Celtic brought down Alan Muir, that and the audio even the SFA couldn’t defend or spin.

Last night, as myself, Joe, and Eric were in the midst of our podcast, a stunning piece of news broke. Had we known it was going to, or had someone messaged us to say it had, we would certainly have covered it live on the air.

Obviously, we recognised that a lot of our viewers and subscribers would be watching the Champions League games, so we’d scheduled our show to end around 7:30 or 7:45. But I think we might have gone on for another half hour had we been made aware that Alan Muir had been fired — or, to use the phrase the media was at pains to deploy, had been “mutually consented” after talks with the SFA.

The hacks are claiming Muir was relieved of his duties after a series of meetings focused on various incidents. They say it was due to events involving us and the club from Ibrox. But let’s be clear: the club from Ibrox wasn’t involved in this.

This is a moment that sends the SFA spinning into profound crisis. It can be traced directly back to Celtic Park and the representations our club made after the Hibs game. Muir’s fate was sealed by that incident — that disallowed goal and the shocking audio that came out afterwards, courtesy of Willie Collum. It made Muir’s position as a full-time VAR official completely untenable.

Not since the “Dougie Dougie” case has Celtic had such a stonewall reason to demand the resignation or sacking of an official.

That case came about because an official admitted to lying. There’s been no cover-up this time, and none was possible — not now that all that material is recorded and stored. When people in the Scottish football fandom demand to “hear the audio”, we all know what they mean — even if what they’re asking for is sometimes rooted in moon-howling or paranoid supposition. Some said our demand for the audio in this case was based on paranoid supposition.

And then we heard what was on the audio. It was not supposition anymore. It wasn’t paranoia. And nobody could claim otherwise.

That audio was, as we all said at the time, unspinnable and indefensible.

In it, you clearly hear that Muir had made up his mind to disallow the goal, and everything that followed was just a search for a pretext. He tried to bounce his VAR official not once but twice into agreeing with him. His position wasn’t based on the facts or the incident itself — it was a pre-determined outcome. He made his mind up the moment the ball hit the back of the net. That’s what I believe, and that’s what the audio appears to demonstrate.

Collum didn’t defend him when the audio came out.

Instead, he focused on explaining what should have happened — which basically confirmed what we all already knew. He didn’t tackle the content of the audio. He didn’t try to spin it. He certainly didn’t defend it. He knew how bad it sounded. He knew Muir couldn’t get away with something that brazen.

It was my colleague, Joe McHugh, who first broke the story that Muir had been left off the rotation for a second consecutive series of games. Now, we’ve seen officials miss one game after a major incident, and you can write that off as how the rotation works. But to miss two in a row? That was clearly a message. It was the SFA saying that this was serious, and that — for once — they were taking it seriously.

After Joe’s piece came out, I wrote a follow-up. In it, I said that the SFA holding him back from games was a de facto admission that his position was untenable.

The day after the game, I said in my article that Brendan’s comments were supremely damaging to Muir, because he had no defence against what the Celtic boss had said. But nobody in the media was prepared to go that far. That night, after the audio release, I listened to the Graham Spiers podcast, where two senior journalists basically agreed that the situation was unrecoverable.

One of them actually used the word “untenable.”

At that point, there was no doubt in my mind what had to happen, and I said so the following day.

Fan media opinion had gone from a fringe view to the mainstream. That happened because the audio was so incredibly damaging. While we all knew Muir wouldn’t have survived in any other football association, we still half-expected the SFA to try to fudge it, and to quietly return him to the rotation.

That’s why last night’s news, when it broke, was so surprising.

If my article on the fakeover hadn’t already been scheduled for 8:00 p.m., I would certainly have done a follow-up there and then.

But I figured it was best left till daylight for a proper examination.

The media coverage has since proven me right — because in trying to broaden the scope of the “investigation” into Muir’s conduct to include decisions involving the Ibrox club, they’ve once again shown themselves to be as corrupt as any rogue official has ever been or could ever be. They do not want to confront the full implications of this.

I’ve no doubt the SFA considered an accumulation of evidence.

But the reason this went so far — and why Muir ended up with his neck in the noose — is that the audio left no room for doubt. He was a man determined to get the outcome he wanted, regardless of the laws of the game. He was determined to chop off a Celtic goal that would have drawn us level in that match.

The moment that audio dropped, he was done. The stuff we wrote and said, the discussions in the media — they were tame compared to the fury Celtic must have been unleashing behind the scenes. The club deserves huge credit for this. They’ve pushed this all the way, and then some.

I understand why the media is in a big hurry to claim that this was about decisions going against Ibrox — particularly in November’s League Cup Final. But if the SFA had been truly concerned about that, they wouldn’t have kept giving Muir high-profile matches. They did give him those games — until he was caught on tape essentially overturning a Celtic goal for no good reason.

So this doesn’t come down to anything else. This is a direct consequence of what happened at Easter Road, and the fact that there was no possible defence of it. That leaves the SFA in a very bad position. They know there was a cynical motivation behind that decision. And it’s high time they cleaned house and put in place the sort of regulations that exist elsewhere — regulations designed to stop cynical motivations having any influence on games.

The last time we caught an official basically lying and demanded his removal, the referees went on strike. They claimed Celtic had tipped them over the edge — that they felt harassed and under pressure. Some even said they felt endangered.

Notice the complete lack of any support for Muir here.

Times have changed. We’re not where we were then. Nobody is defending this guy — because nobody can. There’s no case for the defence. None that would stand up to even the mildest scrutiny.

It’s time the SFA seized this moment. It’s time the clubs — including Celtic and especially Celtic — seized it too. Clean out the Augean stables. Purge the stench. Because Muir is just one of many.

The only thing that sets him apart is that he got caught bang to rights.

We put out our latest podcast last night, “Crisis? What Crisis?”