Two games left. One point separating Hearts and Celtic at the top of the Scottish Premiership. Daizen Maeda’s bicycle kick into Jack Butland’s net on Sunday sealed a 3-1 win over Rangers — and now only Derek McInnes’ side stands between Martin O’Neill and a title nobody saw coming in August.
A fairytale season that has gripped Scottish football
Hearts chasing their first league championship in 66 years — that single fact explains why media requests have flooded in from across Europe and beyond. The club’s communications staff spent months fielding inquiries from outlets in places few Scottish football stories ever reach. This is not routine domestic drama. It’s something rarer.
You don’t need to be a Hearts or Celtic supporter to feel it. Fans of every club — blue, tangerine, claret, amber — have some personal stake in how this resolves. Scottish football hasn’t produced a title race this tightly contested in living memory. Pure theatre, as the moment genuinely deserves.
At Tynecastle, the mood has been calm and purposeful all season. While Celtic Park erupted in protest during the autumn — fans directing fury at the board, at manager Wilfried Nancy, whose appointment now looks like one of the great miscasting errors in recent Scottish football — Hearts quietly went about their business. The contrast could hardly have been sharper.
Now those roles have shifted. Celtic fans are daring to believe again. Hearts fans, who once watched from a position of comfortable authority, can hear the footsteps behind them.
| Club | Games played | Points | Goal difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearts | 36 | Leading by 1pt | +3 goals |
| Celtic | 36 | Second | Chasing |
| Rangers | 36 | Eliminated | Out of race |
Rangers, who invested somewhere between £35m and £40m across the last two transfer windows, exit this story with complaints about a Alistair Johnston challenge and doubts over Celtic’s opener. That noise changes nothing. A leadership deficit at Ibrox proved decisive long before Sunday’s final whistle.
Maeda, O’Neill and Celtic’s improbable momentum
Daizen Maeda went 17 consecutive games without scoring before April. Last season, his longest barren run was six games. The Japanese forward looked unhappy for much of the campaign after a proposed move to Germany collapsed in circumstances that reflected badly on Celtic’s recruitment operation. And yet, when it mattered most, he delivered.
His recent record tells its own story :
- Two goals in a 3-1 win over Falkirk
- One goal in a 2-1 victory against Hibs
- Two critical goals in Sunday’s 3-1 derby win over Rangers
That second goal against Rangers — an overhead kick that looped over Butland — was the finest he has scored in a Celtic shirt. Timing, instinct, execution. Kieran Tierney had run off James Tavernier on the left; his cross met Maeda’s improvised volley before the goalkeeper could react. Butland simply watched it drop in. Not the moment to lose your best form.
Martin O’Neill has been measured throughout. The veteran manager — one of the most decorated in Celtic’s history — acknowledged after Sunday that winning two games from here is like climbing two mountains. He knows the road. He has walked versions of it before. His calmness has filtered through a squad that has never played with genuine fluency this season but has repeatedly found ways to win ugly.
Celtic have not been convincing in 2025-26. O’Neill himself would barely dispute that. But there’s a stubbornness to this group — a refusal to lose ground permanently — that has carried them back into contention from a position where resignation letters were more eagerly anticipated by fans than league medals.
Wednesday sets the stage for Saturday’s defining showdown
Hearts host Falkirk on Wednesday. Celtic travel to Fir Park. Motherwell represent genuine danger — the kind of fixture that has derailed title chases before. O’Neill will assume McInnes’ side win their midweek game; he has to plan on that basis. Anything Celtic drop at Motherwell hands Hearts the initiative going into Saturday’s final-day clash at Parkhead.
That last fixture — Hearts at Celtic Park — carries a weight that Scottish football rarely generates. Should Hearts arrive with a lead intact, the pressure on Celtic becomes extraordinary. Should Celtic level the points before kick-off, it becomes a straight shootout, goal difference the tiebreaker hovering over every move.
O’Neill and McInnes will both preach the same thing to their players this week : focus only on the next game. Don’t look at the table. Don’t read the noise. Easier said than done when an entire nation is watching.
For Hearts, the prize is historic — a title that would end a wait stretching back to 1960. For Celtic, it would represent something different : proof that even a fractured, often laboured season under a manager who rebuilt trust from scratch can still end in glory. Both storylines deserve a proper finale. Saturday, Parkhead. That’s where this gets decided.
