For a brief time last night, some of Scottish football lost its mind.

We think we have seen everything, and then Scottish football finds a way of reminding us just how little we have actually seen.

That is one of the great things about covering this game. However ridiculous you think it has become, something will eventually happen which makes you realise there are still entirely new levels of absurdity waiting to be discovered.

Later on, I am going to talk about the overall performance of the Ibrox club last night, because to call it unimpressive would be an understatement. How grim it must have been for their supporters. But there was one element of that game which needs to be discussed first, and I am quite sure it will be discussed elsewhere and elsewhere and elsewhere because it was genuinely surreal.

I am completely unapologetic about watching every one of their games. I always have. On occasion I watch games involving other Scottish clubs as well, because I genuinely like football and I genuinely enjoy watching Scottish teams play. But I watch the Ibrox club because they are our biggest rivals and, if you are going to talk sensibly about them, you have to know what they are doing.

You cannot talk intelligently about an opponent you never watch. It doesn’t matter to me how I see those games either.

Last night I ended up watching their in-house television coverage. I didn’t pay for it, obviously, and I am not going to tell you how I viewed it, but I did.

And they were terrible.

I will get to that separately, because the whole game was dreadful. If you watched Celtic the night before and then watched that match, there would have been absolutely no doubt in your mind which was the best team of the four involved.

In terms of the two Glasgow clubs, that gap looked enormous, the way the Grand Canyon is. Yet even that was not the truly surreal part.

Everyone knows by now that Cammy Devlin was shown a red card shortly after coming onto the pitch. I have to admit that, at the time, I was half doing something else while the game droned on in the background, so I did not immediately understand what was happening when the IbroxTV commentary team suddenly became convinced the referee had been sent to the VAR monitor to consider awarding their side a penalty.

That got my attention immediately. I thought, well, that will probably put the tie to bed. Except when I looked at the incident, I could not see the penalty.

In fact, at first, I couldn’t even understand which incident I was supposed to be watching. It didn’t look to me as though a foul had been committed by the Czech player at all. It looked like the foul had been committed by the Ibrox player, so who was the penalty for? Had the guy misspoken and it was at the other end?

And I immediately turned to Paulina and said: that’s a red card.

What made the whole thing so strange was the commentary.

There was no acknowledgement whatsoever of the reality I thought I had just watched. The commentators remained convinced they were looking at a possible penalty to the Ibrox club, so Paulina and I sat there, incredulous, waiting for to see whether we’d get what we expected or the decision which they seemed absolutely certain was coming and which, from where we were sitting, would have been utterly inexplicable.

Then the referee turned away from the monitor and reached for his pocket.

I said immediately that he was going to send Devlin off, and there was not even the slightest flicker of doubt in my mind that it was the correct decision.

Yet the Ibrox TV commentators were baffled.

Devlin himself looked baffled. Derek McInnes apparently looked baffled. I now know the BBC Scotland commentary team initially seemed equally astonished.

And suddenly I was left wondering what everybody else had been watching.

Because here is the thing: if you see that challenge only once, in real time, I suppose there is the vaguest possibility that you might initially misunderstand what has happened. I don’t really know how, but football moves quickly and people miss things. Hard as it is to imagine, people might not have seen that “sweep he leg” moment from The Karate Kid as it happened in real time.

Do I believe that? No, but maybe it’s possible.

But I defy anybody to watch it more than once and reach any conclusion other than that it is a red card. Once you see the replay, denial becomes embarrassing. Slow it down and there is even less room for argument. Whatever you thought in the first instant, the evidence is now sitting in front of you.

We have all seen some extraordinary things during our years watching, talking and writing about Scottish football, but I find it almost impossible to comprehend somebody watching that incident repeatedly and still refusing to recognise it for what it is.

You can scream for a penalty all you want, but I genuinely do not know what you think you are seeing. Your brain must be processing the information differently from mine. It has to be. Because I know what I saw, and I was not remotely uncertain about it.

Sometimes I do ask myself whether we are the crazy people. Have years of watching this particular club warped our own perceptions? Do we automatically assume the worst because we have allowed hostility and rivalry to condition us?

Then something like last night happens and reassures me that, no, I am not the one asking others to abandon observable reality.

Increasingly, Scottish football seems to involve perfectly sane people being told not to believe their eyes, their ears or their basic ability to comprehend what is directly in front of them. We are effectively being encouraged to doubt ourselves.

And whenever I think about that, I return to one of my favourite pieces of logic; it comes in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

Father Callahan is trying to reason with Mark Petrie’s father about the existence of the vampires and Petrie does not want to hear it. Petrie thinks he has trapped him with a sarcastic question: if enough people told Callahan that a giant ladybird wearing a hat had led a parade down Main Street, would he believe them?

Callahan’s answer is wonderful.

If he believed the witnesses were credible, if he could eliminate trickery and if he was satisfied he was not being pranked, then yes, he says, he would already be well down the road towards believing it.

Petrie laughs because he thinks that answer proves Callahan is foolish. In reality, it proves precisely the opposite. Callahan is open-minded. Petrie isn’t. Petrie has simply convinced himself that his existing understanding of reality is complete and anything which does not fit inside it can therefore be dismissed automatically.

I try to think about football in those terms.

We all watched the same incident. We all have access to the same replay. However ridiculous or surprising something may initially appear, if the evidence supports a conclusion, then eventually you have to accept the conclusion.

That is what rational people do. You do not invent the conclusion you would prefer. You do not reject what your eyes are showing you because it is politically, emotionally or psychologically inconvenient. You follow the evidence, even when you dislike where it leads.

The only way I can understand somebody continuing to deny what happened last night is if they have become conditioned to zone out reality whenever reality disagrees with them. The moment something appears which they do not want to accept, the brain goes into automatic defence mode and begins constructing an interpretation which feels more comfortable.

The only alternative explanation is that, for a brief period last night, something approaching mass hysteria gripped an entire section of Scottish football and caused people watching the same pictures to experience completely different physical realities.

Because the rest of us saw what happened. The rest of us saw the brutality of that tackle. And anyone who continues to insist that the incident was somehow something else is not merely disagreeing about a marginal refereeing call. They are refusing to acknowledge what is directly visible on the screen, or to interpret it the way we do.

I am at least encouraged that some of those on the BBC who initially thought it was a penalty seemed fairly appalled with themselves once they realised how badly they had misread it. But even there I struggle to understand the original reaction. More astonishing still are those who have seen every replay available and remain supposedly baffled.

And this is not an isolated phenomenon around Ibrox.

Last night was simply an extreme version of it because the incident was so clear-cut. But I would have said something similar about the penalty Hibs were awarded on the opening day of the campaign, and people are still arguing about that one.

Michael Stewart included, incidentally, whose Hearts sensibilities are increasingly starting to strain his reputation for objectivity.

The reasons that was a penalty have been explained over and over again. The defender has his hands on the opponent, pushes him backwards, is not looking at the ball and makes no genuine attempt to play it. His entire intervention is designed to stop the attacker reaching the ball, and he does that by fouling him.

It is an obvious penalty. Yet people still insist it isn’t.

The same thing happened with the Motherwell penalty Celtic received in the second-last game of last season. That incident has been litigated and relitigated until even talking about it is boring. The rationale has been explained. The rules have been explained. Every frame appears to have been dissected down to its component atoms.

Still, it gets folded into the Grand Conspiracy of The Unseen Fenian Hand.

That is the world we live in now. Or perhaps more accurately, it is the world some people are determined that the rest of us should be forced to live in.

And that is where I often think about Orwell’s greatest and most terrifying invention: doublethink. The ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously, even when those ideas cancel one another out, and somehow believe both of them because each is useful to the narrative at a particular moment.

The illogical and the impossible can sit quite happily beside facts and evidence. Reality bends and weaves around whatever conclusion is required that afternoon. Surreal is not really the word for it. Without Orwell, I am not sure we would even have the vocabulary to properly describe it.

And it affects everything over there.

It affects the way the support thinks. It affects the way stories are reported. It affects the financial discussion, the football discussion, the refereeing discussion and apparently even the ability to process a video replay.

They are talking today about another potential move for Vaclav Cerny, with figures of around £8 million being thrown around alongside enormous wages. Even before you get into whether the player wants the move or whether the selling club wants to do business, the financial implications are immense.

Put him on a three-year deal at wages approaching £2 million a season and you are talking about roughly another £3 million a year hitting the sustainability calculations once the transfer fee is spread across the contract.

And these regulations are not becoming looser for the Ibrox club. They are becoming tighter, and the same newspapers enthusiastically pushing the transfer story then acknowledge there might be “one or two roadblocks.”

No shit, Sherlock. One or two? There is an entire motorway in front of that deal littered with the flaming debris of a modern tank battle.

And the fantasy does not stop with magic money trees and beanstalk beans which apparently grow actual beanstalks.

I read some of the commentary after Celtic’s match and discovered that apparently we have been “outplayed” in our last two games despite scoring seven goals. Apparently, we are not good to watch. Which is funny, as I think right now that I would rather gouge my eyeballs out than voluntarily sit through another performance like the one the Ibrox club produced last night, whereas I am actively looking forward to Celtic’s next game.

(The things I put myself through for this job … man oh man …)

Yet somehow, we are supposed to believe that we are the ones playing badly.

Even Tom English, hardly a man who spends his waking hours composing love letters to Celtic, described our performance in terms so complimentary that I wondered whether somebody had stolen his laptop.

If one of your rivals most reliable external critics is giving them unvarnished praise, continuing to deny that they might not be a bad football team begins to require an extraordinary degree of cognitive gymnastics.

Then comes the old favourite.

The gap isn’t that big. How many times have we heard that?

One of the poorest Celtic teams many of us thought we had watched in years still finished ten points ahead of them last season, while they ended up third.

But the gap isn’t that big.

It is already five points this season.

But the gap isn’t that big.

Celtic are preparing next week to play for a place in the Champions League proper with a strong first-leg advantage, while the Ibrox club is hanging by its fingernails to European football in the lowest-tier competition.

But apparently the gap isn’t that big.

And eventually you start wondering how people like this even coexist day-to-day with the physical world around them while simultaneously believing so much obvious nonsense about it. Last night crystallised all of this for me.

If you watched that game as I did and saw that incident while listening to a commentary team apparently describing an entirely different sequence of events, you will know exactly what I mean. For a few moments it genuinely felt that somebody had accidently put the wrong replay up on the screen.

Then you discover that mainstream commentators elsewhere had initially interpreted it the same bizarre way. And you think: really?

After everything we have watched and listened to over these past few years, it remains sobering to discover just how differently some people can interpret the same physical reality. I don’t know whether to find that funny or deeply disturbing.

Because we share living space with these people. We work beside them. Some of us do business with them. Some of us are friends with them. Some of us are undoubtedly in relationships with them.

And all this time one side or the other is living in an alternative universe. Either they are living in reality and we are living in fantasy, or the reverse is true. I know which side is right and which side is wrong … but then, they think they do too.

It’s not easy wrapping your brain around that.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.