The cup is gone, time to move on

After yesterday’s final whistle had gone, there were a lot of emotions running around in my head. The overriding one was confusion. I was confused as to how we could have put in a performance like we did. 

It confused me because of the way we had been playing in the run up to yesterday’s game.

The St. Johnstone result had instilled a level of confidence in us – that after yesterday – was clearly misplaced. So what actually happened to cause us not to show up at Hampden?

Before I delve into that, something entered my head last night while I lay awake in bed, going over the game in my mind’s eye. Before kick off yesterday, I was supremely confident that we would achieve a treble this season.

It seemed inevitable when you look at the collapse of the Ibrox side since the turn of the year. The result on the 3rd of this month further fuelled that confidence. Then the result against St. Johnstone made me believe it was a certainty. 

I felt we were untouchable.

I wrote in my article in advance of the semi-final, that form goes out the window for a cup game. Clearly the Ibrox side have proven that to be a fact, both in their Europa League run and now domestically in the cup. I said they would be up for this one and clearly they were.

Why wouldn’t they be? They had just gotten into a European semi-final.

I think we underestimated that fact. Yes we had seen them perform poorly in the league after big results in the Europa League, but a cup game is different. Yesterday proved that.

Like or not, they were better than us. 

Something else that entered my head is this, we do not have a divine right to win a treble every season. The quadruple treble has instilled in us the belief that it is our right and that we should be aiming for