Today there are three possible outcomes, and two of them should end in a firing.

The draw is the horrible middle ground.

It does no good to anybody. It is a result that neither side can really contemplate because it brings no meaningful benefit, but it also brings no definitive ending. It simply leaves everybody trapped in the same miserable position for a bit longer.

A defeat, however, should be fatal. For either side, losing this game should bring the curtain down on a managerial reign.

And in both cases, there is already a perfectly legitimate argument over whether things should ever have been allowed to reach this point in the first place.

That is what makes today’s game so extraordinary. This is not simply about three points. For both managers, it ought to be about survival.

The three points are the football prize. That much is obvious. They will go on the board. They will contribute to the campaign. They will matter when the table is looked at tonight and again at the end of the season.

But the real prize today is survival.

The real prize is getting through the afternoon with your job.

And what I find remarkable is that there are Celtic managers in our history who would already have been sacked before reaching a game like this.

Lose today and the clamour for Martin O’Neill’s head will become almost irresistible, even for a board which seems desperately keen to keep him around as its human shield for as long as possible.

For all the state Celtic find ourselves in, though, and for all the unpalatable mess we have made of this season so far, Neil McCann’s position is even worse.

Kilmarnock go into this game rooted to the bottom of the table with nine points from 12 matches. Their supporters are already losing patience. Some of them cannot believe the deed has not been done already.

And today Celtic could fulfil their fondest wish.

Because if we deliver a hammering to Kilmarnock at Celtic Park, I genuinely do not know what force greater than gravity would be keeping Neil McCann in that job. That story should probably have ended already.

A heavy defeat today should finish it.

Kilmarnock fans have seen some inexplicable managerial appointments over the years, but this one has to rank right up there with the worst of them.

McCann had managerial experience before Kilmarnock appointed him, and had most recently been involved in the interim setup at the Ibrox club, but he had also spent a substantial amount of time working in television rather than building any convincing case that he was the obvious man for a Premiership job.

What exactly did Kilmarnock expect to happen?

I find the appointment baffling. I find it impossible to believe there were not a dozen managers working elsewhere in Scottish football who would have represented a better bet than going back to Neil McCann.

Yet that is what they did.

And they have been paying for it ever since. The decision made very little sense to me when they made it, and the fact he is still there now makes even less.

At this point, you would think they would have turfed him so far out the door that the only way he could see Kilmarnock again would be through the Hubble telescope.

I don’t understand it.

Kilmarnock supporters don’t understand it.

Nobody seems to understand it.

But I know this. We can bring McCann’s tenure to a close this afternoon. Or he can bring Martin O’Neill’s Celtic career to a close.

And notice that I keep using that word: career.

Because that is the long and short of it. When these tenures end, I find it difficult to imagine either man taking another serious football-management job.

McCann’s appointment at Kilmarnock always looked bizarre to me. And O’Neill had been away from frontline club management for so long that, before Celtic went and pulled him back from his own pundit’s chair, it seemed inconceivable that he would ever return to it.

Yet here they are. One managing Celtic. One managing Kilmarnock. And both entering a game where defeat ought to end the story.

There is something almost perfect about the symbolism of it.

The club at the top end of the league and the club at the bottom are united by the same basic flaws in their decision-making.

Short-termism. A lack of planning. Appointments which look reactive rather than strategic. No convincing sense of what comes next.

The only thing separating Celtic from Kilmarnock is resources.

We have more money. We have better players. We have a larger support. We have vastly greater commercial power. And those resources are exceptionally good at cushioning the consequences of repeated mistakes.

Kilmarnock make a bad managerial decision and it can put them in a relegation fight. Celtic make one and we’re merely in a much tougher title race.

That does not mean our decisions are better. It means our margin for error is enormous. And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable thing about today’s game.

Two clubs operating in completely different financial universes have somehow arrived at the same basic question. How much longer can this possibly go on?

And so today is about survival. Today is about who hangs on and who starts circling the drain. Notice that term? Because, of course, it is entirely possible that defeat for either side will not persuade their board to pull the trigger.

After all, McCann should arguably have gone before now. What exactly makes today different? And with O’Neill, you get the impression that he could lose every game between now and the January window and this board would still want to prove that it is the bigger man in its battle with the support by retaining him and handing him money to spend.

But today should end it for somebody. A victory for either side should bring the curtain down on the man in the opposite dugout.

Football is supposed to be a meritocracy and if Kilmarnock lose heavily at Celtic Park, then it should be over for Neil McCann. There is no obvious end in sight to their suffering while he remains manager. It may seem harsh to make that judgement on the basis of a defeat away to the champions. But something has to give.

Their supporters know it.

Aberdeen supporters have known the same feeling and some of them applauded the piece I wrote before the cup semi-final arguing that the time to remove their own failing manager was before that game rather than waiting for the inevitable result to provide the excuse.

Clubs almost never move quickly enough to bring an ailing regime to an end.

Even when there are times when you can see almost from the beginning that something simply is not going to work. McCann is a sterling case in point.

There is not the slightest shred of evidence at the moment that he can rescue Kilmarnock from the fate which appears to be waiting for them. So, failure to win today should simply confirm what many Kilmarnock supporters already believe.

Nine points from 12 games. Bottom of the table. That should be curtains.

But if Neil McCann walks out of Celtic Park today with 12 points from 12 matches, then the questions are no longer about him.

They are about Martin O’Neill. They are about how a Kilmarnock side we put five goals past on their own ground can come to Celtic Park and beat us.

They are about how a team sitting at the bottom of the league can walk into Paradise and take three points from the champions.

And those are questions Martin O’Neill is not ready to have to answer.

Obviously, I want to see Celtic win today and win well. I want us to condemn Neil McCann to the dole queue, or back to the BBC commentary box, whichever is the fate worse than death. I don’t like Neil McCann, and that’s hardly a secret. A club that hires Neil McCann as manager probably deserves everything it gets.

I certainly won’t cry tears of sympathy if Kilmarnock have left it too late to turn their season around.

But O’Neill is going to face these questions every single week now unless Celtic go on a long, sustained run of victories. We won on Thursday, against some pretty significant odds. Another win today will ease some of the tension around this place.

It won’t fix everything. It won’t make the wider problems disappear.

But for another week at least, the centre will hold, and we can go into another international break without people contemplating their future again.

Let somebody else do that.

Let somebody else reckon with the weight of the bad decisions they’ve made.

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