Jeff Stelling, do your homework before commenting on Celtic’s fixtures.

So yesterday I wrote about McCoist again. He rejects the suggestion that he is a deranged conspiracy theorist.

This site called him exactly that. The problem for him is simple enough. He has pushed at least a couple of deranged conspiracy theories involving Celtic in his time. Foremost among them is this nonsense that Celtic runs Scottish football. And why? Because the fixture list is fair.

What surprised me even more, listening to the talkSPORT clip where he tried to pass off his own paranoia as a joke, was Jeff Stelling’s colossal ignorance.

I have only one thing to say to Jeff Stelling, and to any other English commentators who want to weigh in on Scottish football and how it is run.

Do your damned homework or shut the hell up.

Because if you do not know what you are talking about, then you sound ignorant and stupid when you pretend that you do.

Stelling looked at the fixture list and decided something must be wrong with it because Celtic have Hearts and the Ibrox club both at home, while the Ibrox club have Hearts and Celtic both away.

He clearly does not understand how post-split fixtures work.

But five minutes on the internet could have given him the answer. Instead he sounded a lot like McCoist.

Of course, this is more straightforward and less controversial than he thinks.

It is actually very simple. So Jeff, let me explain, since you clearly could not be arsed even googling this.

Celtic has been to Tynecastle twice in the league this season. Celtic has been to Ibrox twice in the league this season.

The Ibrox club has been to Celtic Park once and Tynecastle once.

That is how you end up with Hearts playing the Ibrox club at home and Celtic away. It means Hearts gets two home games and two away games against both Glasgow clubs.

It is also how Celtic ends up with Hearts at home and the Ibrox club at home. And it is how the Ibrox club ends up with the two away games. Because it already had the two corresponding home games against those teams.

There is no conspiracy here nor anything unusual going on.

As much as I detest the split, and I do, this part of it is perfectly normal. The league tries to ensure that every team gets 19 games at home and 19 games away over a 38-game season. That is called sporting integrity.

If you have three clubs competing for the title, you cannot disadvantage one of them by taking away its entitlement to one of those home games against the others.

I do not know whether these people are just dumb or heart lazy.

Here is the other thing that seems to throw the Stelling’s of this world off. They don’t understand this one looks so lopsided because nobody knows who the top six teams are going to be when the season starts.

The SPFL decided to give us two games at Ibrox and two games at Tynecastle before the split.

But nobody at Hampden knew what that meant. Hearts did not make the top six last season. When the fixture list came out, nobody had any idea that Hearts would be in the top six, never mind challenging for the title.

This is a quirk of the system this season.

And next season, because we have had the two home games this time, the post-split fixtures will in all probability send us to both Ibrox and Tynecastle in the final run-in; do you think anybody will be squealing about how unfair that is?

So, I really wish that Stelling and some of the other clown-car occupants on that radio show, would stop expressing amazement at things that are very easy to understand if they cared enough to check.

And that’s really what it comes down to; they all think they “know” what goes on up here but even on the most basic points they don’t have a clue.

This is years of relying on the likes of McCoist and people like Keith Jackson for their news.

Of course, they filter everything through a blue tint and their own basic idiocy.

That is no excuse.

These people sit marooned in their little English Premier League bubble.

Fine. I get that. But this is basic stuff. It is fundamental stuff.

Last season, after the split, we went to Tannadice, Ibrox and Aberdeen. That is how it works. Listening to Stelling’s disbelief just reminds me that ignorance usually builds conspiracy theories.

But when your job is to comment on this stuff for a living, it might help to know what you are talking about before you start talking about it. There is no excuse.

McCoist, at least, we understand here. He cannot see past his own prejudice.

But when you have built your reputation as a knowledgeable and impartial commentator, as Stelling has, your knowledge base really ought to be better than this. It’s embarrassing. Because it’s only in this void where the facts should be that someone like McCoist can push his brand of nonsense in the first place.

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