Yes, Celtic will change whether the BBC gets this or not.

Last night, I read a BBC report which quoted Paul John Dykes. Atop the piece was a question; Will there be change at the club?

I thought Paul John acquitted himself brilliantly. I thought he said all the right things, and I would not have disagreed with a single word of it.

But the article itself, and the questions he faced, reveal a strange disconnect between the media environment and those of us within the Celtic support who understand this moment and what it means for the club.

I have said this repeatedly, and I will say it dozens more times. The people responsible for this season will not walk away unscathed. Every one of them will leave this club, and if supporters have to shame them into it, so be it.

This club will move beyond this period, but it will not move backwards. There is no return to the old days, when those people sat in the stands like masters of the universe while supporters played a passive role.

Those days are gone. They are not coming back. There will be no peace. There will be no unity. We will not see a lasting ceasefire, or whatever we want to call this strange little moment, while they still remain.

Their first responsibility was always to the institution itself.

Over the course of this year, they have repeatedly failed to balance the needs of that institution against their own selfishness. They have acted in a profoundly self-serving manner from start to finish.

Their decision not to support Brendan Rodgers in any meaningful way was taken to damage the man. But they knew it would also damage the club, and that mattered less to them than damaging him. They do not get to escape from that.

That is their legacy. That is what they will be remembered for.

I say that knowing full well there are sections of our support who did not like Rodgers, who never trusted Rodgers, and who believe every negative caricature of him that exists. Those people are entitled to that view.

But their view of Rodgers and my view of what the board did to him are not mutually exclusive.

They may have believed they were fully justified in damaging Rodgers in whatever way they could. They may have believed they took that decision because he was behaving selfishly himself. But I do not care how they dress it up.

These folks knowingly took decisions that harmed Celtic, the club they are supposed to run on our behalf. They wilfully gambled with this season. They willingly left the team weak in critical areas. I don’t care how they justify it to themselves. I don’t care how they rationalise it or what helps them sleep at night, and I don’t care whether they were right about Rodgers or wrong about Rodgers.

Their responsibility was to put Celtic first. They did not. That is what their record will reflect.

Then, when they had the chance in January to make amends, they chose not to. They chose not to support O’Neill, the man they had thrown into the job. They gambled with his reputation, and they gambled with his relationship with the supporters as well.

I was never going to forgive them for the summer.

But nobody should forgive them for January.

Even if you think Rodgers was the devil in disguise, you cannot ignore what they did to Martin O’Neill. For many fans, I know that was the breaking point.

So, there is no going back.

Those people are damned by their own actions. Nothing they do in the future will reconcile me to their presence at Celtic Park. Nothing they do will erase the stain of what they have already done. There are things you do not come back from.

As far as these people are concerned, we have crossed the Rubicon. As Caesar reportedly said at that fateful moment: alea iacta est. The die is cast.

Still, the media has trouble grasping this.

I don’t know where the disconnect comes from. A lot of them read the blogs. I know a lot of them are well aware of the thinking amongst supporters. Perhaps they have convinced themselves, somehow, that this is only a small number of malcontents.

They are wrong. Every one of us who has spoken at length with our fellow Celtic supporters knows they are wrong.

This club has to change, or it will not heal. People have to leave, or it will not change.

That is where we are.

That is pretty much the crux of what Paul John Dykes told the BBC, and even then, the article still seemed unable to grasp the scale of the anger or even place it in context.

There are people who have written that Martin O’Neill will have saved the board if he wins the title. Those people are ignoring the many, many, many of us who have said on podcasts, written on blogs and discussed this in forums.

Victory or failure, triumph or tragedy, nothing changes our determination to see these people gone.

Success will not paper over these cracks.

It cannot be allowed to.

There is a famous debate from the Roman Republic, and it was about what should happen to the Catiline conspirators, men who had plotted against the state. The old guard in the Senate argued that they had betrayed the Republic and should be put to death.

Julius Caesar, then an ambitious young senator, argued for a form of permanent imprisonment and the forfeiture of their assets. On the surface, it was an appeal to due process, and historians generally agree that his speech had moved the room. The men had been arrested before the commission of a capital crime; they could not be judged, then, as if they had done it.

Then Cato stood up. His argument was simple and devastating. The Senate had to stop acting like children and recognise the peril they were still in. Caesar was asking for mercy because the conspirators had failed. But had they succeeded, none of the senators would have been alive to judge them.

So, Cato the Younger told them to act as though the conspiracy had succeeded and only then had the conspirators been caught.

Once that logic landed, the Senate delivered its judgement.

That is how I view Celtic winning the title, if we do win it.

Avoiding disaster does not absolve the people who created the conditions for it.

If O’Neill drags this team over the line, it does not mean the board committed no serious offence against the interests of the club. It does not mean the gamble was justified. It does not mean the summer was acceptable or that anyone should forget January.

All it means is that the club avoided the worst consequences at the last possible moment.

It is about time the media in this country understood that.

Yes, this club will change. It has to change.

The wheels are already in motion, and nobody is stopping this train. Removing them all may take years, but the pressure will last years too. The campaign will last years. It will not stop until they are gone.

And anyone who believes Dermot Desmond will simply pick another bunch of yes men and continue as before should understand this: those yes men will suffer the same fate if they behave the same way.

Change is not just desirable now. It is necessary, and once change becomes necessary, and once enough people want it, it becomes inevitable.

These people can doubt our resolve as much as they want, but I know we are stronger than they are. Because what they take out, we put in. These people have never given anything to Celtic. For them, it is all about what they get back.

We, on the other hand, have given everything to Celtic.

Those people in their plush offices, their nice cars and their lovely homes it all only exists in the way that it does because of what we put in.

If they think their resolve is stronger than ours, they are wrong. We love this club more than they do. We are passionate about this club in a way they cannot comprehend. The person who gives something to an institution always has more skin in the game than the person who takes something from it.

That is why we will win.

That is why we will outlast them.

The BBC article says there are lots of Celtic fans who disagree that this board has to go, and who disagree that this season unravelled because of them.

Fine. It is high time to produce them.

Let us hear from them. Let us hear the serious, public, scrutinised case for the defence.

You know, I have heard plenty of articulate people from our side go on TV and radio, and speak on podcasts, and present the case for the prosecution. I have heard them explain, calmly and clearly, why change is necessary and why this board has forfeited trust.

I have yet to hear a single serious defence of those at the top of our club.

Maybe it is time we did.

Or better yet, maybe the people at the top of the house should stop hiding behind invisible proxies and present their own case. Let them put themselves in front of the cameras. Let them face the journalists and answer the questions. Have them explain why they deserve to remain in post after what they have done.

They won’t. And we all know why. They don’t have the guts, and they don’t have a case worth presenting. There is no real case for the defence, and those of us on this side of the table know it full damn well.

That is why we get the questions. That is why people always ask our side to justify its position, explain whether we are overreacting, decide whether we are misjudging the situation and consider whether we are reading the room wrong.

They ask because we are the only people confident enough in what we believe to put ourselves out there and defend it.

When nobody on the other side is willing to do the same, what does that tell you about the strength of their argument?

Yes, this club will change. The change is already underway. It is like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger until it becomes an avalanche.

They can delay it. They cannot stop it.