Ibrox Crowd Takes Centre Stage in First Old Firm Cup Clash

Sunday’s Premier Sports Cup quarter-final is the first Old Firm meeting of the season, Derek McInnes’ first as a manager in this fixture, and it comes with Ibrox stripped of any away support.

This is not just an early cup tie – it’s the first Old Firm collision of the season, and it lands at exactly the moment both Glasgow clubs are trying to shake off European humiliation. Celtic and theRangers meet at Ibrox on Sunday at 12:00 BST in the Premier Sports Cup quarter-final, and as BBC Sport reports, Rangers legend Graeme Souness sees it as a chance for both sides to “put a marker down” before the league fixtures follow.

No Away Support at Ibrox

There won’t be a single Celtic voice inside Ibrox this weekend. The clubs and the SPFL agreed there will be no away supporters at any SPFL fixture between the sides this season, a decision that followed the Scottish FA’s independent review into the unrest and pitch incursions at March’s Scottish Cup quarter-final, when roughly 8,000 away fans had been allowed in for Celtic’s penalty shootout win. More on the away-fan lockout here – Rangers had floated an allocation of just 300 for Sunday, and Celtic rightly knocked that back.

Form, Scars and a European Hangover

Celtic go in on the back of six straight Premiership wins, 14 goals for and only three against, though the manner of some of those results has been shakier than the table suggests. The elephant in the room is what happened against LASK – a 3-0 first-leg cushion in the Champions League play-off turned into a 5-1 mauling in Austria and a 5-4 aggregate exit, one of the great Champions League collapses in the club’s history. Four league wins have followed, but a scrappy win at St Johnstone midweek won’t have anyone at Celtic Park entirely convinced.

McInnes has his own European scar tissue – beaten by Jagiellonia Bialystok, then out of the Conference League play-off to Jablonec on penalties – but domestically he’s found form, with four straight league wins after a stuttering start. He was blunt about what Sunday requires: “You’re not going to play Celtic and dominate the game for 90 minutes. We’ll have spells, they’ll have spells, it’s just the way it is,” McInnes said via BBC Sport. Without away fans to unsettle, that Ibrox crowd becomes his tactic as much as any team selection.

The Cup That Keeps Producing Firsts

Martin O’Neill knows exactly what he’s asking his players to overturn. “The crowd will be right behind their team, which you would expect. We just do our best. We know that we’re up against a very fine side,” O’Neill said. History is stubborn on this one – Celtic haven’t won a League Cup knockout tie in Govan, ever, and their last League Cup win at Ibrox came in the 1973 groups.

Rangers have reached the semi-finals in all but one of the last ten seasons of this competition, so there’s no complacency to be found on either side of the city. Whoever silences the other’s corner of Ibrox first – with no travelling support to help – will fancy their chances of making it two firsts in one afternoon: a first Old Firm win of the season, and McInnes’ first as a manager.

Mon The Hoops.