds just to reach the CONFERENCE League. And the Scottish Cup Winner having FOUR rounds to reach the Europa League. And the fifth placed team not even entering Europe

That was the shocking state of affairs Scottish football was staring into at the end of next season. Starting this season in seventeenth place in the UEFA rankings was a seismic drop from the relatively lofty position of eleventh place we ended last season and the ninth position we held for two years – we hadn’t been higher since 1988.

Just two European game-weeks ago we remained seventeenth and had earned less coefficient points this season than every nation above us apart from Israel. The analysts and supercomputers predicted somewhere between sixteenth and nineteenth as Scotland’s most likely finishing position. It looked terribly bleak. But fast forward just a couple of brilliant weeks and our outlook has completely flipped. We’ve increased our season total by nearly 50 per cent in just two weeks - from 3.4 points to five points.

That has resulted in us jumping up four places from the depths of 17th to the much more palatable 13th - and sit 1.7 points (four wins + on draw) behind twelfth placed Austria.

Two weeks ago, three Scottish clubs kept a clean sheet in the same week in Europe for the first time ever in the group stage era as we managed two wins and a draw. Celtic regained their confidence with the 0-0 draw in Italy and they put their foot to the floor this week as they recorded their most impressive European victory since beating Barcelona 2-1 at Celtic Park in 2012.

The 3-1 home win