The SFA audio release is a dreadful moment for an anti-Celtic media addicted to outrage.

Who remembers “I love it when a plan comes together”? That’s a beautiful little piece of 80s catchphrase magic from The A-Team, usually delivered after some harebrained idea had worked to an almost mystical degree.

Well, I love it when a plan does not come together.

I love it when a Scottish sports media plan to disrupt Celtic, throw Celtic off, or suggest that Celtic have somehow benefited from some underhanded scheme blows up in their faces. Tonight’s SFA release of the match officials’ audio may be one of the most humiliating examples of that ever.

I don’t know how best to say this except just to say it: they’ve all been given a using. They have all played the role of the useful idiot to perfection.

As I always tell people who fall into this trap, they didn’t pick you because you were useful. They picked you because you were an idiot.

That is why the likes of Tom English, who I wrote about earlier, and others should be feeling pretty red in the face right now. Embarrassed, certainly. Maybe even a little bit ashamed.

They have disgraced their profession because they have proved themselves to be credulous slobs. Unwilling to do any digging. Unwilling to do any research. Pliable and, like a bull shark swimming up a dirty river, willing to swallow anything.

They were fed a line and they bit down hard on it.

They didn’t know the hook had been baited. They didn’t know that their own bitterness, their own keenness to find something, anything, with which to discredit Celtic’s accomplishment was exactly what had been counted on.

Tony Bloom has this reputation as a numbers guy. Well, Hugh Keevins famously said Celtic had a 0% chance of winning the title, and we all saw how that ended up. But I could have predicted this: there was a 100% chance that large sections of the press were going to swallow a conspiracy theory here. There was not even the slightest chance I was going to be wrong about that. It was as certain as death and taxes.

So, Hearts played out their little farce. They ran with their series of allegations. Players being assaulted, which our own manager has now called out twice while asking for evidence to support it. They promoted the idea that the game had been ended by the pitch invasion, or by the police, or by divine intervention, or whatever else they were claiming and briefing certain pliable, gullible, idiotic journalists about.

Those people played their role to a tee. Some put their own necks on the line. Some – those who had any – put their own credibility up for grabs. They vanished down the rabbit hole one at a time together.

It turns out that Hearts were not as smart as they thought they were. They certainly were not trusting people who were as smart as they thought they were.

Where it went wrong was not in trusting people who were pliable. It was in trusting people who were pliable and rabid at the same time.

That is what unravelled it.

You had people who were only supposed to carry the message amplifying it instead. Demanding investigations. Pushing Hearts towards further inflammatory statements. Turning a grievance into a campaign. Turning a campaign into a conspiracy theory.

That is what gave it away. Hearts are not at this level.

You have to learn this game in stages, and you have to be very good to get away with something this brazen. You have to know that your messengers will carry the message, but not turn it into Chinese whispers with unintended consequences.

Hearts are amateurs playing at the big boys’ table.

As I said before, this is a small club trying to appear more important than it is.

But it is not just that.

They forgot that the extreme nature of their claims demanded extreme proof. The journalists trusted with the story were not going to ask for that proof, but the rest of us did.

The moment Celtic fans, fan media and others started asking, in an organised way, “Where is the evidence for this claim?”, the claim itself began to collapse.

Because there is no evidence.

None that has been brought forward. None that has been produced.

Some of the claims have already been exposed to outright mockery. Take the stuff about Hearts players getting onto the bus outside Celtic Park amid a supposedly hostile atmosphere. Hostile atmosphere? There were a couple of people giving them a slagging, something that happens across football every single day.

An absolute nothing incident was blown up as though it was the last chopper out of Saigon.

One by one, the dominoes have fallen.

This morning, I put up a piece explaining why the so-called missing minute was a lie. The referee’s clock is the only one that counts, and it runs no matter what happens on the pitch. Whether he adds time for stoppages, corner kicks, goal kicks, celebrations, pitch invasions or anything else is at the referee’s discretion.

There is no missing minute anywhere.

The clock ran until he stopped it. That means during the celebrations. During the pitch invasion itself. By then, the minimum eight minutes had elapsed.

But the truly hilarious part is that Hearts themselves appear to have been central to the decision to end it.

You can hear on the audio that the decision came after a discussion with Derek McInnes. That alone destroys almost everything people have been told, on and off the record, over the past few days. There were no unanswered questions. There were no doubts as to the outcome. There were no serious questions remaining over whether the game was brought to an end by the officials.

None of that was true. Hearts did not just know the game had ended. Their own manager was central to the discussion that led to it being brought to an end.

Since we know there were no lasting safety concerns about the stadium itself, because the fans were cleared quickly enough for the trophy presentation to proceed, there was no reason for Hearts to leave the ground claiming some great emergency.

The pitch invasion itself lasted mere minutes; I timed it this morning. A grand total of three minutes after the first fan left the stand they were all back behind the barricades. Three minutes. This was not, as you might have surmised from the press reports, a running battle lasting hours, a declaration of martial law and special forces rescuers on standby in case the rampaging hoard forced Hearts to barricade inside the dressing room.

The scene was swiftly brought under control. Celtic players returned to lift the trophy.

So, Hearts leaving the ground looks less and less like a safety decision and more and more like what Gordon Dalziel suggested on Radio Clyde the other day: a pre-arranged exit in the event they did not get the result. They chose to use some fans being on the pitch for a couple of minutes as a smokescreen.

And, of course, the hacks lined up for their serving of BS.

Hearts fans are fulminating about the statement. Ibrox fans are fulminating about the statement. But for once, I hope the media has the good grace to realise how wrong they got it all. Not because it will make us feel better. Not because it will cheer us up.

We’re all pretty cheerful already, because we understood what this was from the start and said so repeatedly. I’m not even happy that we’ve all been vindicated, although we absolutely have been.

I’m uneasy.

I’m uneasy about how easily our media swallows lies and disinformation. I’m uneasy about how regularly it regurgitates those lies and that disinformation back into the wider world.

I don’t need an apology. I don’t need them to say sorry to Celtic fans or to the rest of their readership.

I need them to be pissed off. I need them to recognise that they were royally grafted. I need them to realise that they were used and abused. I need them to understand that they were gullible and willing participants in a days-long campaign of misrepresentation.

Some of them played more than a willing part in it.

I need them to be professionally offended. I need them to feel insulted. I need them to want payback. Because if they just pretend this did not happen, if they pretend they were not absolutely turned over, if they are not asking questions about their own professionalism and ethics, then we really are in a bad, bad place.

A much worse place than the one they have been trying to describe, with their talk of a lawless game and a lawless club playing out of Celtic Park.

We have a media that is there for anyone brazen enough to use it to settle scores. To spread lies. To level false accusations. To smear people. To discredit whole institutions if they think they can get away with it.

When all it takes is a press release from a football club to trigger day after day after day of poisonous headlines, all built on a fraudulent premise, then our problems go far beyond football.

I need the media to care about that. I need them to be angry about it. I need them to take a long look at themselves and their own conduct. I need them to learn from it and take those lessons forward. I need them to be better at what they do.

We all need that.

So no, I do not feel any great sense of joy or vindication here, although I recognise that we have all been vindicated. It has been an embarrassing few days for the entire Scottish sports media industry. It would be good if they did some sober reflecting on that.

But you know something? I wonder if we are way past the point where these people are capable of it. Worse, I wonder if their industry is capable of it now. Addicted as it is to drama, gossip and innuendo, with no standards left and no sense of responsibility to report facts and gather evidence.

Far from bringing one crisis to a close, this should make us all aware of the crisis we are living with all the time.

This is why public trust in the mainstream media is so low. This is why the first instinct many people have is to reject outright anything they say.

That is bad enough in a sporting context.

But it does not stop at the sports desk. If only it did.

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