Celtic will not “throw” Hearts the title. This rubbish needs calling out.

Michael Gannon’s piece in the Daily Record today is pretty abysmal.

It begins with a contention that every Celtic fan should challenge aggressively, and it contains at least one claim so absurd it sounds like something that would have come out of the mouth of McCoist or some other assorted clown.

Gannon writes about the near impossibility of the task facing Celtic.

Except that it is not nearly impossible at all. It is a fairly straightforward task.

Win six out of six and you are champions. There is nothing complicated about that. There is no reason to believe it cannot be done, except that this is a poor Celtic side.

But, this is not a Celtic team going up against world-beating rivals.

All three title contenders are pretty poor. There is no more reason to believe one of them will win it than there is to believe we will.

Anything can happen here, and points will be dropped all over the place.

One of the stupider claims in the article is about goal difference. Gannon says it’s worth an extra point. This is such a daft argument. Goal difference only matters when two sides finish on the same points. It never has counted as “worth a point” and never will.

It is hard to know where to start with that one.

By the time we play Hearts on the final day of the season, goal difference ought not to matter a damn. It is not something I am overly concerned with, and it is not something I ever have been overly concerned with.

The assumption that the Ibrox club is far enough ahead of us that goal difference is effectively worth an extra point is dumb, even if we are being generous. There is a long way to go here, and a lot can happen that renders goal difference irrelevant.

If we win our matches up to the home game against the Ibrox club, then regardless of what other results they have picked up, we move in front of them in the league if we win and goal difference isn’t a factor at all.

Gannon’s other bizarre claim is that in a normal season we would already be out of the title race and miles behind.

I have no idea what he means by that, or from which part of his anatomy he dragged that nonsense.

In a normal season, we sit 15 points clear right now, with the Ibrox club in its usual shambles and no Hearts title challenge to speak of. In a normal season, we are probably sitting on around 80 points already, which might be enough to win this title, and we would be heading for 90.

So really, I do not know what is wrong with these people.

This has not been a great season at Celtic and, you know what, we still reached the League Cup Final. Only the fact that a complete muppet managed us stopped this from becoming a six-week charge towards a domestic treble, even at our worst.

This idea that we should write ourselves off, or that it will take some kind of miracle for us to get over the line, is rubbish. If we are even 10% better than we have been for most of this campaign, we will win the league.

But here is the contention I personally find offensive.

It is the idea that if Hearts are still in it on the final day and they need a win to become champions, we will roll over.

Let me say what I have said before. It is no less a calamity for Hearts to win this title than it is for the Ibrox club to win it. Especially if it relegates us to third place. In that scenario, who finishes top becomes almost beside the point.

Third place is a profound Year Zero moment for this club.

The idea that we would voluntarily accept a huge amount of damage inflicted on ourselves just to stop someone else from winning the league is so idiotic, so detached from reality, so utterly moon-howling, that it ought to speak for itself.

I want to put it on the record right now that I would be disgusted if our club chose to inflict that kind of harm on itself simply to stop an Ibrox title win, and I would be shocked if many Celtic fans accepted that outcome.

Yes, there are good reasons not to want to see it go to Ibrox.

But I am focused primarily on Celtic’s long-term interests. I do not care what short-term boost other people might get from it.

A Hearts title win would be just as horrible for me, and for most other Celtic fans, as an Ibrox title win would be. If it is not us, then I do not really have a preference one way or another. I care what happens to Celtic.

The risk that a negative result in that final game might condemn us to third place is unacceptable.

That is the scenario we would be facing, unless we are already stuck in third. We would go into that game, presumably, already out of the title race (otherwise why would we not try to win it?) but still with a chance of finishing second.

Nobody is going to tell me Celtic fans will willingly cheer on a scenario where we drop from second to third and then head into a summer not of rebuilding but of savage recalibration of our entire financial strategy. The gap between Champions League football – even Europa League football – and Conference League football is so vast that you had better believe it would hurt in ways we have not even begun to imagine.

To me, that is where the whole argument dies. We are not inflicting that kind of harm on ourselves. Not on the off chance that we can damage the club across the city as well. That is not how we are motivated. That is not how we are set up. The more these idiotic hacks push this idiotic line, the more annoyed I get with it.

Because imagine just one possible scenario.

We play the B team at home on the final day against Hearts to make sure Hearts get the win. Hearts duly do. We finish third. Then Falkirk beat the Ibrox club anyway, which would have denied them the title regardless.

We would have inflicted severe damage on ourselves for no benefit whatsoever. We have harmed ourselves to ensure an outcome that it turns out happened anyway. That is how stupid the whole argument is.

I want Celtic to win every game between now and the end of the campaign. If I thought fa Celtic team was not trying to win a match, I would be furious.

It is not worthy of serious discussion anyway. Because these are professional players led by a manager who will not accept that outcome. They have far too much professionalism ever to do something so rancid and self-defeating.

Our board act sometimes like a bunch of self-destructive firebugs setting everything ablaze.

But the rest of this club still retains a shred of sanity.

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