Gordon Strachan believes that Celtic are right back in the race for the Clydesdale Bank Premier League after their 3-2 win over Rangers at Celtic Park yesterday – a match in which Rangers had Steven Whittaker sent off and lost David Weir to injury, which may force him out of Thursday’s Uefa Cup semi-final, second-leg against Fiorentina.

Two goals from Scott McDonald and a third from the penalty spot by Barry Robson sealed Celtic’s win. It wouldn’t be the Old Firm, however, without some sort of incident, and Artur Boruc provoked anger among some spectators by peeling off his shirt at full-time and revealing a T-shirt with an image of the Pope on it.

Celtic are now five points clear at the top of the table, though it is complicated. Strachan’s team will go eight points clear if they beat Motherwell on Saturday, but Rangers will have four games in hand. Their next league game is against Hibernian at Easter Road on Sunday.

Strachan refused to be drawn on the title race, though he had the look of a revived man after yesterday’s victory. “We feel better about ourselves now,” the Celtic manager said after tasting a second successive Old Firm win, three weeks after his team looked dead and buried. “How anyone else [Rangers] reacts to this I can’t tell you, but I have a satisfied dressing-room in there. We are feeling decent about ourselves again, which is about as good as it gets.

“The points are crucial now. It doesn’t really matter about the performance at this stage, it’s about results. And we are the champions until someone takes that away from us.”

Strachan laughed off the minor squabble between Robson and Georgios Samaras, who had just come on for Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, who wrestled over the ball at Celtic’s 68th-minute penalty.

“We said before the game that Jan would take our penalties, but I’d just taken him off,” Strachan said. “So then it becomes an issue of how people are feeling on the field. If you are having a really good day, it’s a lot easier to take penalties, and Barry was getting bigger and stronger as the game went on. So it was a good choice.”

Walter Smith said he felt Rangers deserved a point and was aggrieved that Whittaker was shown a red card by the referee, Craig Thomson, when Vennegoor of Hesselink had remained on the field for an ugly challenge on Amdy Faye.

“For his first foul, OK, Whittaker got a booking, but his second challenge [on Shunsuke Nakamura] was just a tired challenge,” the Rangers manager said. “When you take into context Vennegoor of Hesselink’s challenge [on Faye] we’ve had a player sent off in innocuous circumstances. In the context of the game, Vennegoor of Hesselink’s challenge warranted more than a yellow card.”

Smith admitted that yesterday was a setback for Rangers, though he felt his team’s destiny was still in their own hands. “We had a long run recently when we went six months in the league without losing, so if we can get back to that level of play, then we can win the league,” he said.

“After our last league win against Celtic at Ibrox a lot of people were saying that that was the championship race over. But now we know that, if we keep winning, we’ll have a four-point lead, so that’s the job ahead of us.”

Strachan, asked if he felt Boruc’s T-shirt with the inscription “God Bless The Pope” was provocative, replied: “Why? He’s not a bad lad, is he? If it said ‘God bless Myra Hindley’ I might have a problem with it.”