As Ange Gets Us To Another Final, Celtic Haters, Start Your Engines After Penalty Call.

I take a perverse amount of satisfaction tonight in the foot-stamping fury of Derek McInnes and others at the nature of the “penalty decision” Kilmarnock did not get today.

In a match where we had the ball in the net four times but only got two goals it would take someone pretty brazen to claim that Kilmarnock deserved more than they got … but that’s what the narrative will be.

I’m literally just in from the game and I have not seen the incident for a second time.

But it looked like a penalty to me from my vantage point and I fully expected it to be given.

That not even the VAR officials asked the ref to look again, when I’m certain they’d have liked nothing more, has me half convinced that it’s not. I’ll have to watch it properly to be sure.

But sooner or later there was always going to be a call that went in our favour, erroneously or otherwise, and you wait and see … the same people who were telling us to sit down and shut up will raise 99 kinds of hell.

So this is the week they’ve waited for, the one where they tell us that it was all a conspiracy theory after all.

How many of them, though, will darkly hint that these are the decisions “the big clubs get” in these matches?

What is that if not a conspiracy theory of another sort?

What is it but an entreaty to the SFA to up its game and start considering reform?

Hey, if McInnes thinks they were denied a penalty and VAR isn’t doing its job, or the refs aren’t, and Robbie Neilson is bitching and moaning about last night’s decision then we welcome them to the reform movement and we look forward to their support.

If we’re going to have discussions about this stuff then let’s accept the first premise, that SFA run refereeing is a system that is utterly broken and unfixable.

But I guarantee you there will be no talk about that at all, instead this will be weaponised against us.

For all that, we had one foot in the final and even if they’d gotten their call I don’t believe Kilmarnock were going to get a result. The second goal for us was coming, it was a matter of time, and people can live in denial at that as much as they like.

Their keeper made some good saves.

Our boys had the ball in the net four times.

To try and shift the whole debate to one over that decision denies us the credit we deserve.

This is a football winning machine. It is utterly relentless. Utterly ruthless.

And we’re in the final, job done, and onto the next challenge.