Rangers pay the price for a poor November as Celtic enjoy seven-point lead at the top

Roddy Forsyth

Rangers drew with Dundee United and Motherwell and completed a damaging month with Saturday's defeat by Hearts at Tynecastle, a combination of results which cost Walter Smith's side seven points – exactly the margin that separates them from Celtic this morning.

The next four fixtures for each club now assume enormous importance for the outcome of the title race. Rangers have three home games – against Hamilton, Hibs and Celtic – and one away to Dundee United. Celtic, meanwhile, have one home match, against Hearts, and travel to Hibs, Falkirk and Ibrox, where the second Old Firm derby of the season will be played on Dec 27.

Rangers are so close to a tipping point that one more defeat would mean that they could not win the championship by their own efforts alone. It is an alarming scenario for Walter Smith, who returned to Ibrox in January 2007 after the collapse of fortune under the ill-starred and brief reign of Paul Le Guen.

At this stage under Le Guen, Rangers were a massive 13 points behind Celtic. With the same number of matches played last season under Smith, the gap was three points, but Rangers had two games in hand.

The manner of their 2-1 defeat at Tynecastle – the goals scored by Marius Zaliukas and Laryea Kingston both stemmed from free-kicks by Bruno Aguiar and undefended headers from Christophe Berra – reopens the question of how much Rangers lost by their summer sale of Carlos Cuellar to Aston Villa. Even Rangers' goal was scored by a Hearts player, Christos Karipidis, when he diverted a Charlie Adam free-kick into his own net via the crossbar.

"We struggled in a defensive sense by giving away too many fouls," said Smith. "That gave Hearts the opportunity to get the ball into our area and we ended up losing two goals from such situations.

"With the consistency Celtic have shown, any points that we drop are a blow to us and it certainly means the three Old Firm games left are ones where the pressure is on us."

Meanwhile, despite their demoralising Champions League exit in Aalborg, Celtic drew heart from Rangers' loss, of which they were aware prior to their own 1-0 home victory over Inverness Caley Thistle, in which Shaun Maloney scored the only goal of the game. "It probably gave us all a lift," said Scott McDonald, their Australian forward.

"We knew the importance of coming off the back of a European game and getting a good result. We knew it was going to be a tough one against Caley Thistle – they made sure we went the full 94 minutes with them, but I think we were always in control of the game.

"OK, it was only 1-0 and as we know from Tuesday there is always the threat of something happening, but if you look at possession, we probably had nine tenths.

"Either way, it's another three points on the board and with our rivals' failure to do that, it didn't matter whether the performance was there or not – we're now seven points clear.

"We are 12 games unbeaten and with players coming and going there's been no set starting XI, like there was for most of last season. That just shows that the squad has got a lot stronger this season, which is great for the club.

"We have seen that come to the fore this season and we have still got a few players out, so we look forward to them coming back. No one in the dressing room has discussed for one minute this unbeaten run that we have been having.

"It's just something that has come about. Obviously we will continue to try and win every game and if we can keep the run going then it puts pressure on our rivals to keep winning as well, but anything can happen as we saw at the end of last season.

"It isn't over till it's over and it is certainly a long way away from that. It doesn't finish till the end of May so there are a lot of games to be played and a lot of work to be done.

"There was no problem in training after we came back from Denmark. Everybody came in the same as usual, upbeat, the tempo was really good. If you ask the manager that he will tell you the same. Nothing was discussed about the Aalborg game. We had the day off the next day, we got it out of our system and we know what's ahead of us. There are three trophies up for grabs and we want all three, simple as that."

Taken from telegraph.co.uk