Rodgers slams the snipers and he’s right. We just make this look easy.

Today, Brendan sat in front of the media, and as he always does, he defended the club vigorously against this bizarre allegation that what we do is somehow easy. But of course, it’s not easy. Nothing about what we do is easy. Celtic is a club that has to work incredibly hard to stay ahead of the rest.

Earlier, I talked about how the narrative around this season has been that our success is somehow unhealthy for Scottish football.

But as I said last night, this is how every club should aspire to be. Every club should aspire to be as well run as we are – in the areas, at least, in which we are well run. Every club should be trying to build success on stable foundations, not begging for sugar daddies to come in and solve all their problems for them.

I mean, honestly, think how often we hear this narrative from the club across the city – that all it needs is fresh investment. What it actually needs is to do what it does better. That’s the solution. That club has pissed away so much money. It has squandered so many seasons. It has made chronic bad decisions. And at the heart of all of it is this belief that if they just spend more, that’ll fix everything.

In the meantime, do we get credit for what we’ve done? No, we don’t. As I wrote at great length the other day, that report last year which had us number one not just in the country, but on this island – it’s staggering. Not only because of the high score we got – 80 out of 100 across several metrics – but because we’re the only club that’s married a high position on that chart with consistent success.

This stuff is not easy. We just make it look easy.

Instead of getting praised for that, we get stick. We get told how unhealthy it is that we’re so far in front. We’re constantly told that the game here would be better off if even more money was poured down the Ibrox black hole.

You know, one of the problems we have is one that we’ve created for ourselves – and I mean the Celtic fan media in particular. It’s that maybe we don’t get enough credit as a club because of the way we pillory the side across town. I mean, in the way we portray them sometimes, these are people literally falling over their own feet. And whilst that’s true, and whilst they do live in delusion and fantasy, it also suggests that staying ahead of them isn’t actually that difficult.

But Rodgers is right to point out some facts of life on those occasions when he gets animated and angry enough at this narrative to do so.

He’s right to highlight that we don’t have a sugar daddy owner, that we don’t have so-called investors pouring money down the drain to keep us on top. Everything we do is self-sustaining. He’s right to point out that the consistency of the team on the pitch is unmatched by any other side in the country. Hell, if it was matched, we wouldn’t be in a position to wrap the title up in the first game after the split.

If what we do is so easy, how come we’re the only club that does it this way? Not just here in Scotland, but across the UK. How come we’re the only club that can marry good governance with winning trophies? And you can say what you like about the domestic competition not being that good, but if you’re going to say that, then you’re forced to answer the question: if what we do is easy, why can’t they do it? Why is the domestic competition not that good?

If this is all about money, then the club across the city has spent plenty of their own and should be in a much better place than they are. And this isn’t just one failed board over there. This is at least three since that club crawled out of the grave of Rangers – which itself was a model of dysfunction and which had to resort to increasingly desperate measures to keep up with us, from the moment Fergus finished building the stadium.

None of this is easy. We just make it look easy.

And whatever criticisms I have of the club I support, they’re based on wanting to see it do even better. Even if the narrative that our board is content simply to stay one step ahead of the club across town were true, that alone is harder than it sounds.

What a lot of people who fling this crap at us fail to recognise is this: when you’re the top team in the country, when you’re the best, everyone wants to beat you. More than once over the past 10 years, I’ve lamented that there are clubs which raise their game to a whole new level when they play us – and can’t manage it week in, week out against anyone else. In some ways, I’ve said those clubs are cheating their fans. Because if they could maintain that level, they might be contenders themselves.

But in my criticism, I never lose sight of the simple fact that every team wants to scalp us. They all want to be the side that beats the best team in the league. If we’re on a long unbeaten run, they want to be the ones who stop it.

Every game we play is a cup final. That’s what Rodgers meant when he tore a strip off the players after the St Johnstone game. There are a few in the squad who haven’t quite grasped that yet, who don’t understand that the level of expectation in the stands must be met – that those standards have to be maintained.

And it’s not easy to do this stuff. We just make it look easy.

Winning titles consistently, again and again and again – that’s not something every club can do. Not even a club that can outspend others in the league. The two richest clubs in the Premier League in terms of overall income are not Man City and Liverpool – they’re Man United and Spurs. This winning lark isn’t easy if you do have the money.

Even if it were a measure of the weakness of our opponents that none of them can keep pace with us over a 38 game league campaign, that doesn’t explain our other success metric – all those domestic cups.

When Murray’s team won nine in a row, and the media was boasting about how they had one team for the league and another for Europe, how many trebles were there? Even when they were using EBTs and doping the hell out of their team, how many grand slams did they complete?

Winning a title over 38 games, you can afford slip-ups if you’re just better than the rest. But look at that domestic cup record we’ve amassed in the past 10-15 years. How do you account for that? Luck? That takes consistency to a whole other level.

Six domestic trebles. All those doubles. How many trips to Hampden is that? How many defeats in all that time? Rodgers has never lost at Hampden – and he’s been there so often he could probably drive there blindfolded.

During the Murray era, they were spending far more – in proportion to the rest of Scottish football – than we’re spending now. That was a time when we were routinely finishing outside the top two.

So where were all the trebles then? Where was the shower of silverware? Bear in mind that none of that was sustainable – and all of ours is.

This stuff isn’t easy. We just make it look easy.

I’ll tell you what is easy – sniping from the sidelines and talking about how “tedious” it is to watch a club achieve this kind of domestic excellence.

It’s easy to sit in a media office and fill your paper with fantasies about Rodgers going to Leeds, or Spurs, or whichever English club has a vacancy that week.

That’s so easy that a million cut-and-paste merchants and clickbait sites have sprung up doing exactly that.

It’s easy to spend other people’s money. Easier still to fantasise about how you’d spend it. What’s harder is earning that money, working hard, and building a football operation that sustains itself by spending only what it brings in.

It’s easier to get lost in delusional fantasies about how successful you might be – and be hypercritical of those who actually are. It’s also embarrassing.

And you’d think by now these people would have evolved enough to recognise excellence when they see it, to recognise how much work goes into being this good. But they can’t – because none of them will ever be this good at anything.

And so they’ll keep writing this kind of ridiculous dreck – some of which is so bad it finds new layers of bottom. And it amazes me that they can keep doing it, and you know what? Maybe we should give them some credit.

Because that can’t be easy. But they sure do make it look easy.

Watch our latest podcast episode; so good the other side can’t stop talking about us!