No Celtic Fan Or Official Should Be Fooled By The End Of Ibrox’s Penalty Free Run.

All things shall pass. Even Ibrox’s run without conceding a spot kick. But let’s not be conned here. This run would have continued, it would be continuing now, except that it was no longer Scottish football’s grubby little secret.

We, all of us, made sure of it.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Speirs did his podcast on this.

He was inspired by the BBC journalist Richard Gordon who had stated, in an article, the bald fact that officials are biased in favour of the Ibrox club.

Gordon himself was only saying what Andrew Smith of The Scotsman had hinted at when this run was only 40 games through.

And Smith’s bringing that into light, and the 40 plus game run which had preceded it, gave many of us our cue to hammer the point again and again and again. Speirs and his podcast turbocharged the debate because suddenly it was the story on everyone’s lips with even people in the mainstream media being forced to talk about it.

The moment he put Matt Lindsay on the spot over it, in spite of Lindsay’s denials that there was anything untoward going on, I knew that run was heading towards its end. They both openly acknowledged that real questions would be getting asked if it continued much longer, and so something that was really only being talked about on the Celtic fan media sites had become one of the most debated issues in Scottish football.

Once this was no longer under the rug, once sunlight was shining in, there was no way that run could be sustained. So, take a bow, all of you, because it was all of us – the bloggers, the readers, those who post comments and share this stuff, everyone who ever asked a journalist to comment on it or simply kept up the score, this great social media army of Celtic cyberspace – working hard which brought us here.

The objective was not to change this thing ourselves – we have no power within Hampden after all. It was to make it mainstream.

When you expose something like this to genuine scrutiny it withers and dies. I’ve always told you guys that my issues with the Scottish media aren’t so much the jobs they do as they are about the jobs they don’t and won’t do … we can move the needle though. It just takes work. It just takes effort. It just takes sustained chipping away.

There is something called tensile strength. It’s a measure of how much a material can take before it begins to crack.

If you know just the right pressure points you can bring down a building. Otherwise, you chip away with your chisel and hammer until something breaks. Eventually, everything will. It takes perseverance and the knowledge that nothing withstands forever … given time and enough pressure, you can force open anything.

The real problem those who would have kept this run going for far, far longer had is that people outside Scotland were taking note as well.

I am not convinced the Ibrox club were ever close to a record – Barcelona went 48 games and there are probably other examples out there for those who want to look – but just the mere fact some here, including in the press, were talking in those terms, and that the media was constantly having to deny that something is wrong, had gotten attention.

One of the things that finally tipped the balance was the presence of VAR.

Oh yes, VAR has had its first positive impact; curiously, it has had it by not doing anything. And that’s the point.

This has to be the only league where the introduction of VAR has resulted in more penalties being given against every team in the league whilst one club continued to evade them. The European record of spot kicks counted against them too.

It’s where VAR met the stats that the anomaly stood out a mile. That’s where it was starting to become a major talking point outside of Scotland.

When you look at this situation, it’s no big mystery why this week has gone as it did. When you put eyeballs on something as dodgy as what we had here those presiding over it need to do some fast deflecting.

It works too. Look at the response of people like The Village Idiot, like Tom English, like those at The Record and elsewhere who are now telling us that the run’s over there was nothing to see in the first place. And that we should stop whingeing.

I got an inbox full of bile between full time Saturday and going to bed last night asking me if I was satisfied now with the final toll from the last two games as we go into the break; Ibrox has conceded a penalty and been refused a stonewall one (nice rewrite of reality that), we’ve dodged several sending offs and had two given against us. Are we happy now?

And my answer is, of course we are.

Because those were the correct decisions, and all we’ve done is shone enough light that it has forced the association to play it straight.

We’ve gotten basic fairness, and it doesn’t matter that getting it took cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer; that was the method they left us with.

Basic fairness is all we ever wanted. Not special treatment. Fairness.

I don’t care how much Sevconia wails and whines. I don’t care how scornful gutless wonders like English are, because as far as I’m concerned it is Mission: Accomplished and we did that, all of us did that.

And all of us are going to have to keep our eyes on what happens next, because a lot of folks inside the Association and elsewhere might just get the idea that now we’re back to zero again they can start another lengthy run of dreadful decisions.

Remember what I wrote this morning; it is not in anyone at Hampden or Ibrox’s interests to see anything change … and that’s why the furore over this weekend’s events will die down quickly and be forgotten about.

Because then people can get back to business as usual, and that’s where we have to be ever more vigilant, ever more determined and ever more set to this task.

Alan Morrison was right; do not let anyone fob you off.

One decision doesn’t change the “pattern of assistance.” The penalty run might be over, but the culture remains and it’s not changing willingly.