No, demented Ibrox fans, Celtic did not “cause” the Omicron lockdown nor take advantage of it.

One of the most astonishing things about the Ibrox club is the number of lies their fans believe in. Absolute lies. Outright lies. Easily disprovable lies. Things that bear no relationship to the truth whatsoever but about which they are wholly convinced.

I wrote about one of them not that long ago—the Steven Gerrard myth. I wrote about another when I discussed the ridiculous claim that if the Ibrox club had signed Lawrence Shankland, they would have won last year’s league title. All of it, of course, is the most lamentable claptrap.

Last week, someone drew my attention to a thread on one of their fan forums about how the chance to “bury us” came about during the COVID campaign. It’s a claim we’ve all heard before and rightly dismissed as rubbish. But some of those on that thread wanted to amplify the claim, and have proposed a brand new theory.

That the season that directly followed it—the season in which we secured the title under Ange after storming back from a dreadful start and winning a league and cup double—is one in which we brought forth the blackest of the dark arts. This has now become the focus of another of their conspiracy theories.

Their theory hinges on how Celtic mounted that comeback.

It revolves around a story I’ve highlighted before—one I covered when discussing the ticket standoff. Let me give you some background and remind you of what happened and what Celtic said at the time.

We came into that season hoping that a deal had been reached between ourselves and the Ibrox club that would allow away fans to return. But there was a savage limit put on those tickets, capping them at 750. Celtic were not impressed, but we hoped that some meaningful talks could eventually lead to a proper allocation again.

The whole country was emerging from lockdown. We’d gone a full season without supporters being allowed inside the ground. Fans couldn’t wait to get back into stadiums. At Celtic, a lot of us got tickets for a pre-season friendly against Wolves, played in an eerily three quarters empty ground. So, the news that we were going to be back at Ibrox and their fans were going to be back at Celtic Park was widely welcomed. It was seen as another step towards a return to normality. But we were in for a big surprise when it came to those games—especially the Ibrox one.

About a week to 10 days before that match—our first meeting of the campaign—I got a phone call from someone at Celtic Park. They told me that, although we had taken possession of our away allocation, printed the tickets, and had them ready to go, the Ibrox club had cancelled all of them. Their pretext? That we would not offer them an ironclad guarantee that their supporters would be allowed into our ground when the corresponding fixture came around.

Celtic were stunned and appalled at the sheer cynicism of it. We had already told them that if the regulations would permit their fans to return that they’d be there. But they wanted a guarantee beyond that—one that was absolutely impossible for Celtic to give. And we told them that explicitly. The question we asked over and over again was, how could we guarantee there wouldn’t be another lockdown?

Of course, no one could have guaranteed that. The country had already been in multiple lockdowns. And although we didn’t know it at the time, there would soon be a brand-new variant of the virus creeping through the country.

So they froze our tickets. They cancelled our allocation.

And that first game of the season between the two clubs was played in front of 50,000 of their own fans, a completely partisan home crowd. Not a single Celtic supporter in the place. But Celtic made it clear that there would be reciprocity. They had cancelled our tickets. We had no intention of giving them an allocation at Parkhead.

Fast forward a few months. Celtic had finally hit its stride. Ange had the team playing spellbinding football. Our early season struggles—particularly our poor away form—had been overcome, and we were chewing up the competition. And then disaster struck—not us, but Scottish football as a whole.

The new COVID variant, which we had feared and which we had warned the Ibrox club made their demand for a guarantee impossible, hit like a hammer. It was called Omicron. It spread more easily than the original virus and could evade both natural immunity and vaccines. At the time, that was all scientists could say for certain. But there was anecdotal evidence from certain parts of the world that it might be more dangerous than previous strains. And considering the number of people who had already died from COVID, that was a terrifying prospect.

I know there are a lot of people who still don’t believe that.

I know there are many who don’t grasp that we actually dodged a bullet with COVID itself. But I’ve been studying this subject for more years than I care to remember, long before COVID hit. And I can tell you now—if we had got one of COVID’s bigger brothers instead, our country would look very different.

Because SARS and MERS—two variants of the coronavirus that have made headlines in the past—are far more dangerous and far more lethal than the one that actually spread worldwide. If the virus that emerged from Wuhan had been a little more like those two, we could easily have lost millions on this island alone.

We had no way of knowing if Omicron was our very own Andromeda Strain. The government couldn’t afford to wait too long to find out. I had seen some of the early data from South Africa—where the variant first hit—and I was watching closely. But it was still inconclusive.

When it came to making a call on how to handle it, the Scottish Government erred on the side of caution and reimposed full lockdown measures. Their chief science officer was clear that they anticipated only a short lockdown, just long enough to get a handle on the numbers and see the likely impact on hospitalizations and fatalities.

And, like I said, we were lucky. Omicron, while more transmissible and able to evade immunity, was much weaker than previous strains. In fact, it barely caused visible symptoms in most people who caught it.

Everyone in my household—my entire extended family—caught Omicron. My father and I had no symptoms at all. My mother was ill for one day. Even my elderly aunt, in a nursing home, caught Omicron and was completely asymptomatic.

But let me repeat—we didn’t know that at the time.

The South African data eventually revealed the truth. A massive disparity existed between the number of people infected with Omicron and the number hospitalized. If you had looked at two graphs side by side—one showing infection rates for COVID and Omicron, the other showing hospitalizations—you’d have seen something fascinating.

On the first graph, Omicron cases were massively higher. But on the second graph, hospitalizations from Omicron were significantly lower than those from COVID.

It really was an incredible difference.

The Scottish Government’s own data was almost identical to what South Africa had found. Because of that, we were able to move in and out of lockdown very swiftly. People who to this day claim that the lockdown was pointless aren’t looking at the full picture, and it would be a waste of time to try to make them see it.

Still, the effects on Scottish football were profound. Almost as soon as Omicron cases started to spike, discussions began between the Scottish Government and the football authorities about how to handle it.

The initial plan? To play games behind closed doors, just as they had the previous season. That was the starting point, but that idea was rejected out of hand, and instead, they brought forward the winter break. That’s why, instead of a January derby, we ended up with a February one.

And this is the point of contention for the Ibrox fans, who see in this further evidence that Celtic runs the game here and has a grip on all the institutions in the public sphere. This is further evidence of the Grand Conspiracy of The Unseen Fenian Hand.

This is where Ibrox fans think they were robbed. This is where they claim the great injustice lies—that the Scottish Government, the SPFL, and the SFA handed Celtic an advantage in the title race by suspending the game at a time when we had injury issues and before we had made our January signings.

They think the games should have been played on schedule. They think they should have been played behind closed doors and that this would have been perfectly fine. But I saw that coming a mile away, and this blog was one of the first to write that Celtic should be lobbying the Scottish Government to bring forward the winter break and ensure that sporting integrity was protected.

The Ibrox fans claim that sporting integrity was, in fact, violated doesn’t stand up to the least examination. It’s nonsense because games were only postponed for a short while and thus sporting integrity maintained.

My argument at the time—an argument that some of the clubs also later used—was that fixtures had already been played in front of full houses. If you were then going to deny any of the clubs the chance to play corresponding games in front of their own fans after they had played those away fixtures in front of packed stands, that would have been an impact on sporting integrity.

It was particularly egregious in the case of the games between ourselves and the Ibrox club, considering they had banned our supporters from the first match and played it in front of an entirely partisan crowd. There was no way you could justify playing the home fixture for Celtic in an empty stadium after that had happened.

I thought it was obvious that if we were going to go into a lockdown, that should be Celtic’s position. I don’t know whether that’s the stance the club took, but I do know that we fought vigorously to make sure the winter break was brought forward. However, I suspect that we did it as much on financial grounds as anything else, and it was, in fact, the financial argument that won the day.

Having just come out of a season where there were no supporters allowed in grounds, clubs were in no rush to return to the same thing. They didn’t want to lose more time and more games when they had bills to pay.

The Ibrox club was initially furious, but only in relation to their game against St Mirren, which took place in the week before the lockdown came into effect, needing to be played in front of a restricted crowd … as every game that same weekend had to be. But in the main, there was no big freak out from their club.

And that alone renders this idea that Celtic manipulated the situation to get our game with them postponed utterly ridiculous—unsupported by even the tiniest shred of evidence or fact.

But if you look at their forums, this is one of the lies in which they believe wholeheartedly. The “proof” they offer is that when we came back from the winter break with new signings in place, those signings hit the ground running, and that we were fully prepared for the game at Celtic Park, played in front of a full house of Celtic supporters, with what amounted to a new-look team.

Should we get the hankies out for these people now or later?

I find it incredible how much bitching, whining, wailing, whinging, moaning, and complaining they’re capable of. If you look at the form we were in at that point, if you look at the form we hit after the winter break was over and we went into the back half of the season, no one was going to stop us. We didn’t just hit high gear—we were motoring on all cylinders. We were ready for anything.

It was perfectly valid for Scottish football to bring forward the winter break. Clubs wanted it. That decision also more than vindicated Celtic’s ticket stance when the Ibrox club had demanded guarantees that the home fixture at Celtic Park would have their fans at the game.

The irony, of course, is that not only did we correctly predict the possibility of another lockdown, but we’d have been able to give them their tickets for the match regardless. And they would have got them—had our fans been inside their stadium, their fans would have been inside ours.

Would it have made any difference? Absolutely not. Celtic would still have won the game. Celtic would still have won the title. And they’d be finding some other conspiracy theory to push.

The simple fact is that Ange had already built a team that was capable not only of challenging for the title but of winning it. All we did in the January window was add the final pieces of the jigsaw—the nucleus of the Treble-winning team for the following campaign. But I’ve never doubted that we’d have won that first one regardless.

Ibrox fans have a pitiful need to believe that they’re constantly cheated or that some great conspiracy—some Unseen Fenian Hand—is what stands in their way and has consistently kept them down.

Normally, I would leave them to their fantasies, but this particular one annoyed me. It annoyed me because, like certain people in the Scottish mainstream sports media—including Keith Jackson—they either don’t understand where the country was at that particular time and the danger we all might have been in, or they just don’t care.

They’re willing to use any justification to push their twisted narrative, just as their club cynically sought to exploit the troubles and the drama of that time, their fans continue to try to bend reality into whatever shape suits them.

That they devoted an entire thread to speculating on whether that’s why we won the league is absolutely pitiful.

We won the league because we had the best players. Because we had the better manager. Because, in spite of our own bumpy, rocky start, their great messiah Gerrard had gotten off to one that was just as bad in its own way and left us in the race.

Once we got over that rocky start and started putting wins on the board, there was never going to be anyone stopping us. I wonder what excuse they had for the following season. Or last season. Or what excuse they’ll come up with for this one.

I’ll keep looking at their forums to find out.

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