Celtic’s Critics Want Yesterday’s Second Goal. They Can Have It. They Can Have 50.

The Good Ship Celtic sails on an ocean of bitterness and that is never clearer than when we win when they don’t expect us to or when we have to graft for it and get there by sheer determination. The hard-luck story of the opposition is only one part of it. Every controversy involving us, whether real or imagined, generates days and days of angry denunciation.

There were decisions yesterday I have no complaint with except for one. That penalty given against us would never have been given against the club from Ibrox, and we know it wouldn’t because we’ve seen it denied their opponents. They got a nearly identical decision on Saturday.

A penalty is a penalty, and I think handball in the box is a spot kick … but not it seems when it falls against them or goes our way. Equally, I have no problem with the penalty we didn’t get. I thought the foul was outside the box. But an identical incident involving Tillman, and which the press didn’t want to discuss at all, went their way very recently.

I thought Kilmarnock were absolutely cheated on Saturday with the decision they didn’t get, and which would certainly have been given the other way. I said so in a piece after the game, when McInnes had done his usual bit of soft-soaping the matter. Oh he complained but not to anyone that matters. He was content to piss in the wind.

Yesterday we were a goal down before St Mirren lost a man to a deserved red card. That, if you believe the media, was the moment that “turned the game.”

Forget that the red card was for denying a goal-scoring opportunity to Kyogo, the one guy you don’t allow a one-on-one with a keeper, and that the game was one way traffic … we’re supposed to believe that we got a lucky break in the game rather than just a fine managerial switch a half time.

Now some people want our second goal chopped off.

You know what? I say let them have it.

They can have another one as well, we’d have won 3-1 and my old man would have got his correct score coupon up. In fact, there was a stat just after we scored the fifth about how in Ange’s 99th game we had now put the ball in the net 250 times.

So let’s be generous. These people are never going to give us credit.

It sticks in their craw just to acknowledge that we’re actually winning matches.

I wrote a Keith Jacksass spoof last year about how we’d never scored a “fair” goal in our history, that if you look back on every game we’ve ever played you can find a foul which wasn’t given before the ball went in the net, even if you have to look half an hour back into the game.

But a record like that … 250 goals in under 100 games. So let’s be generous.

We’ll pick not one, not two, not even ten but fifty goals scored under Ange and the Blood God can have them. Satisfy the lust of everybody out there who grudges us it, who hates us for being this damned good, this damned effective, this damned successful.

And you know what?

This team will still average two goals per game.

Which over the course is still comfortably title winning form.

If that doesn’t slap into some Peepul just how good this team actually is then I don’t know what will.

Maybe one day they’ll grit their teeth and force out an acknowledgement of it.