The Celtic Fans Reaction To The Tynecastle Defeat Was Critical In Getting Us Here.

There is a mistaken view of the Celtic support that they do their best work, their most critical work, inside the stadiums themselves. This hasn’t been true for a very long time.

The Celtic Family is a vast diaspora spread across the world; at most, 60,000 of us who are lucky enough to live in a geographic area which allows it, or who can afford the cost of travelling on a regular basis, get to see the team in the flesh once a fortnight.

That’s not this Family at its finest.

The ways in which this Family gives its support to the club are as varied as the fan-base itself. But its our social media following which has grown ever more vocal and influential.

I’m not ruling out what the 60,000 do at home, or what the thousands who go to away games do … but in the day-to-day life of Celtic those of us who are active every day, whether as writers or readers or engaged followers on Twitter, Instagram or the other channels, have a massive impact too.

Celtic fan opinion takes many forms, but it’s online where you can see it all the time, unfolding even in real-time, with fans reacting to every event and piece of news. And there was one moment since the New Year where everything could have really come wildly off the rails, and if it had then I would suggest we’d not be sitting top of the table right now.

The reaction to the Hearts game at Tynecastle was absolutely crucial in keeping morale high and the sense of momentum going. Because that was a bad, bad result, one that could have really knocked the whole club for six and given the manager a really difficult path to walk. That the Ibrox club had lost to Motherwell the day before actually made that a harder blow to take in some ways … although the sense that it hadn’t done any real harm was also very real.

But had our supporters reacted to that badly, had anger erupted against the boss, against the players, against the board, against the club itself, I think things would look pretty ugly right now. All the ingredients for a meltdown were in place.

Not only was it the latest bad result of the campaign, but it was a massive reversal when we’d had the chance to go back top. The media evidently hoped that would be the reaction. They were sharpening their pencils for it.

Yet the reaction of the fans was brilliant, and we were aided in that by having a very clear culprit; the VAR official, John Beaton.

Not that Don Robertson, the ref, was getting off the hook nor that he deserved to; it was that we knew full damned well that what had happened that day was a complete scandal. The other thing that kept us focussed was that the manager himself said so.

We missed a penalty that day at 0-0, so nobody was kidding anybody on that there weren’t some self-inflicted wounds. But we were all able to look at them objectively and calmly, understanding that when your side is deprived of a key player from a terrible red card decision and then concedes a penalty at a vital moment in the match that it is very hard to turn it around.

Hard. Not impossible.

But the phrase I kept on hearing after that one was “extenuating circumstances” and I wholly agreed with that view. It was impossible to hold it against the team and the manager when we could smell something fishy about the officiating that day. That the boss came out and aggressively put our case showed that those inside Celtic thought the same.

Even so, the nerves might have been allowed to creep in.

There might even have been a re-evaluation of the game itself in the days to follow, had the SFA not then committed yet another act of war against our club by deciding to discipline Rodgers in the way they did. Not so much the decision itself, which a lot of us had kind of expected, but the timing of the case, so obviously and deliberately to coincide with us going to Ibrox.

The club’s response to that – Rodgers unapologetic stance, and our decision to bring in a top sports lawyer to represent us – shook the SFA up and further raised morale amongst the fans.

And whilst I thought some people’s reactions to the ban being imposed were short-sighted in that they didn’t quite grasp what it was that Celtic had managed to achieve, I think the club’s position was vindicated when Rodgers masterminded our taking a point at Ibrox, a game where the SFA had every intention of making him watch from the stand.

It is hard to believe, but of course the SFA’s dire response to this whole affair continued into their decisions to make Robertson the ref for Livingston and to put Beaton in the middle of the game at Ibrox itself. This was the SFA trying to throw its weight around, but they’d already lost the battle that mattered and Celtic had a straightforward path ahead.

Through all of it, the Celtic fans been absolutely incredible. The reaction to the Hearts game was not to shrug it off as unimportant and inconsequential – we all knew that was certainly important that there might be huge consequences – but to recognise the role that the officials had played and to put it to one side and move on to the next game on the list.

That’s one of the reasons we’re here, with it all in our hands and the road mapped out for us. Because nobody panicked, nobody over-reacted … and we got behind the team when the team needed that the most. Brilliant.