Celtic won last season’s title, even if the Village Idiot thinks Clement threw it away.

Yesterday, and not for the first time, The Village Idiot decided to act absolutely true to type on Sky Sports after the Ibrox club’s game. He is one of the people who incessantly pushes one of the most grotesque lies that the Ibrox fans tell themselves and the rest of Scottish football, although that lie has been refuted over and over again.

I was surprised that Chris Sutton, in particular, let him away with it.

What he said was that the Ibrox club should have won the title last season but threw it away. Now, I don’t know how many times we have to go over this subject. I don’t know how many times we need to put this on the record.

Yeah, the Ibrox club briefly had its nose in front. But at no time—at no time—was the title ever out of our hands. That’s the difficult part for them to hear. It was up to us to do what was necessary to get ourselves back in the race and to win the title on our own merits. And that is exactly what Celtic did.

This nonsense, this outrageous piece of disinformation, has gone on for far too long. Far too many people in the media both believe it and spread it. In some ways, this plays to our advantage, because if Clement is seen as having had the title in his hands and dropped it, that puts him under pressure before the season even starts. I knew that would happen the day he got his nose in front.

Writing on this very site, I said that it might be the worst thing that could happen to him. Because if we managed to take it—if we got our act together and started to put together a run of wins sufficient to win the league—people would say that he had thrown away a golden opportunity.

And although there was a certain advantage for us in that story gaining wide acceptance amongst their fans—making it much more likely that they would turn on him this season—the simple truth is that all this does is deny us the credit that we are due for our exceptional end to the last campaign.

And I’m sick and tired of this fiction persisting. Any good that it was going to do was long ago made redundant by the fact that Clement simply cannot put together any kind of run of form this season. His campaign is already over, and we’re not even out of February. But this idea that he had it in his hands and dropped it? Simply nowhere near being true. The onus was on Celtic to do what we had to do. And we did.

We went on that run of victories that we needed. We went to Ibrox and got the point that kept us in the race. And everyone who pushes this crazy fiction is going to say that it came down to Ross County and Dundee, but it didn’t come down to either of those games. Even if Clement’s side had won both of those fixtures, we would still have been champions based on our own form and our own results.

And this isn’t difficult for even the simplest student of maths to check. We would have won the title anyway. That is just a fact—a stone-cold, incontrovertible fact. All those results did was increase the size of the cushion we had. All they did was give us some extra breathing space. But even without them, we would have been champions.

On the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of March, they lost to Motherwell, and we lost to Hearts. At that point, they maintained a two-point lead over us.

But it was never out of our hands. That two-point lead was still intact when we left their stadium with the 3-3 draw. That was the day they could have moved decisively ahead of us—and on paper they failed.

But if you look at the makeup of that game, it was Celtic who actually failed. We had a goal lead going into the latter stages. They scored an equaliser very late in the game. We then went up the pitch and scored what everyone thought was going to be the winner, only for them to equalise again.

On that day, we threw away a chance to move top by conceding two goals so late in the match. Nevertheless, we left that day with the title still in our own hands. Two points behind, but with everything still to play for.

The Village Idiot and all the rest of them simply refuse to accept the simple fact that, after that day, there were six fixtures left and we pretty much had to win all of them. And we did. We won all of them. They had seven games left. And after the Ibrox game—which they celebrated like it was a league decider—they promptly lost to Ross County and then drew at Dundee. This is the period in which Clement is said to have thrown it away.

But the mathematical fact remains that we still had to do our own bit and that if we managed it we would have been champions anyway. It’s all there in the league table at the end of the campaign.

In the aftermath of Ibrox, they dropped points in four more games. They lost two and drew two. The losses were against Ross County and Celtic. The draws were Dundee and the final game against Hearts.

Let’s say they had beaten Ross County. Let’s say they had beaten Dundee and Hearts. The differential for those three games would have put another seven points on the table for them. Unfortunately for them, that’s not enough.

Because Celtic’s winning run to the season—including that victory at Parkhead—got us over the line with an eight-point lead. Not seven. Not six. Not five. Eight. And for the hard of thinking, like The Village Idiot, that means that even if they had won all of their remaining games after the 3-3 draw at Ibrox, except for the one at Celtic Park, they’d still have lost the title by a point—by virtue of our better form.

So it doesn’t matter how many angles they come at this from, it doesn’t matter how they try to skew the data—it’s all going to say the same thing.

Even if their form had been almost perfect up until the game at Celtic Park, even if they had not dropped points at Dundee, even if they had not lost to Ross County, even if they hadn’t dropped more points on the final day against Hearts—it wouldn’t have been enough. Because it was Celtic’s form that decided the destination of the league flag.

And as I said, I’m comfortable with them lying to themselves about this up to a point. But that point is reached and breached the moment they start trying to take the credit away from Celtic—because we deserve the credit.

Rodgers and those players, coming out of that home defeat against Hearts with nine games left, knew we had to win virtually every point. The only place where we could afford to drop something was Ibrox—as long as we didn’t lose.

Eight wins and a draw—that’s what we needed to assure ourselves of the league title by a single point. Coming out of the Hearts game, we knew that eight wins and a draw would make us champions, regardless of what they did across the city.

And from now on, every single time someone says this, every single time someone makes this stupid claim about how they “threw it away”, I would only ask that someone sitting next to them, someone like Sutton, perhaps, points them to the facts. Points them to the league table. Points them to where the league was won and lost. Eight wins and a draw in the last nine matches.

That’s the form that won the league. And as long as we could manage that, it didn’t matter at all what results went their way or not.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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