After the final whistle had blown, the fans were thanked for their support, and their attendance welcomed for the next home game: Celtic versus St Johnstone, Saturday, August 22.
And there, in a nutshell, is all that is wrong with Scottish football, and the reason why those south of the border should be grateful to the likes of Manchester City, Aston Villa, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur: the wannabes of our Premier League.
They are, to borrow a phrase from Australian cricket, keeping the rest of them honest. They are the reason that the elite in England have to keep spending and improving, have to keep bringing great players such as Fernando Torres and Andrei Arshavin to our shores.
Without ambition, without the fear that if one of them slacked off an ambitious upstart would jump straight into their place, where would we be? That’s right: Scotland.
Celtic need to score three goals (or two, keep a clean sheet and win a penalty shoot-out) to progress in the Champions League against Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium this week, and as preparation goes, they might as well play the local scout troop as St Johnstone.
Without ambition, without the fear that if one of them slacked off an ambitious upstart would jump straight into their place, where would we be? That’s right: Scotland.
Part of their problem is that their weekly domestic fare leaves the team utterly unprepared to face the best teams in Europe. Celtic point to the odd good result such as the 2-1 home win against AC Milan in 2007, omitting to mention that it was an early Champions League group game and the Italians ultimately topped the table by four points. Arsenal then removed them in clinical style in the first knock-out round and they didn’t even finish in the top four of Serie A that season.
The odds on the Scottish Premier League this year read Celtic 5-6, Rangers 5-6 and next are Hearts at 100-1, and if Celtic continue building a squad which is capable of little more than football’s equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, no wonder European nights so often end in disappointment at Parkhead.
As Arsene Wenger the Arsenal manager, so eloquently explained last week, his club does not have the money of its rivals, not even of some of the interlopers such as Manchester City, but the presence of sprightly rivals jostling for position on his shoulder means he cannot remain snootily aloof of the transfer market for long.
So, while believing faithfully in his youth policy, he also spends big on Arshavin, and plucks an outstanding central defender from Ajax in Thomas Vermaelen, and this keeps Arsenal one jump ahead.
Celtic might not be generating the same money as Arsenal, but they are making enough to invest more ambitiously in players. Their target should not be the easy ride of the Scottish Premier League, but the sterner contest of European competition. This is a club that has settled, rather than one that aspires.
There are teams in England’s Championship division thinking bigger than the giants of Scottish football these days; or at least there will be if Newcastle United ever get an owner with vision, or Sven Goran Eriksson gets his way at Notts County.
Martin Samuel is the chief sports writer of the Daily Mail, where his column appears on Monday and Wednesday