Celtic Wins, And The Wailing Starts At Ibrox And In The Media.

Listening to the many talking heads pontificate on the rules of football is usually glorious; most of them simply do not have a clue what they are talking about. But when a defender has control of the ball and is physically pushed off it for a forward to get it from him that’s a foul. What happens when that is explained to them, as it was to Neil McCann last night?

He says that he just doesn’t like the rule. I heard that and burst out laughing. Well of course, maybe we should just do away with the rules altogether then, eah? And the offside one with it, and just give three points to the Ibrox club for turning up.

There is an incident none of them wants to talk about; the moment in the game where Kyogo runs at the Ibrox defence and lashes in the shot from the acute angle. It’s cleared off the line, but the ball is still in play.

If you’re watching what’s happening off the ball, Butland and then Goldson both take a turn at shoving Kyogo in the back; he’s actually felled by the defender. Please note that I’ve said the ball is still in play. Either of those shoves is a penalty.

Do you hear anybody talking about it? Of course not. Because that might shift the narrative towards one where we too have a right to feel aggrieved and we won and so lost that right.

But hearing the obvious pain and frustration out of the likes of McCann and Boyd makes me laugh. That no-one wants to discuss that incident I just talked about tells you which controversy they want to highlight for the next fortnight. Well, let them.

Now today their club has leaked it to one of their media nodding donkeys that they intend to “demand answers” from the SFA over their disallowed “goal” on the grounds that they don’t think the referee made a “clear and obvious error.” But of course he did. Which is why VAR highlighted it. The same ref goes over, looks again, and makes the right call.

Claims that Celtic “intimidated officials” in the lead-up to the game, a theory which has proliferated on the Ibrox fan forums, is ludicrous because, of course, we did no such thing. In fact this website called the club out explicitly because we didn’t and I thought that in order to keep these people honest we would have to.

The news that Ibrox is going to complain is hardly earth-shattering. On almost every occasion where we’ve beaten them in the last few years they have manufactured a controversy of some sort, in order to keep the scrutiny of the media and their fans on point. This is just another pitiful deflection tactic after a bad result, and one that was quite obvious.

Whatever helps them sleep at night, I guess. If I were in their shoes, I’d be a little more worried about the state of their club and their shambles of a manager. Some of the guns have turned to point right at him. I hope he survives a little longer, long enough to go out of the League Cup and get their Europa League group off to the worst possible start.

All that club is doing in disappearing down the rabbit-hole here of blaming someone else is delaying the inevitable. And it is inevitable. The Mooch has about as much of a future as this Tory government, which is now simply waiting to be put out of its misery.

Their club will be in turmoil when they have to finally do it … but that does not change the fact that eventually it will need to be done. In the meantime, they will complain.

And based on the likes of McCann, they will have a lot of people in the media willing to cheer them on as they do it.

They, too, are focussed on the wrong things.