Old Firm Clash: Rangers vs Celtic in League Cup Quarter-Final

The first Old Firm of the season arrives with something tangible on the line: a place in the League Cup semi-finals and an early crack at shifting the balance of power.

Rangers welcome Celtic to an Ibrox stripped of away fans on Sunday, with a Scottish Premiership showdown at Celtic Park looming just a week later. The stage is familiar. The stakes feel higher.

Celtic come in perfect in the league, six wins from six. Rangers, after stumbling out of the blocks, have strung together four straight victories and started to look like a side with teeth again. One of them will leave with their domestic momentum intact. The other will be dealing with noise, and plenty of it.

McInnes steps back into the fire

For Derek McInnes, this is not just another big game. The last time he stood opposite Martin O’Neill on a touchline, it ended in heartbreak – a Premiership title decider, a late twist, and his final act as Hearts head coach.

Now 55, McInnes has lived enough of these pressure days to know what awaits him. He has faced Celtic 61 times as a manager and beaten them 10. That record tells its own story: he knows how to make life awkward for the Hoops, even if the odds rarely tilt his way.

As a Rangers player, he tasted Old Firm victory in his only appearance in the fixture. On Sunday, he finally gets his first crack at it from the home dugout.

Across the technical area, O’Neill stands as the seasoned Old Firm operator. He has managed Celtic 28 times against Rangers and won 16 of those encounters. He understands the chaos, the rhythm, the moments when the stadium feels like it might swallow the game whole.

This time, though, he walks into Ibrox without a single Celtic fan in the ground.

Selection puzzles on both sides

McInnes’ first major headache is up front. Captain Lawrence Shankland is out, Youssef Chermiti is missing, and the manager has to decide who leads the line in a game that can turn on one chance.

Ryan Naderi has made a strong case. He earned a start in midweek against St Mirren after coming off the bench to score the winner against Motherwell when Shankland went off injured. Naderi played the full match, worked hard, and did the dirty running. But it was substitute Bojan Miovski who found the net with the only goal.

That finish keeps Miovski firmly in the conversation. A former Aberdeen striker, he knows this league, knows the physicality, and knows how to live off scraps. McInnes must decide whether that instinctive edge is worth a start in a game of this magnitude.

Then there is Kevin Kelsy. The £9m deadline day signing from Portland Timbers made his first start in midweek. He is still waiting for his first Rangers goal. Throwing him into an Old Firm cauldron could either light the fuse or expose his rawness. McInnes has to judge whether this is the night for potential or reliability.

O’Neill has his own calls to make, though they come from a position of strength. He rotated heavily for the midweek win at St Johnstone, making five changes to rest key players ahead of Sunday.

Camilo Duran, with six goals already this season, is expected to return to the starting XI after O’Neill admitted they missed his presence in Perth. When he came on, he was used on the right, with Kasper Hogh – just back from injury – preferred through the middle.

That throws up a classic Old Firm question: does O’Neill trust Hogh to lead the line again, or does he push Duran into the central role and try to get both on the pitch from the start at Ibrox?

At the back, Cameron Carter-Vickers was given a complete rest in midweek after starting every game so far. Dane Murray stepped in and delivered a solid performance. Yet this is Ibrox, this is Celtic-Rangers, and experience counts. O’Neill must weigh Carter-Vickers’ leadership and big-game nous against the rhythm Murray has just found.

In goal, Wolves loanee Sam Johnstone was preferred to regular No 1 Viljami Sinisalo and responded with a clean sheet and a crucial save at 0-0. Dropping him now, after that display, would be a bold move. Sticking with him means entrusting an Old Firm night to a keeper still feeling his way into the club.

Ibrox, 50,000 Rangers fans, and silence in the away end

The backdrop to all of this is unusual, even for this rivalry. Only Rangers supporters will be inside a 50,000-capacity Ibrox after the authorities ordered no away fans for this League Cup quarter-final, amid an ongoing ticket allocation dispute between the clubs.

The sides had previously agreed to a five per cent away allocation for all SPFL fixtures at both grounds. That was torn up after on-pitch clashes between fans following their Scottish Cup tie in March and an independent review that followed.

So Celtic will walk out into a wall of blue, not a single pocket of green and white in sight. It is not entirely new – they have gone to Govan without their own fans before and won – but it strips away one of the usual emotional anchors for the Parkhead side.

For Rangers, it is an opportunity and a responsibility.

McInnes knows it. He has been clear about what he expects from the stands as much as the pitch.

“We’ve got to bring the crowd with us,” he said. “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.

“I think it’s important that we tap into having that 50,000 behind us and be behind the players, support them, have their backs, not be on their backs and really make it as tough for Celtic as possible.

“We’ve got our part to play in that and I felt that if we can capitalise on good play and good opportunities, which we didn’t do last night and we didn’t do against Motherwell obviously, if we can get ourselves in front, give the crowd something to get behind, then I think the strength of our club can be shown.

“I think if the 50,000 can be utilised and we can have the strength of performance in the team that will help the team, it will be difficult to stop.”

O’Neill embraces the edge – and the warning

On the other side, O’Neill feels the strangeness of the occasion but leans into the scale of it.

“Looking forward to it in the usual way, nervously looking forward to it, excitedly looking forward to it. It’s a great fixture,” he said.

“It’ll be strange in many aspects not to have any away fans in our area. I always felt as if it would give you a crumb of comfort in some description, but it is what it is.

“We had police come in today, just a little 15-minute meeting with us, just reminders of our behaviour, which I think is actually a timely reminder, it’s a good thing as well.

“I think it’s the overall picture. Gosh, it’d be nice to have something to celebrate. I think it’s just general behaviour from us.

“The games themselves almost take care of themselves in that sense.

“There’s a great atmosphere. The league game that we played, 2-0 down early on in proceedings and Ibrox probably as loud as it’s ever been and a really great atmosphere reciprocated by us in the little split game as well too, I thought that was really great.

“But I just think it’ll be a bit strange not having the fans in, but as I say, the atmosphere takes care of itself.”

The atmosphere will come. It always does here. The question is which set of players handles it better with a semi-final place on the line, a trophy up for grabs, and the first psychological blow of the season there to be landed.