Celtic fans, feast your eyes on the madness of the Ibrox fan forums.

As most Celtic fans will be aware, the Ibrox fan forums went into instant meltdown the moment the fixture list dropped. You almost have to admire the speed with which they did it. They really didn’t waste a moment.

The fixture list drops, and within seconds the whole Ibrox social media asylum is up and running, every crank theory in circulation, every old grievance dusted off, every familiar note of victimhood hit at full volume.

These Peepul didn’t even ease themselves into it. They didn’t pause to think it through.

They went straight to “corruption,” straight to “cheating,” straight to the old, stale fantasy that shadowy forces are forever arranging Scottish football to do them down. I thought I would spare you the requirement to go and find this stuff for yourself.

I thought I would provide some of the highlights for you myself!

And let’s be honest, some of it is magnificent.

One of them takes one look at Celtic getting the final-day home game and blurts out, “Corruption for them to be sitting 3rd and getting the home game last.” Another says the whole thing has been “set up to help one team only.”

First, we’re only sitting in third right now. By the time the split games kick off, we might not be. This apparently hasn’t dawned on them. As for setting it up for us, if they win their first three games they’re home and in good nick. If we win our first three it’s pretty much in our hands. Nobody has had it “set up” for them. You still have to win.

A third, in a fit of pure blue delusion, decides Celtic playing ahead of them in the first two rounds amounts to “pure cheating and corruption from the SPFL and Sky.” This is not analysis. It is not reason. It is moon howling, unless we’re now suggesting that Sky are part of the Grand Conspiracy of the Unseen Fenian Hand? Christ, you’d think we could do better than employing the Village Idiot if we were.

The bit that really broke them, of course, was the final fixture.

Celtic at home to Hearts on the last day has sent them into a kind of collective nervous collapse. One calls it “a fucking disgrace.” Another says it was “hand picked by that lot so they can lie down to Hearts if needs be.” Yet another, in a line that deserves to live forever, writes, “Congrats Hearts on your 6-0 win.”

As I said earlier, that is where their minds go instantly. Not to football, not to form, not to the possibility that one team might beat the other if the title is on the line, but to fantasy. To a world where everybody conspires, everybody collaborates, and everybody exists to stop their club from winning the title.

That tells you more about them than it does about the fixtures.

Because here is the truth. No fixture list was ever going to satisfy them. None.

If they had got Hearts away on the final day, they would have spent eleven pages explaining why that too was somehow unfair. If Celtic had faced a harder run, they would have found some hidden advantage in that.

Even if everyone had played the games at 3pm on a Saturday, they would have invented another grievance and carried on from there.

The paranoia comes first. They manufacture the evidence afterwards.

What really panics them is not the fixture list itself. It is what the order of those games might allow Celtic to do with it.

Because if results go our way early, Celtic Park could become the place where their title challenge dies. That is the fear under all of this noise, as I wrote earlier.

They know they have a rough sequence. The Ibrox fans know Tynecastle and Celtic Park back-to-back can wreck them. They know that if they drop points before they come east and then lose again in Glasgow, their season may already be finished before the final weekend arrives. That is what sits underneath the screaming.

Not righteous anger. Not sporting principle. Fear.

And once you see that, the whole thread becomes hilarious.

They really did think the final-day game would be at Tynecastle against Hearts. You can tell from the panic and the shock. You can tell from the disbelief that the football authorities have not arranged the last act of the season around the scenario most flattering to them.

One of them even sniffs that “the super computer picked that one well,” as though some machine in a dark room had been trained specifically to torment the people of Govan. Another fumes that “it’s amazing how these things always go their way!!”

Always. Even in a season where Celtic have spent months making a nonsense of their own campaign.

That is why the overreaction matters.

It is not just funny because they are hysterical. It is funny because the Ibrox hysteria reveals the assumption underneath it. They genuinely believe the game should naturally arrange itself around their needs, their preferred narratives, their ideal title run-in, their chosen television spectacle.

And when it doesn’t, when reality intrudes, when they face a difficult sequence and Celtic get a final-day home game, their first instinct is not to say, “Right, let’s win our matches.” Instead, they scream that the world has wronged them.

That is a loser’s instinct. How many times have we said this?

The whole Grand Conspiracy of the Unseen Fenian Hand revolves around a simple idea: “we won’t be allowed to win.” That gives the Ibrox fans both an alibi for failure and a way to claim that cheating and corruption taint any success we secure. It’s pitiful.

To be fair, by page 11 a few of them start trying to steady the place. A couple tell the others to calm down and focus on winning their own games. One even says, sensibly enough, that they should stop getting bogged down in fear, conspiracy and paranoia.

But by then the damage is done. The thread has already become exactly what you would expect from them: a monument to self-pity, bad faith and grievance culture masquerading as football discussion. So yes, laugh at them.

Laugh at the instant leap to corruption. At the fantasy of Celtic giving the league to Hearts in front of a home crowd, with the distinct possibility that it would condemn us to third at the same time.

Laugh at the thought that a fixture computer, Sky Sports and the SPFL all got together just to inconvenience them. Laugh, above all, at how badly they wanted that final-day trip to Tynecastle and how furious they are that they did not get it.

Because the Ibrox fans have told us, once again, exactly how mad they are.

And no matter what happens from here, today has been a good day because of that.

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