The Scottish media ought to be ashamed after their Celtic bashing 24 hours.

Yesterday was one for the ages, wasn’t it? Our media … what a joke they are.

Celtic fans have seen a lot. We have watched meltdowns, tantrums, conspiracies, media pile-ons and all manner of Scottish football lunacy over the years. But I am not sure we have ever seen anything quite like the last 24 hours.

What came across most clearly was that every Celtic site, every Celtic fan media person, every blog, every podcast, every Twitter account, every meme-maker and every supporter who spends time examining this game felt exactly the same way.

We have never seen anything like this before.

Some people will say these are unique circumstances. But let’s be honest, they are not really unique at all. Some of us have been saying for a long time now that any weekend where a decision goes in Celtic’s favour, or one goes against the Ibrox club, you are going to hear about it for days and days at a time.

This one will run far beyond the week. It will run far beyond the month. We will still be hearing about this next year and well into the future.

It has gone exactly as I predicted. Celtic are being fitted up for the role of the bad guys. That is the part we have been assigned to play. We are not even the spoilers or the party poopers anymore. We are the cheats.

That is a much darker story to spin, and there are elements of Scottish football who will carry this in their heads for as long as some of us are alive. If Celtic win this title, there will be people who say this is exactly how we did it.

It has been one hell of a time to be a Celtic fan.

We have been through a lot this season. Let us not kid ourselves. It has been a truly terrible year in many ways, particularly because of the people running our club. But as supporters, we have come through all of it with a certain amount of balance.

There was a period last week where I was perfectly willing to contemplate Hearts winning the title simply because they had been the better team. I was even willing to give Derek McInnes credit if that was how it ended.

But you know what? To hell with all of that now.

I want to beat these people as much as I’ve ever wanted a title. I want to beat McInnes. I want to see him at the end of the season with tears in his eyes. I want to see his players broken, their supporters shattered and their dreams crushed.

I want it all to this extreme because the torrent of rubbish over the last 24 hours has been so extreme, so absurd and so vicious that I cannot wish any of these people well. I just want Celtic to win now. I want to see the light of joy go out of their eyes. I want to leave them with another 40 years of hard-luck stories and what-might-have-beens.

I know full well there is not a single neutral in this country who wants to see us win this title. But then, I have known that for weeks. If it was not this decision, it would have been something else. They would have found another stick to beat us with, another reason to say we did not really deserve it.

Kevin Nolan did not even hesitate to say we would not deserve to win the title, and that was before events at Fir Park. So, when I hear gutter rats like Simon Jordan banging on about how he hopes we do not win it, I can only say: no kidding.

You never wanted us to win it. You never hoped we would win it.

So, stop pretending there has been some dramatic transformation because Hearts feel hard done by, Motherwell feel hard done by and the drums are banging their mad tune. You never wanted to see us win this. We already knew that.

The English commentariat has been particularly ignorant here. I will be talking about some of them later today. These are people who do not give Scottish football a second look, yet suddenly they are experts on the game up here and how it is run.

That is laughable.

Jeff Stelling can stamp his feet all he wants. He was screaming conspiracy a couple of weeks ago as well, with no context whatsoever and apparently only Ally McCoist’s word to go on. If you are taking your information from that man, you deserve every bit of mockery that comes your way when you start spouting his nonsense out of your own mouth.

Gary Lineker? I did not even know Gary Lineker knew there was football up here. He should have stuck to selling crisps and keeping his mouth shut about things he clearly does not understand. He’s wandered into a minefield with clown shoes on.

But then a lot of people are throwing their two cents into subjects they do not understand. We had an entire panel on Sky attempting to discuss physics the other night, which is certainly one of the funniest things I have ever watched.

The only thing funnier was that clip from Ibrox fan media where one guy was trying to work out how Hearts would win the title if Celtic drew, only for his mate to explain that no, it would go to the last game. Then he tried to talk about goal difference being plus five, and the other guy had to explain that when you are playing the second-placed team, every goal they score costs you one as well, so Celtic would only need to score three.

The look on his poor little face as he tried to contemplate basic mathematics was hilarious.

A lot of people have embarrassed themselves over the last few days. I mean seriously embarrassed themselves. But more embarrassing than that is the attempt to pretend they have suddenly developed an affection for Hearts they did not have before.

If the Ibrox club had still been in this, Hearts would not be getting a look in. It would all be about how the Ibrox club was being cheated and how they were on the brink of a historic crime being committed against them.

Hearts fans should not believe for one second that this media sympathy means these people are their friends. These people just hate us. Do not mistake one for the other.

What this chorus of bitterness and fury has really been about was summed up perfectly by a Celtic Twitter account yesterday: it is not about the decisions, it is about who got the decisions.

That is the simple truth of it.

Some of us have been saying that for months during a season where every contentious Celtic decision was analysed, probed and dissected like the Zapruder film. People rushed to snap judgements which were later found to be absolutely idiotic.

The same has happened here.

Celtic’s own piece of spectacular footage from behind the goal proves conclusively what we already knew.

There is a lot to unpack here. They have given us enough material for two months of stories in the space of a single day, and there is no sign they are ready to stop. Some of these clowns are sticking to their guns. They are resolutely determined that this decision was somehow bent or corrupt, even though the idea that Celtic were done a favour by John Beaton and Andrew Dallas is manifestly ridiculous.

Of course, this is designed to have an impact on the weekend. This is designed to ensure we do not get a single decision, not even a justified one. We are going to have to rise above the pressure being put on people. In Dickinson, we are once again coming up against a referee who, to put it mildly, is no friend of our club.

That is one of the funniest things about the last couple of days.

As I said in my earliest piece yesterday morning, you have people like McCoist calling for refereeing to be reformed, but not in any way that would actually matter. He rejects out of hand the idea of bringing in foreign referees. Of course he does.

If he genuinely believed the SFA was corrupt, foreign officials should be top of his list. So why does he reject it?

Because he knows full well that if the SFA is institutionally biased, it is not biased in Celtic’s favour. He does not want to upset the status quo too much. As we have said before on this site, and as Celtic social media has said for years, if people have suddenly realised that Scottish officiating does not work, great.

If people have suddenly realised there might be a case for cleaning out the whole Augean stable, wonderful. If people have suddenly recognised that perhaps bias does operate against certain clubs, then excellent.

Let’s have the conversation.

If anyone thinks we are afraid of that conversation, they have not been paying attention. We have been calling for it for years. But why do I suspect no one seriously wants to have it?

Because then things would change.

If I know one thing about Scottish football, it is that nobody in power wants things to change. God forbid we have leaders who take the rulebook seriously. God forbid we have leaders who make officials declare allegiances before they get major games. God forbid we treat these matters as seriously as associations all over the world do.

It makes me laugh to hear people suddenly talking about the need for reform when we have been talking about it for years and being accused of paranoia for doing so.

Well, who sounds paranoid now?

It is not a coincidence that some of these same people who are whispering paranoia out of one side of their mouths are also telling us to ditch our paranoia out of the other. You would have to be pretty stupid not to see what motivates that behaviour.

They want to scream about one type of bad officiating, but they do not want us to go too deep into all the rest.

They want to talk about title races being tainted, but nobody wants to talk about the half-dozen league titles which should have been stripped and were not. “Sporting integrity” only comes out of their mouths when they want to defend Ibrox’s divine right to win things or get what it wants. When you want to talk about the times they leaned on other clubs, berated officials or demanded that certain people should not be allowed to officiate their games, suddenly that does not count.

McCoist mouthing off about people ignoring the rulebook is hilarious. This is the same rulebook he has twice this season said he does not agree with and therefore should not stand.

Then you have Keith Jackson defending the integrity of John Beaton from Celtic fans and Willie Collum from Ibrox fans. Yet I seem to remember that when the Ibrox club was stamping its feet and making a lot of noise about Collum, Jackson said they had a case to answer. He said Collum should be facing hard questions.

In one column in his rag newspaper, he even pointed out that Collum teaches at a Roman Catholic school, something which had absolutely nothing to do with his officiating.

Likewise, Tom English has spent many moons sneering at conspiracy theorists and people making claims about officials. But he has sounded as rabid, crazy and nutty as the maddest of those people over the last few months, and especially over the last 24 hours.

They have no shame. None. They also have no credibility at all on the subject of refereeing reform. Many of us have pointed out for a long time that the current system does not work and needs to change.

As we have said previously, on the day people get real, on the day people actually want to reform the governing bodies, on the day they get serious about change, we will be here.

We will be here because we have been here from the start.

Change is something we have openly called for. We have even made suggestions about how that change might work. As we transition from one version of the governing body to a better one, it would not hurt to bring in foreign officials every now and again.

You cannot scream about not trusting officiating in Scotland and then reject that idea out of hand. If you do, I cannot take you seriously.

No one else should either.

You either recognise the problem and want to deal with it, or this is all just for show or a burst of momentary rage because Celtic got a decision. A lot of people should be taking stock of how they behaved in the last day. They should be looking at their own behaviour rather than pointing their fat, stupid fingers at other people.

Those who spent years telling us we were paranoid now sound far more paranoid than any Celtic fan ever has, ever did, or ever will.

For years, I have heard stories about how we run the governing bodies and how we run the SFA. As I pointed out yesterday, there are now stories in national newspapers about how we run the Scottish Government as well.

But nobody has ever produced any real tangible evidence for that. Nobody has ever produced a Jim Farry to support that claim. Nobody has ever produced a Campbell Ogilvie to make their point. Nobody has ever produced a Hugh Dallas to strengthen their case or a Gordon Smith to slam dunk it.

There is plenty of evidence over the years to suggest that people working at the very highest levels of Scottish football have been pro-Ibrox and anti-Celtic. Actual proof. Evidence which resulted in people losing their jobs and which led to major investigations.

I could go on and on. It is all there in black and white.

That is the difference between our version of paranoia and theirs. Our version wasn’t paranoia at all. They really were out to get us.

But apparently, our own conspiracy is either very good or we are very, very lucky, because if we run Scottish football for our benefit, we have not done terribly well at it. We still have the Dickinson’s, the Dallas’s, the Beaton’s and all the rest getting games. We are still, to an extent, putting our fate in their hands.

I can tell you this: if our club was running the game, John Beaton would not be working at the SFA as a referee. Dickinson would not be anywhere near a Celtic match. Andrew Dallas would not be on VAR in anything we were involved in.

These people have histories, and we know what those histories are.

If people had said after the game that we have incompetent officials, that it is no wonder none of them made the FIFA list for the World Cup, everyone would have listened. Most would have agreed. Even if there were disputes over individual decisions, nobody would have argued against the basic point.

But these people went to hysterical extremes.

That is the problem.

That is where some of them ceased to be professional and reminded us why we do not take their credibility seriously. The last 24 hours did not teach us anything we did not already know about them. But for some of them, the last 24 hours should have taught them lessons about themselves which they would do well to heed.

A few of them ought to be looking in the mirror over the next day or two and asking: what the hell happened to me after that game?

When they come back down to earth, those who are not wired to the moon anyway, maybe they will have the good grace and good sense to admit they got it wrong.

If they live south of the border and work in English football, they need not bother wasting our time with apologies. But they would do well to stay out of our business next time, because they clearly do not understand the damn thing they are talking about. If they cannot be bothered to learn, I would rather never hear from them again.

Someone who gets all their ignorant information on Scottish football out of the mouth of Ally McCoist is probably not someone we need to pay much attention to anyway.

If some of them are watching that incident again, especially Celtic’s own footage of it, and realising how wrong they got it, then let it be a lesson to them. When the only person talking in your ear is a bigot and a moron, it is probably better not to listen too much to what he has to say. We will call that a lesson learned.

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