Billy Dodds can lie to himself about last season’s title race, but Celtic more than earned the triumph.

Last night, while working on the latest Fear and Loathing, I made the mistake of listening to the BBC Scotland podcast.

That meant enduring the almost unendurable Billy Dodds, banging on about standards at Ibrox, the things he wants to see the club do, and how they should make five or six signings in January. Of course, he never says where the money for that is coming from or what the point of such an exercise would be, given the league is now well and truly beyond their reach.

But I wouldn’t have written about any of that, because none of that was worthy of commentary, until he started talking about Philippe Clement’s record. At that point, he repeated a lie that I’ve heard from others.

And yes, I’ll call it a lie because that’s exactly what it is. I’m not going to give them the courtesy of pretending it’s a mistake. It’s not. Anyone with the ability to look at a league table and do basic maths knows better.

Dodds claimed that the Ibrox club would have won the title last season but for the slips at Ross County and Dens Park. He asserts that those were the only games standing between Clement and a title-winning campaign.

He doesn’t present it as opinion but as fact. But it’s not fact. It’s a lie. It’s a distortion of reality and a complete upending of the truth.

Celtic won the title last season because we deserved it, plain and simple. From the moment we went to Ibrox and came away with a 3-3 draw, it was in our own hands. All we had to do was keep winning, and we did exactly that. Even if you subtract the points they dropped in those two matches, we still win the league.

The narrative that those games were decisive is utter nonsense. Celtic’s win on 11 May on home soil, a 2-1 victory over the Ibrox side, was the result that truly sealed the title. Even if they had beaten Ross County and Dundee, that win would have put us clear with two games to go.

I don’t know what comfort they think this revisionism brings them, but it’s insulting. It disrespects our manager and our players, who worked tirelessly and delivered when it mattered. We won the title not because of favours or other teams’ mistakes but because we earned it.

Celtic’s form after the loss to Hearts on 3 March was immense: eight wins and a draw to close out the season. That draw, of course, was the 3-3 at Ibrox where they celebrated like champions despite the fact we left that ground with the league in our hands. We then won six straight games, including the 5-0 hammering of Kilmarnock which officially made us winners. In other circumstances we may have been made to wait until the last day, but I still don’t doubt we’d have gotten the job done.

For Dodds and others to diminish that achievement with their delusional narrative is galling. It’s disrespectful to our players and manager, who ripped the title out of their hands with sheer grit and quality. Nobody handed us anything. We took it by going to their ground, getting a draw, beating them at Celtic Park, and putting together a winning run that carried us over the line and would have done so regardless of what puny fightback they had been able to muster.

I usually don’t care about the lies these people tell themselves to make their situation seem better. If they want to delude themselves rather than confront their problems, that’s their issue. But this time, their nonsense crosses a line.

That season, and that triumph, are among my most treasured memories as a Celtic fan. It was earned. It was beautiful because it took our club pulling together and working for every minute of every game. I won’t let a little twerp like Dodds or any of the other ex-Ibrox players masquerading as serious journalists on BBC Scotland sell us, or that triumph, short. That belongs to us, now and forever.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

The other day we put up our latest podcast … The Calm After The Storm. Please show your support by liking, watching and sharing it.