After this set of fixtures, nobody should mention the “Supercomputer” ever again.

Before this weekend started, I had a lot of fun mocking, without mercy, those who thought some supercomputer was going to pick the winner of this title.

How does the supercomputer look now? What is its analysis now that the Ibrox club lost at home yesterday and is only one defeat away from total disaster?

Every single person who published that supercomputer story, in whatever form, on whatever website, and for whatever reason short of submitting it to mockery, should feel thoroughly embarrassed today.

That was not a real story. It does not even meet the definition of what the right calls fake news. It is not news, it is just fake.

Football is played on the pitch. It is brutal and unforgiving and remorseless. It does not respond to numerical formulas. You cannot explain it purely through number-crunching.

That is why I am so distrustful of analytics as the guiding principle of a club. There is more to football than stats and data. They are a reasonable guide in certain circumstances. They are not a reasonable guide to who is going to win the title.

Neither is media hype.

For weeks, we have had all the talk about how the Ibrox club were watching results across Europe to find out if they would go straight into the Champions League. That is the proof of people focused on the wrong things.

What they should have been thinking about was whether they could get the results that would win the league.

If they had spent a little more time on that subject, and a little less time on all the ephemera and fluff, they might be in a better position today. Instead, they are staring down the barrel of the long gun.

I find the way the media has covered them hysterically funny.

All the talk about what a great coach Danny Röhl has proved to be. This guy crashed out of the Scottish Cup. He crashed out of Europe in absolute failure. He has not been able to put together a winning run in the league worth a damn, except right at the start.

They have dropped eleven league points since January. They continue to be a mess of a club. Yet, for reasons past understanding, our media acted as if the title was a foregone conclusion.

The only foregone conclusion at that club is the hype. The only thing you can absolutely count on is them getting carried away. They have done it time and again.

Over on their forums last night, all the talk was about how they dared to dream and how hope was snatched away from them.

The reason this keeps happening is that they are never realistic about their hopes or their dreams. Over and over again, they believe their own hysterical overestimation of themselves and their underestimation of the clubs around them.

They think they just have to show up to win matches.

That is not true. This is why the supercomputer story proliferated on their sites in the first place. I don’t know what the excuse was for Celtic sites that ran it, but over there it was treated as external confirmation of what they had been telling themselves all along.

That is their problem. They cannot separate fact from fiction. They home in on anything that confirms their fondest wish, no matter how ridiculous it is.

Now look, as I’ve said, this isn’t over. The supercomputer will tell a very different story today from the one it told yesterday. But that does not mean it will be right today, just because it was wrong yesterday.

It simply means those of us who don’t place any store in what the supercomputer says recognised the flaw in the system all along. This is a complicated game. It produces unexpected outcomes. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that they find themselves right back in the race before long.

But the very fact that the so-called supercomputer will say something different today from what it said yesterday is all the more reason not to trust it in the first place.

Anyone still running that pitiful story should be ashamed. The bookmakers now make Celtic favourites for the title, but I place no more store in that than I do in the supercomputer.

We still need to win our games. We need to keep doing the job. If we do the job, then more likely than not, we will win this title. But it is not in the bank.

We won’t win it because the bookmakers made us favourites. We won’t win it because some pile of microchips produced a percentage. If we win it, it will be because the players go onto the pitch and get it done.

This should be a day for a lot of people eating humble pie.

It should be a day for a lot of people coming to their senses and realising that they have been living in a fantasy for the last few weeks. Others have been clinging to any validation that fantasy gives them.

Yesterday was a sobering day for a lot of people. There may be more sobering days to come. That is the thing about football. You are not going to know until you know.

And you only know when the results tell you.

Not because an overblown calculator was paired with a crystal ball.

Leave that stuff to the fortune tellers.

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