Today Celtic Got The Injustice They Deserve.

Football fans, if they follow their team long enough, come to break games like that into broadly three categories. There are days when you get everything you deserve. There are days when everything goes against you and you feel a sense of injustice. And there are days, many days when you follow this club, when you get the injustice you deserve.

Was there an element of cheating in that first 45 minutes today? Yes, of course there was. Absolutely and no question about it. The red card is a travesty. Their penalty is a joke. But if we score ours none of that happens, which more than anything else brings us back to a point we’ve made often and lamented loudly; why are we so bad at the dead ball?

If the winds of change are rolling through Celtic Park with the departure of Mark Lawwell, if that’s to be the start of something and not just an end point done as a sop to increasingly angry supporters, then we seriously need to drive a wrecking ball through the coaching department and rebuild that from scratch because something is way, way, way off there.

I’ve never seen a Celtic team so utterly ineffectual from dead ball situations.

We can’t get anything from corner kicks. The last time we scored direct from a free kick eludes me. We do not even score penalties regularly and consistently anymore; Idah arrived and converted his first two masterfully. Look at that spot kick today. Is he keeping up his practicing? Is anybody at Celtic prioritising this? You can lose games, and thus leagues, on account of that.

How many corners in that first half? Every one of them wasted.

Every one of them a hit-and-hope shot into the box.

I find it pathetic and this isn’t the first year we’ve watched this, this has been a trend for a long time and we’re not getting better at it. I’ve seen individual games this season where the corner count for our team has been into double digits … and I can count on one hand how many times we’ve been able to make one count.

It’s woeful. Absolutely woeful. I’ve never seen a poorer Celtic team when it comes to this stuff. Not ever. Not in my life. And I am shocked that we’ve had three different men in the dugout over the last few years who have failed to put that right.

The other thing, of course, is John Beaton. And John Beaton should never be officiating a Celtic match, and there isn’t one of us who doesn’t know that.

The Ibrox club demanded that Collum not officiate any more of their league games and guess what? He hasn’t since, not in any capacity. John Beaton is a far more problematic case than Collum is; we all know what Beaton is and what Beaton has done to Celtic over the years.

When you put critical decisions which could decide the destination of a title in his hands, without exerting at least some pressure, without at least making it clear that the club will be insisting on the very highest possible standards, you get the injustice you deserve.

The officials had charted the course of this game at half time. I never believed that we’d see one of those turnaround second halves, it just wasn’t in the script. We’re our own worst enemies because all the issues of this campaign so far were on display, in spades, when it came time to look at who we had available to us from the bench.

The poverty of the squad Rodgers has to work with following four windows without the signing of a guaranteed first team player save for Alastair Johnston is stark and terrible.

Mark Lawwell left this week, but that’s no guarantee that the policies of this club are going to change enough to deliver better, not that it will matter if we lose this league because Rodgers will be one of the first to go and the costs of that are going to make quite the dent in the cash pile and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the decision of the bean counters was to let a new manager, whoever would be daft enough to take the job under these people, see if he can work with what he has before deciding to fund a rebuild of the squad.

The worst thing about this board is that there is not a strategist on it. There is nobody on there who is capable of thinking and acting purposefully. This is why there’s no coherence to the football department, this is why the very real risks of failing to reform officiating have been ignored and why cronyism and nepotism are seen as acceptable business practices instead of as high-risk, lobotomising and toxically divisive.

If these people were capable of thinking beyond the next fan-subsidised knees-up in the executive dining room they’d recognise that they’ve placed themselves and this club in tremendous danger. And there is no sign that they are willing to take any responsibility for a single bit of it.

Even Lawwell’s departure is dressed up as a resignation “to pursue other opportunities” when the properly sensible, strategic, thing to do would be to say he was relieved of his duties because his performance has been unacceptable.

That does two things; it demonstrates that from now on everyone at the club will be held accountable and it shows the world that you are serious. Sacking the chairman’s son is as big a statement as hiring him in the first place, and much more positive. The geniuses at our club don’t even have the common sense or clarity of thought to do that, to turn a real setback for them into something that makes them look decisive.

The performance today wasn’t good enough. Period. There was a time when a Rodgers team would have won that game even with ten men on the pitch.

We seem a long way from that, but then that Rodgers team would have access to a far better pool of players than he’s got to work with here.

Look, if you will, at the state of that side; Bernardo, subbed at half time. Holm, Palma, Kuhn and Lagerbielke, of the signings, left on the bench with Rodgers literally preferring, in a must-win game, a kid from the academy. That’s why we’re here, the state of that squad, and most of the people responsible for that are still at the club right now.

It’s easy to come out of this today and look at the league table and think that on an average weekend – i.e. one where we’d won and so had they – that it would look just like it does today, with us still chasing their two point lead.

But of course it’s not the same, we blew that, and whether you want to blame officials for that – and they played their role without a doubt – the culprits are actually inside our own walls. But hey, our armchairs anarchists have the police to hate on.

We got what we were due. An injustice in some ways, yeah, but the one that we deserved.