Seven days that shamed Scottish football.

Seven days ago, following Celtic’s win at Ibrox, this fixture was making more headlines than it has in years. It was on the national news. It was across the papers and all over the media landscape in a way we have not seen for a long time. None of that was very good.

There was talk of a “shame game”. There was talk of disgrace.

We heard folk say that the match had embarrassed Scottish football. Listening to some of the commentary, you might even have thought that a few people in Scottish football were quietly enjoying the opportunity to say so.

For some of us it was a thoroughly depressing moment.

Yes, our side had won. Yes, our side had knocked their biggest rivals out of the cup and inflicted a massive psychological blow on them. Seven days earlier we had gone to the same stadium and come away with a credible draw after being two goals down at half-time.

The performances were not perfect. Neither match was flawless. Yet the planets seemed to align in such a way that those two results looked exactly like the kind of moments that give a team momentum.

They looked like the kind of games that propel a side towards a domestic double.

Nevertheless, the achievement was always going to be overshadowed by the events off the pitch. All we could hope for was that the matter would be dealt with honourably, and yet almost immediately we got newspaper coverage which, from the very start, sought to confound and confuse observers with a familiar set of smokescreens.

False equivalence. Narrative management. Whataboutery. The same old tricks of the trade we have seen before, and before, and before.

On the surface the situation was fairly simple.

Celtic supporters came onto the pitch to celebrate. Ibrox supporters came onto the pitch to fight. There is a world of difference between those two things. One is an expression of joy. The other is an expression of hate.

Yet it’s very clear that the media never intended to cover it that way. From the very beginning their determination was to blur the issues anto suggest that one was just as bad as the other.

And so, the past week has been a week of shame.

Not because of the conduct of Celtic supporters, but because of the conduct of an entire media class, a political class, a national police force and the governing authorities of the game. All of them seem to have been competing to see who could appear the ineptest, the most gutless and the most unwilling to confront the truth.

Originally, I considered writing this as a timeline of the past seven days. A step-by-step account of how the story evolved, or rather devolved, from a place of truth into a fog of distortion and half-truths.

But everyone already knows what happened. We saw it.

Every person in this country who watched the footage knows exactly what occurred. Every person in a position of authority knows who instigated the violence. I do not believe for a second that anyone seriously doubts where the lion’s share of responsibility lies.

Yet none of them will say it.

Throughout the past week Celtic sites like this one have asked the people pushing the false equivalence narrative two very simple questions. What were our supporters doing on the pitch? And what were their supporters doing on the pitch?

Those are the only two questions that matter. Answer those two questions honestly and the equivalence argument collapses immediately.

Every time something like this happens there are some of us who hope for a reckoning. We hope that enough people will speak up. We hope that enough voices will refuse to accept the convenient narrative and force the authorities to confront the real problem directly.

Every time we are disappointed. Every time we are betrayed.

And this betrayal feels particularly acute because this case is such an obvious one. This was a slam dunk. The aggression was plain to see. The responsibility was clear.

Yet even now the story is being twisted.

Try challenging the people pushing this version of events and you will discover something interesting. They do not answer. They will not engage.

Tom English simply shut down his Twitter replies so that he would not have to respond to the questions being put to him. Others ignore anything that does not suit their narrative, answering only the points they want to address while quietly sidestepping the ones that matter. They are frauds, all of them.

Even when the truth is being spoken, even when someone points out the absurdity of the situation, the point has to be dressed up as comedy in order to be taken seriously at all.

Kevin McKenna demonstrated that brilliantly in the middle of the week.

His Herald column about the scandalous sight of young men making the sign of the cross in public was obviously satire. It mocked the false equivalence narrative by exaggerating it to the point of absurdity. The joke was obvious.

Yet Celtic supporters celebrating a victory on the pitch are treated as though they are somehow part of the same problem.

When that is the logic of your position, something is deeply wrong.

When the entire media landscape repeats the same distortion, that becomes a problem not only for journalism but for the country itself.

Decades ago, the journalist Ian Archer described the Ibrox fanbase as “a permanent embarrassment and an occasional disgrace”. He also gave them a monicker which survives to this day; he called them Scotland’s Shame.

And they are Scotland’s shame.

But the uncomfortable truth is that Scotland now shames itself by continuing to tolerate them. It is almost as though the country has become immune to the embarrassment. Almost as though the rot has spread so deeply that confronting it feels impossible.

I love this country. Believe it or not, I genuinely do. That is precisely why this depresses me so much. I care about Scotland’s reputation. I care about the character of this country and the values we claim to stand for. Watching the past seven days unfold has made it painfully clear that we are still a long way from representing them.

This was the week when official Scotland had an opportunity to speak up. The government. The police. The councils. The anti-racism organisations. The charities and NGOs that are so quick to comment on other issues.

Instead, we got silence. Shameful, cowardly silence.

John Swinney, the First Minister, spoke about the need for a reckoning. But even that sounded like little more than a line of rhetoric. It was not accompanied by any sense of action or urgency. And frankly we are sick to the back teeth of rhetoric.

Even words would have been better than what we actually got. What we got was a situation where the victims of violence were blamed for causing it, and the victims of racism were casually lumped together with the racists themselves.

Yes, the events of last Sunday were shocking. Yes, they were shameful. But somehow the events of the past seven days have been even worse.

Because what they revealed was cowardice. They revealed dishonesty. They revealed an entire establishment more willing to hide behind false equivalence than confront an uncomfortable truth.

The final insult came with the quiet confirmation that nothing will change. The ticket allocations for Celtic Park after the split will remain the same. The system will continue exactly as before. In other words, the outrage itself was largely manufactured.

In a country content to accept that outcome, the real shame does not lie with something that happened on a football pitch after a game.

The real shame lies with what it says about the country itself. Nothing about it is admirable. Nothing about it is something we should be proud of.

Scotland can be better than this. But Scotland has to want to be better than this.

When you look at the way the media covered this story, when you look at how the political class responded, when you look at the police reaction and the governing bodies of the game, it becomes painfully obvious that too many people are perfectly comfortable with the status quo.

That is why we will find ourselves here again and again and again, until enough people finally decide that silence is no longer acceptable.