Today Martin O’Neill cut through all the rubbish and called the outrage out.

Say what you like about Martin O’Neill, but he always gets the point across.

Today, he made his point in a very big way. When he talked about the Hearts fairy tale, he was correct. All Celtic fans know that part of what is going on here is the number of people who have emotionally invested in the idea of a Hearts title win, for whatever rationale and whatever reasons they can come up with.

He was right to say it.

But Martin could have left it there. He could have framed it simply as the disappointment some people will feel if Hearts have it snatched away from them at the last moment.

That is not how he chose to leave it.

He put an even greater contextual frame on it by pointing out that the same people who want Hearts to win this would have wanted the Ibrox club to win it. If it was not them, it would have been, as he put it, somebody else.

What he means by that is obvious. These people wanted the title to go literally anywhere else but Celtic Park. At the heart of all the bitterness, anger, frustration and freaking out being done by much of the Scottish media is that simple fact.

This is not just an emotional investment in Hearts this season.

This is an emotional investment in the idea that Celtic were on their knees, that this club was fractured and broken, that an era had passed and that Celtic were no longer the strongest club in the country.

We all know these people would have loved to be talking about an Ibrox title tilt. Nobody would be talking about the romance of Hearts had we been the side sitting in third. Sometimes it takes someone they cannot and will not argue with to say it.

That is Martin O’Neill.

It was good to hear him say what we all know.

For all their pretence about sporting integrity, for all their pretence about the reputation of Scottish football and the good of the game, anti-Celtic sentiment has been right at the heart of this since Wednesday night. None of us is dumb enough not to know that, although the media is certainly acting as if it wishes we were.

The SFA is expected to come out and confirm that the penalty decision was correct, which all of us already knew. As I said in the previous piece, that will not influence these people at all. It will not move them one inch, except o shuffle in the sideways direction and find some other justification for their frustrations.

Their minds are made up. A lot of those minds were made up the moment the incident happened.

Martin explained it well today. He laid out the case, and he is the one person in a position to really make it stick. He also pointed out that if the penalty was not given for handball, it could have been given for other reasons, which is another detail many of them have chosen to ignore.

All the appeals to ignorance and all the appeals to emotion swirling around out there do not make a blind bit of difference to him. O’Neill is approaching this from a logical standpoint, and it was high time someone did.

But he is also drawing overdue attention to the real motivations driving this stuff. The Hearts fairy tale is part of it, for sure. There are plenty of people who are dying to see a club from outside Glasgow win this title. But more than that, there is a wish from people in Scottish football to see anyone but Celtic in the box seat.

Martin is echoing what this blog has been saying about us being cast as the villains. That was always going to happen from the moment the fixture list was produced, and it became clear we would have an opportunity to win it on the final day.

The framing of this whole thing has been about Celtic taking something away from everyone else. How dare Celtic snatch from Hearts that which so many people believe they are entitled to? But entitlement is not how football works.

The only entitlement that exists in football is that if you win the most games and amass the most points you will be declared champions. Everything else is noise.

It is all very well bloggers like myself writing this stuff. It is all very well podcasters saying it. I think all of us have done it to one extent or another. But to hear Martin O’Neill come out and say it, to hear him put it so plainly, was tremendous.

This is about the Hearts fairy tale, yes.

But it is also about stopping Celtic. It is about not wanting Celtic to win this.

That finally places the whole thing in its proper context. It cuts through all the nonsense the media is telling itself, and trying to convince the rest of the world to believe.

Anyone but Celtic remains their mantra.

Today, the Celtic boss called them out on it.

Bravo to him.

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