GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - MAY 16: Celtic's Callum Mcgregor celebrates during a William Hill Premiership match between Celtic and Heart of Midlothian at Celtic Park, on May 16, 2026, in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Paul Devlin/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Last night, the anti-Celtic meltdown reached its apogee.
Someone had sent me the Record podcast earlier in the day, but I thought I had already seen it. I had no idea that I hadn’t seen it at all, so when my old man flagged it to me, I had no idea what to expect. I certainly had no idea how absurd it was going to be.
I don’t know what the mood inside Hearts is like. I imagine they are not very happy. I imagine Derek McInnes and the players are gutted. They have acted like sore losers to a degree I find almost incomprehensible, but they have not gone fully over the edge.
I’ve read some excruciating commentary in the media from people who have clearly taken leave of their senses, but most of them are acting emotionally out of frustration, bias or whatever else is driving them. By and large, they have stayed on the right side of sanity.
Then there is Keith Jackson.
When you listen to him, it is obvious something inside him has broken. He is no longer operating on the correct frequency. The words that came out of his mouth were absurd. I could use all sorts of really negative language about Jackson, and in private, since hearing that recording, I have used most of it.
But I am going to try to be more reasonable here than simply pouring out a string of invective.
The comparison that came to mind as I listened was Donald Trump at his most rabid. Not because Jackson is dangerous in the same way, obviously, but because the pattern felt familiar: the insistence on something which does not survive contact with reality, the attempt to create doubt where none exists, and the sheer recklessness of feeding people a theory which will only make the more excitable elements even worse.
That matters, because within the context of Scottish football, what Jackson appears to be attempting is enormously irresponsible. He cannot possibly grasp the seriousness of what he is saying. If he does, then the irresponsibility is on such a scale that the only rational course of action for his bosses at the Record would be to ask serious questions about what he is doing, and then, if necessary, put the plug on the guy.
What I listened to last night was Jackson trying to birth a new conspiracy theory at the heart of Scottish football.
If left unchecked, it would fester for years. It would damage the sport. Worse, it would give licence to some of the craziest people connected to two football clubs who already do not need any further inflaming.
We have already had a Celtic manager attacked at Tynecastle. We have had Celtic players and officials targeted and hit with objects at Ibrox. A referee spent a night under guard just last week. We almost had a riot at Ibrox the last time Celtic were there.
So, when someone in Jackson’s position starts talking about “the missing minute” as if there is some dark secret here, it is not harmless. It is not clever. It is not journalism.
It is wildly reckless.
The thing is, the whole theory collapses the moment you look at one simple fact.
Hearts left Celtic Park. That is it. That is the salient point. That is the fact which bursts the bubble completely. Hearts willingly left the ground.
If they genuinely believed the game still had time to play, their actions make no sense whatsoever. None.
If there was still a minute left, and if Hearts believed that minute mattered, then they should have stayed. They should have remained under the authority of the referee. They should have demanded clarity there and then. They should have asked whether the match was over, suspended, abandoned or going to resume.
Whether they did any of that, all or that or none of it at all, they left. That is the detail Jackson does not seem especially eager to explore. Hearts departure acknowledges that the match had been brought to a conclusion.
He has claimed Hearts were readying a second statement and only relented when the “clarification” arrived in the form of audio. But what, exactly, would the basis of that second statement have been?
If the argument was that the game was incomplete, Hearts’ departure destroys it. If the argument was that the match had not properly ended, their own behaviour contradicts it. If the argument was that they were denied the chance to play on, then the obvious response is devastating; why did they leave?
There is footage of Martin O’Neill and Derek McInnes shaking hands. That matters. Managers shake hands at full time. They do not normally shake hands because a match is merely paused, suspended or awaiting restart.
That handshake is the standard acknowledgement that a game has had a winner and a loser. After that, Hearts start moving their players up the tunnel.
So, let’s follow the logic.
Callum Osmand scores. Celtic go 3-1 up. Supporters come onto the pitch. Both benches appear to understand the game is done. O’Neill and McInnes shake hands. Hearts start taking their players away.
That is not the behaviour of a club preparing to insist there is still a title to be contested. That is the behaviour of a team that knows the title is gone. Before Celtic are even presented with the trophy, Hearts have left the building.
So, if there was any doubt at all about whether there was time still to add on, their departure finally shatters any basis on which they could contest the matter. Not Celtic fans on the pitch. Not doubt over the official status of the match. Not some imagined procedural fog. Hearts could, and should, have sought clarification while still inside the stadium. Any failure on their part to do that is their problem, and it brings the matter to a close beyond any hope of another outcome.
Not that any hope ever existed.
The official position is clear. The match was not abandoned. The referee had the authority to end it. The SPFL accepted that it had ended. The match report does not appear to contain anything that gives any alternative theory the slightest foundation on which to build.
So where is this supposed to go? That is the question Jackson does not answer.
He admits to have no way of knowing what is going on inside Hearts; instead, he speculates not on what he thinks might be going on but by what you can tell by the tone of his voice he hopes might be. By his own admission, he is speculating.
I suspect Hearts themselves probably want to move on, because the longer this goes on, the more questions start being asked about their own claims.
People are now asking where the evidence is for the alleged violence against their players. The footage of their players being taken off the pitch does not show what Hearts seemed to imply. The scenes outside the ground, characterised by some as ugly and intimidating, look in reality like the standard football slagging fans give a beaten side.
Their gross misrepresentation of the hostility their players allegedly faced has already started to blow up in their faces.
That is why it would be madness for Hearts to go any further down this road.
As a club, they may have been able to divert attention away from their poor performances in the final stretch of the season by blowing smoke about supporter behaviour. They may even have succeeded, for a while, in making the story about Celtic fans rather than the failures of their own manager and players.
But disappearing into conspiracy theories is a different thing. Making allegations against officials and the governing bodies, with no basis in reality, is a different thing. Trying to cast doubt on results and decide a title race by means such as these would transport them instantly from the place of the plucky losers into laughing-stock territory.
That sort of thing affects a club’s credibility for years. It would be mocked mercilessly by rivals, not just now, but far into the future. It would not be Celtic’s credentials as champions that carried the taint. Hearts would become a club that had lost all sense of perspective and operated on grievance alone … and they could not possibly hope for a positive outcome.
No serious club wants that reputation if it can avoid it, and especially to no clear or obvious benefit. History will not record anything other than Celtic as champions. That is why Hearts have made very sure to avoid saying what Jackson seems desperate to imply.
And that leaves Jackson standing alone.
He is the one who looks detached from reality. He is the one who appears to have invented a story in his own head and somehow convinced himself it has substance. He is the one trying to raise an issue which does not exist.
The “missing minute” is not a scandal. It is not a smoking gun. It is not the key to some great mystery. It exists only in his own mind. It is the story he has told himself to hold at bay the truth of what has taken place here; it’s a psychological coping mechanism and that’s exactly how it should be viewed and treated by those around him.
Celtic won the game. Celtic won the title. Hearts lost. Their goalkeeper went forward. Their free kick was poor. Celtic broke. Osmand scored into an empty net. The place exploded. The game was concluded. The managers shook hands. Hearts left the ground.
That is the timeline. That is the reality. Everything else is noise and noise is not going to materially affect any of that.
Keith Jackson can crawl around inside this fantasy for as long as he likes, but there is no rabbit hole here except in his own mind. There is no conspiracy to uncover. There is no hidden truth waiting at the bottom of it.
There is only a football match that ended with Celtic confirmed as champions and Hearts beaten into second place. If that has broken some people, then so be it.
But let us not pretend that Keith Jackson’s inability to process reality is something the governing bodies or Celtic need to answer for. Instead, let’s put it as bluntly as we are able; this clown has lost the plot.
Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
I am now convinced that The Upside Down is a real place and Celtic Park was a gate. It must be a more sane explanation for Jackson’s comments than the narrative that’s being clung to.
This will all swell again when we win the double!
Can someone remind me? Is there a game of some kind this week-end? I thought there was but there’s not been any mention of it in the papers. Maybe I’m mistaken.
In contrast here’s a piece of proper writing from Ken Early of The Irish Times which is doing the rounds on other Celtic blogs – a different take on the Hearts hype:
I never picked up the Celtic bug as a kid. But over the last few weeks, I somehow found myself becoming weirdly invested in Celtic beating Hearts to the Scottish league title and thus crushing football’s underdog story of the year.
What is wrong with me?
Hearts’ title challenge obviously had the ingredients of legend. They were taking on a sporting supremacy unmatched anywhere in the world. For 40 years, no other club has been able to stop one of Celtic or Rangers winning the title.
This oppressive dominance has obviously been bad for Scottish football and bad even for the two clubs themselves. Rangers became so obsessed with beating Celtic by any means necessary that they became a bandit club that was ultimately liquidated by the authorities. Since Rangers collapsed, Celtic have become so dominant that winning has become boring. The emotional vacuum has had to be filled with malicious delight in the failures of others.
What fair-minded person could hope for anything other than the downfall of these gloating ogres?
The first glimmer of a new challenge came in November 2024, when Hearts announced that they had entered a partnership with Tony Bloom’s firm, Jamestown Analytics.
Bloom, the legendary pro-gambler and entrepreneur, owns Brighton & Hove Albion and has stakes in Union Saint-Gilloise, Melbourne Victory and, since the summer of 2025, Hearts. His analytics company Jamestown works with selected partner clubs across a number of leagues, including Como in Italy and, since last year, Shelbourne.
According to then-Hearts boss Neil Critchley, the Edinburgh club were fortunate to have been picked out as the local vessel of the wider Jamestown project. “…If you like, they’ve chosen Hearts,” he said. “I think that’s a big thing for the football club. I think that’s something we should be very proud of as a club.”
Fifteen years ago, in the days when Brad Pitt was playing Billy Beane in Moneyball, the link-up might have been a feel-good story. Early-2000s Beane seemed a prophet of enlightenment and emancipation. Here was a way to use science to sweep away the cobwebs of ignorance and prejudice that held us all back. And here was a way for the little guy to win.
We know now that the widespread adoption of Moneyball methods took only a few years to ruin baseball. “It turns out that the smart way to play baseball is boring,” Moneyball author Michael Lewis told the SF Chronicle in 2024. “It’s much less fun having geeks from MIT running the baseball team than it was having colourful, tobacco-chewing former players who you knew. It’s much less fun when the manager is clearly less important, more like a middle manager.”
The effect has since spread to all professional sports. NBA fans complain that half of the charm of basketball has been optimised out of existence. The widespread annoyance with the English Premier League this season is rooted partly in the sense that football is going the same way.
The conquest of sport by rich and secretive data guys is one small dimension of what feels like an all-pervasive process working through all aspects of life. What a journey we’ve been on together over the last 15 years, as the innocent dream of “Bicycles for the Mind” has given way to the Age of Enshittification.
The tech that once seemed liberatory now exudes a dark aura of menace. More and more it feels as though the very stuff of our daily experience – the things we see and feel and react to – is conditioned by proprietary algorithms owned by insane billionaires.
Clearly, Tony Bloom is no Musk, Thiel or Alex Karp. Yet the scouting services Jamestown can provide to its lucky clients are reminiscent of the Tolkien talisman that Thiel and Karp’s Palantir is named after. “Gaze into our seeing stone and behold the next Scottish Player of the Year, plugging away in the obscurity of Norway’s Second Division…”
Bloom’s role in Hearts’ title charge drew the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which profiled the club last week. “Even the club’s most devoted supporters can’t quite grasp the sorcery of their recruitment policy,” wrote sports editor Joshua Robinson. He quoted Foundation of Hearts chairman Gerry Mallon, who said: “It’s a black box to us. It feels like we’ve got the cheat codes to football.”
Most of the players involved in this heroic Hearts campaign were there before Jamestown got involved. But can you be a true underdog when you have Tony Bloom in your corner giving you the cheat codes?
Their rivals for the title was a club apparently bent on wasting every one of their many advantages in the most incompetent way possible. It’s hard to believe how much chaos Celtic managed to cram into one season. A spectacular falling-out with Brendan Rodgers was followed by a spectacular falling-out between the board and the fans. The Green Brigade ultras were banned for five months. The board hired Wilfried Nancy as manager, watched him lose six matches out of eight and sacked him a month later.
You then had the unimaginably corny twist of the legend coming out of retirement to save the season – twice. Martin O’Neill, who famously scoffs at the very concept of expected goals, happens to be the perfect antagonist to the football data revolution represented by Bloom. By some mysterious process, the story of the lurching giants began to feel more compelling than that of the focused, intelligently-maximising challengers.
O’Neill’s success in instantly transforming the losing sides of Rodgers and Nancy into winning sides is one of the most interesting things to happen in football this year. It suggests that even as the game becomes ever more complex and choreographed, the key skill of a coach is still the ability to get the players into the right frame of mind to play.
In the end, it comes down to making your players believe what Celtic’s Canadian right-back Alistair Johnston told the Sky cameras on Saturday: “We just felt we were gonna f***in’ find a way.”
They didn’t play that way in the first half. They were nervous and tentative and it became the kind of match Hearts were hoping for. The challengers took the lead with the archetypal goal of season 2025-26: a well-worked inswinging corner. But Celtic’s penalty equaliser a few minutes later rattled Hearts, who played hardly any football in the second half.
Celtic played hardly any football themselves until desperation kicked in with about 15 minutes to go and they started to flood forward in numbers. After Daizen Maeda’s goal, 10 minutes of utter frenzy. Any semblance of tactics, of patience, of organisation – of reason itself – was hurled aside as both teams slashed wildly at the ball and crashed into each other at 100mph. This was a magnificent spectacle of pure, uncut, military-grade Scottish football.
It finished with Celtic running the ball all the way up the field into the unguarded Hearts net amid wild celebrations that culminated in the pitch invasion people will probably still be complaining about in 50 years.
Was the crowd’s behaviour a sign of civilisational decay, or the natural irrepressible response to such an incredible ending to an extraordinary season?
The most famous line of football commentary in the English language includes the information that a pitch invasion is taking place. Sometimes people just can’t help themselves – and making them feel that way is what this game is all about.
Well presented sir…thank you…
Ah, proper journalism. It’ll never catch on in Scotland.
Brilliant article.
I think Two things broke Jackson and many many others. 1/ The hoki koki (you put the big HUNS in the wee HUNS out ..in out in out shake them all about) ha ha 2/ Tony Bloom said he would SPLIT the “old firm” he did..but NOT in the way Jackson and co WANTED …GIRUY
James…as I’ve said many times before….I have no interest in Jackson’s theories…wouldn’t dream of reading his stuff…and certainly wouldn’t give him the oxygen of publicity…I feel that articles like this , help keep him relevant, and in my world that’s a no no…Just my opinion.
“Hearts left Celtic Park. That is it. That is the salient point. That is the fact which bursts the bubble completely. Hearts willingly left the ground.”
And according to reports this morning that was pre-planned.
Jackson is an amateur hack working for a gutter rag read by imbeciles.
Aye, fear and loathing lives in clickbait.
And they never stayed for the runner up medals either! Am sure the sponsers were happy, not! The spfl cant let em away with that ,they have to fine them. Cowards!!
Wait until our first game at Tynecastle next season,assaults guaranteed,red cards guaranteed,maybe even a penalty against us,WE HAVE BROKEN THE WHOLE ESTABLISHMENT WITH THIS TITLE
Martin O’Neill – a man of honour, intelligence, decency, integrity and sportsmanship.
And then there’s Derek McInnes.
Did you see his article ?
‘ Operation Arse Covering ‘
Ha Ha Ha Ha
Boyd,Halliday,McInness and various others,sitting in TV and radio studios,willfully lying and misrepresenting situations,are the cause of most of the contrived outrage since the weekend.
There’s not a genuine,honest,decent,unbiased man among them.
They say what they say for clicks,attention,and some sense of self-importance for sure….but BIGOTRY drives ALL of it.
Surely to fuck Celtic will never let this cretin over the door of Parkhead ever again…
Everyone should have more respect for Lucy Letby than that human lump of cancer that is Jackshun…
He’s the scum of the fuckin earth !