The hacks can cry about a “tedious” treble as they like. Celtic fans aren’t complaining.

The Scottish Daily Mail is starting to pop up on these pages more than I ever thought it would, and that’s saying something—because I despise that publication almost as much as I despise certain other newspapers in this country.

Just the other day I highlighted Callum Crowe’s piece on the Ibrox fake-over and his revelation that things are not going well because they’re nowhere near reaching 51%. That story has been confirmed over the last few days, by Andy Devlin at The Sun, so Crowe obviously has a few decent contacts.

But his article today? Oh wow. Absolute rubbish from start to finish. The premise is that this has been the most “tedious” treble campaign ever. And the justifications he offers? Dreadful. The fact that we’ve only beaten the Ibrox club once in the league so far, and that it took penalties to beat them in the League Cup.

I mean, you’d think the whole season boiled down to those games. It doesn’t. A championship is won week by week, game by game.

There are only four games against them in a campaign. There is not a single Celtic fan who would trade a league title just to beat them four times. That’s not what matters to us. Our season isn’t defined by the derby games.

I don’t know what his allegiances are, and I don’t care—but he sounds bitter, to say the least. When he writes that the semi-final at the weekend was “horribly one-sided,” what was horrible about it? If your team wins, there’s nothing horrible about watching them do so in a semi-final.

He’s basically telling Rodgers that if he becomes the first Celtic manager to win three trebles, there’s no glory in that. Which is ridiculous.

We’ve been the biggest side in this country for decades now. We went through that spell during the 60s and 70s when we were virtually untouchable—and in all that time, no Celtic manager won three trebles. What Rodgers has done is exceptional. And he’s fully entitled to believe that there’s a place in the history books waiting for him.

The article says this Celtic team isn’t even the best Brendan Rodgers side. Well, that rather depends on your perspective, doesn’t it? He talks about how it hasn’t won as many points as some of Rodgers’ earlier teams. But this one will finish the season with more points than the last Rodgers team to win two titles in a row.

He says it’s an “inferior” side. He seems to be suggesting the players aren’t as good as in Rodgers’ first stint—and that may or may not be true. But I’ve enjoyed watching this team across all the fronts it has competed on, especially in Europe, which is a fine yardstick for judging where this Rodgers team stands against other treble-winning sides of the last decade.

But where they stand in Celtic’s history? Well, they will stand proudly in it as the team that secured a record number of trebles. Each player has his own chance to write that page in the book. What do we care where it stands alongside the greatest sides in the history of our club? What does that even mean anymore?

Does Crowe think anyone really looks at it like that? Does he think any of us are sitting around wondering how this team will stack up against the greatest Celtic sides in history? I don’t think that even in the moment.

We know who the greatest sides were. And for every time someone says, “look what this modern team has achieved,” there’ll be someone making excuses for why it’s not up there with the all-time greats.

Someone said to me the other day that the greatest modern Celtic team was the Seville side. I had to remind them that the Seville team didn’t actually win anything that year. I agree we should have won the title—but we didn’t. The Seville team came up short in every competition. Sure, a team that included the likes of Larsson, Morav?ík, Petrov, Lambert and the rest—they were a joy to watch.

But then you remember that Alex McLeish won a treble on their watch. It was the last one that a side from Ibrox secured.

Even talking about it just underlines how much I’ve enjoyed watching every moment of this season when we’ve been in full flow. Watching Celtic win things is never going to get old. I am never going to be bored by it. I’m going to enjoy it forever. There will never be a time when I’m not caught up in the drama of a treble campaign.

It’s not even unusual to read a reporter talking about how Celtic’s dominance is somehow unhealthy for Scottish football.

But I’m not convinced that Scottish football would be any “healthier” if it were us and a club from Ibrox trading titles like we used to. That doesn’t sound especially good for the game either. Yet that’s exactly what some people seem to want us to go back to.

There have been spells during this season when we haven’t played particularly well. The football hasn’t always flowed. We’ve looked a bit off it at times. But that happens every season. Are we going to call every title win “tedious”? Are we going to say that every campaign is boring?

It’s not our job to worry about the rest of this league. It’s their job to get better. To provide us with more of a challenge. To the ones complaining about us winning endlessly—here’s the advice: sort yourselves out. Put up more of a fight.

Most of Scottish football happens away from the Glasgow soap opera. That’s hard for a lot of media folk to grasp—and sometimes we forget it too—but it’s still true.

Most football fans across the world follow teams that don’t regularly win trophies. So when fans of other Scottish clubs say they hate this environment, it may well be true. But ask the supporters of Spurs how they feel. Or the fans of Brighton. Or Southend United. Or whoever. Most fans go years—decades, even—without seeing silverware.

And more and more, when I read this sort of stuff, I’m acutely aware that the only people who really, consistently, talk like this—the only people genuinely sick of the “state” of Scottish football and the one-team nature of it—are the fans of the other team that expects to win everything… and never does anymore.

The only ones consistently talking about how it’s a “shame” that we don’t have a more competitive league are the fans of the team that most expects to compete.

During the Ibrox nine-in-a-row in the 1990s, I watched my team go five seasons without a trophy. When we won the 1988–89 Scottish Cup Final against Rangers at Hampden, I’d have been stunned to learn we wouldn’t win another until 1994–95. Nine years without a league title. And there were times during that spell when we finished as low as fourth.

That was the 1993–94 season: back when we played 44 games with two points for a win. We finished on 50 points and didn’t even qualify for Europe. We had three managers that year. Our top goal scorer was Pat McGinlay—a midfielder—with 12 goals, 10 in the league. We scored just 51 league goals. Four clubs outscored us.

So yeah, some of us have seen it all. We’ve been through the dark times. Through the bad spells. And all the while, the club at Ibrox—the one called Rangers—lorded it over us. Courtesy of David Murray and all those bank millions.

I will never tire of watching us win things.

I’m sure there were periods back then when I didn’t enjoy watching Scottish football. I’m sure there were times it felt tedious watching them win everything. But here’s what amuses me: even in their big-spending days, even when we were sitting fourth, even during all of that, they never had a spell as dominant or as trophy-laden as this one. Not once. At any point.

And I think that’s what drives them mad. Not just what we’ve done—but that we’ve done things they never could. That we’ve reached a level of sustained success that even Murray, at his peak, couldn’t match.

I dare say they do find this tedious. I dare say it does drive them to distraction.

But they shouldn’t mistake their own bitterness and frustration for anything else in Scottish football. Because most of Scottish football doesn’t care which Glasgow club puts its coloured ribbons on the trophies.

No Celtic fan I know is complaining about the “lack of a challenge.” We have neutralised the challenge. We have blown away the challengers. That is not ever going to become tedious or boring or less enjoyable to me.