The Media’s “Celtic Beat Nine Men” Headlines Are Grossly Misleading Garbage.

The BBC did it. (No surprise there.) Sky Sports did it. (Again, no great shock.) A couple of the tabloids have done it in their online editions. Ibrox fan media is awash with it. What I didn’t expect was to see the headline in The Guardian; “Celtic pull ahead in Premiership race as Giakoumakis sees off nine-man Hearts” it screams.

And this from their PA piece. It’s not even the latest bitter rant from Ewan Murray, their pet Hearts fan who can’t stand to give us credit for anything.

Highlighting the nine men is just another way of denying us credit for what was a very comfortable win. They had no shots on target. They planed 89 of the 90 game minutes with eleven men on the park. We were into injury time when they were reduced to nine.

Honestly, these headlines are a joke. There is a malice about this sort of coverage which is hard to ignore. It doesn’t help, of course, when Robbie Neilson himself, the Hearts manager, is allowed to go on national radio and TV and claim that it swung that match … there is speaking up for your team and there is just talking utter rot, and that’s what he did.

But he should have been called on that. 89 minutes with eleven men. No shots on target. None. Where was the equaliser the ref and the Celtic crowd robbed them of going to come from? I saw no sign of it on the horizon. In fact, it was Celtic who looked more likely to score the second goal of the game. The boss was right; we looked in no danger.

Yet the coverage makes it sound like we broke Hearts only when the sending offs happened. There is no context to those headlines and there isn’t supposed to be. They are another form of attack on us, a puny and quite pitiful one to be sure but we can recognise the intent even if this particular means of hitting us doesn’t really have teeth,

It all feeds in, too, to the underestimation of this team that is still going on across the city. They’ve apparently not noticed that we’ll very soon have gone the equivalent of a whole league campaign without defeat, and they have to come to our house soon.

All that aside, Celtic is in a good place and even these snide headlines don’t change that. Even if we’d played 80 minutes against nine men and the bias was actually reflecting the facts, the one that counts and perhaps the only one is the league top.

We’re on top, on points and goals, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t like it … only someone beating us is going to change it. 36 and counting.