Celtic fans took great joy in John Beaton’s VAR review walk of despair.

On Sunday, for every Celtic fan who witnessed it, we were treated to one of the great moments of the season when John Beaton was called to the VAR monitor. It was glorious. He didn’t walk like a man going to review a football incident.

Instead, he walked like a man who had just had a knock on the door from a stranger urging him to come to the street because “I think I just ran over your dog.”

Every Celtic supporter saw it. That slow, reluctant trudge. The shoulders slightly lowered. The expression of a man who already knew this was not going to be a pleasant experience. In other words, it wasn’t the body language of authority. It was the body language of resignation.

And in that moment, blackly and quietly, it was hilarious.

Beaton moved like a man feeling every step along the way, as though he were carrying on his shoulder a bag full of bricks. It was ponderous. Slow. Like a condemned man walking the Last Mile to the electric chair, dragging out every step as if some invisible clock ticked and, if he wasted enough time, he might be granted a reprieve.

There was, moreover, something almost funereal about the whole thing. The slow pace. The fixed expression. All it was missing was a black tie and someone carrying flowers behind him whilst an organist played The Death March. He knew in that moment that nobody in his local was buying his drinks for him that night.

Earlier, how happy he must have been going off at half-time, with the score 2-0 to his favourites. He must have been giddy with delight, believing perhaps that Celtic were so far out of it that there was no need to concern himself with a marginal call.

So how shocking it must have been to get the VAR call. You could see it on his face, like a guy who has just taken a call from his girlfriend and whose happiness at hearing her voice drains away as she tells him she found the messages between him and the other women when she logged onto the computer to do her Asda shop.

Once upon a time, a referee judged an incident and that was it. Immediate. Final. Right or wrong, the moment belonged to him and the flow of the match carried on. Now, by contrast, there’s a pause. A summons. A walk. A review. A delay heavy with expectation and tension.

During that walk, the whole stadium becomes a silent audience. On Sunday, Beaton made that journey like a man going to open a letter marked “Final Notice.”

When he reached the monitor you could see he already feared the worst. For the first few seconds he looked less like a decision-maker and more like someone lying on an operating table who has just been told that the anaesthetic might not work.

And what, exactly, was with the hesitation? The reluctance? The incident itself is as clear as it could be, so what did he spend those long seconds going over and over the footage for, as though it was his life flashing before his eyes?

Maybe, you could almost imagine him thinking, if I look hard enough I can find some minor infraction so I don’t have to give this. Maybe if I stand here long enough I can run down the clock. Then again, I am the clock. I might have to give this after all.

That, ultimately, is what made it funny to Celtic fans. Not the decision itself. The walk. The wait. That delay as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to go there.

Scottish football, of course, has always lived on controversy. VAR, however, has added a strange new emotional layer to it all and, for a moment on Sunday, Beaton was the star of the show. It was his discomfort at having to be in that place, at that time, which made it compelling.

Before VAR, frustration came after the decision. Now, instead, the tension builds before it. The walk becomes part of the spectacle. The hesitation becomes part of the story. The body language gets analysed as much as the incident itself.

That’s precisely why Sunday’s moment stuck.

Beaton approached that monitor with all the enthusiasm of a man about to check his bank balance after a wild weekend away. It wasn’t confidence or control. Rather, it was apprehension. The look of a man who knew he wouldn’t like what he saw.

But we liked what we saw. First came the walk and the wait.

The weary resignation on his face as he was forced to turn back to the pitch, draw that box in the air and point to the spot.

Then we saw him experience the sinking feeling, and then a momentary lurch of his heart as Butland made the save and then the second one.

Yet the despair followed anyway, as the ball found its way to the net.

He looked sick to his very soul.

After that came the walk off the pitch at the end.

Not as long as the one to the monitor, but still that of a man double-checking the numbers on his lottery ticket on a windy day, convinced he had all six up, only for a gust to whip it from his hand and carry it away on the current of air, up, over, going, gone.

John Beaton. We saw the pain on your face. And my, how delicious it was.