Tom English’s cup final meltdown has amused and appalled Celtic fans in equal measure.

It’s always funny when someone in the mainstream media gets so animated over an incident that they launch into an incoherent rant without fully knowing the facts.

Then, when you point out to them that they don’t know the full facts and propose an alternative scenario to the one they’re pushing, they turn around and accuse you of not knowing the facts. Do these people have any idea how ridiculous they look and sound sometimes?

This morning, I wrote about our old friend, The Village Idiot, and his incredible meltdown. It was only after I published it that I discovered Tom English of the BBC had suffered a similar meltdown on Twitter and was being pilloried for it by our supporters.

The questions I posed in the last article were put to him over and over again: What exactly do you think happened here? What exactly are you alleging happened here? And, of course, he can’t answer those questions.

No one will answer those questions. But English should be made to answer them, as he has a habit of coming down on Ibrox’s side without knowing the full facts.

As I said earlier, there’s a very simple explanation that’s been suggested. I suspect that when the SFA finally makes the statement that all these people are demanding, they’re going to be very disappointed. What they may well find out is that the foul wasn’t for the jersey pull they all think it was, but for the one a moment before, when there’s no question it was outside the box. If the referee’s blown for the first foul and given it for that incident, then all their whining doesn’t matter a damn.

It’s not just that they’re reacting badly to the result—that’s no more than we expected. It’s that they’re behaving hysterically.

Even at the best of times, English is not one of those people you can take seriously when he pretends to have coldly and rationally analysed a situation. I remember his behaviour during “Emailgate” when Dundee were being pilloried left, right, and centre for their vote to end the season during COVID.

It’s not even that he knew nothing about what had actually happened there; in fact, he ignored completely the SFA’s and the SPFL’s explanations for what they said had occurred. When the Ibrox club produced its dodgy dossier, he was one of the first people in the media to declare, “It’s obvious they have a case.”

That document was taken to a meeting of the clubs, and almost all of them dismissed it as irrelevant rubbish. Peter Lawwell himself famously said it was garbage and embarrassing.

I don’t believe the Ibrox club were the only ones who had cause to feel embarrassed by that reversal. People in the media who banged their drum without caring what actually went on, who believed what they were told by the Ibrox club—that there was some irrefutable smoking gun in that document—should have been equally embarrassed. English, more than most.

As part of the BBC, the national broadcaster, this is a man who has dismissed as cranks and nuts those who’ve questioned referees in the past, but who was ready to believe there was a gigantic conspiracy at the top of the game to give Celtic a title.

Any credibility that English had as a journalist went out of the window that very day. His claim that the decision at the weekend was “inexplicable” completely ignores an obvious explanation.

Now, it may well be that the SFA at some point this week turns around and says they got it wrong. But at this moment in time, there is a perfectly reasonable and logical alternative theory which these people don’t even seem to want to consider.

For my sins, I sat and listened to as much as I could stomach last night of Radio Clyde. A caller proposed this exact scenario and what I found interesting is that, as with English on Twitter, it didn’t matter how carefully he tried to explain himself. The anchor and studio guests pointedly refused to listen to what he had to say and attempted to misrepresent his comments at every turn.

Repeatedly, he had to stop them and say, “I didn’t say that. Listen to what I’m saying.” And they didn’t want to listen. They didn’t want to hear his explanation because they’d made up their minds. That’s what’s truly atrocious here.

The Village Idiot goes as far as anyone is willing to go in suggesting that this all might be the result of a conspiracy, but even he knows better than to use those actual words. It’s the oblique hints elsewhere that are most troubling.

For someone like English, working at the national broadcaster, to claim the decision is “inexplicable” when in fact there is a perfectly obvious explanation which they won’t even consider strongly suggests that these people aren’t actually interested in finding out what happened but only in promoting their own theory about it. Although they won’t tell anybody what that theory is.

What it also shows, of course, is that some of them just default automatically to the Ibrox talking points and the Ibrox party line. English has a penchant for doing that. This will not be the first time he ends up with egg on his face if the explanation turns out to be not quite so convoluted, not quite so conspiratorial, and not quite so controversial as he imagines it in his head.

And at that point, will he apologise to some of the people he slammed online last night for simply pointing this out? Of course not. These folk never do.