Celtic fans are neither greedy nor entitled for wanting this club to be more.

I sometimes read things that genuinely make me mad. There was one assertion in a BBC Scotland piece today, asking if our problems really are as serious as a lot of people are suggesting, that did exactly that.

Well, first; yes, they are. We have major deficiencies not only in personnel, but in the way the personnel in our team are deployed.

There are serious questions that need to be answered. That is not, in itself, a bad thing for the media to discuss, because football fans can be fickle. Sometimes they see things that aren’t there because they panic, or whatever it may be.

In this case, no, we are absolutely not panicking.

It is incredibly dishonest for any media outlet to suggest that we might be, since we are not the only ones who have spotted the gaping, glaring, enormous holes in this team. The mainstream media has been highlighting those holes since at least the Dundee United game, when they had so many shots on target that they could easily have won. They hit the woodwork four times in that match.

So, all this talk about Celtic fans being conditioned by success to keep on expecting it is largely nonsense. We are the richest and most powerful club in this country by a considerable distance. I don’t think it’s an unfair inference to say that if we are not successful, something has gone wrong somewhere.

But this isn’t just about success here at home. This is about Europe, and it is in discussing Europe that the BBC writer goes too far for me. He introduces an insinuation, even if he attributes it to rival fans, that cannot stand.

He talks about how our supporters now want to see progress in Europe, then adds this sentence: “There will be fans of rival clubs who will view those wishes as greed, given Celtic still continue to dominate domestically.”

I have no problem calling that dishonest, because it is dishonest. Attributing that thought to rival supporters, when I have read mainstream outlets make a very similar claim, is also pretty cheeky. There are plenty of people who see Celtic fans as spoiled and entitled for no longer being satisfied with domestic success.

But the hypocrisy is that the very people accusing us of that are the people who have said, over and over again, that we are far too parochial as a support. That we are far too self-satisfied with being the biggest and best club in this country.

These are the same people who point to our European record time after time and want to beat us with it. A lot of them did after Linz.

These people cannot have it both ways. We are either content to be flat-track bullies, or we are greedy for wanting to be more. Personally, I have always argued, as most other Celtic fans have long argued, that there is no reason this club cannot dominate domestically while also taking giant strides in Europe.

We believe that because it is obvious that if you build a team capable of competing in Europe, it should be more than enough to cope here at home. I don’t think we are entitled or spoiled for demanding that this club be more.

A club with our resources and capabilities should be more.

Celtic fans want what the fans of every club in the country want: to see their team be the best it can be. That is not a tall order. It is not too much to ask that your football club tries to be the best version of itself.

According to the same BBC report, we have already, in the league, faced a quarter of the total shots against us from the whole of the last league campaign.

That should give you some idea of why we are unhappy. Those concerns are based on what is happening on the pitch.

It is also worth pointing out that the Ibrox club was the first domestic opponent we faced with the firepower to punish us for such glaring holes in our defensive structure. Before the weekend, I said that I would far rather have played Hearts or Aberdeen in preparation for that game than St Johnstone.

The thinking behind that was obvious. We needed to know whether those vulnerabilities had been fixed. They hadn’t, and we didn’t find that out conclusively until Ibrox, because we had not faced a domestic opponent capable of punishing those mistakes and deficiencies in that way.

Our next opponents after this weekend are Motherwell, Benfica, Hearts, Celta Vigo and Hibs. There is plenty of scope within that section of the fixture list for even more pain and even more painful lessons. This isn’t going to be fixed just by getting a good result tonight and another on Sunday.

There are long-term questions about this club and what it is doing behind the scenes that have arisen over the last few weeks and months. They are not going away. Those in charge need to come up with answers.

But I am so tired of the supporters of this club being beaten with one stick and then another. If we are happy just to be top of the league, apparently that is not enough. We should be pushing our club harder. We shouldn’t be prepared to accept being, as Sutton put it, flat-track bullies.

Then, when we push the club to be more, we are ungrateful.

Sutton is not the first person to call us that over the last few years. It is a regular refrain from journalists with an axe to grind, but more and more Celtic fans are convinced that the argument has merit. We should not be content simply to dominate this league.

You only have to look across the city at the strutting, gloating eejit who runs the Ibrox side at the moment to see an example of why. He has led his side to European ignominy and disgrace, and he and the media have him down as some kind of world-beater. That is the environment we rule over. That is the level not only of the opposition, but of the entire ecosystem we are in, and we are wrong for wanting more than that?

We are wrong for pointing out the very same deficiencies that the media itself has been discussing and writing about for weeks, even before the game at Ibrox?

Honestly, there are sections of the media that want to have their cake and eat it too. This is a depressingly parochial little country, and it is important that we have standards, even if the rest of the game doesn’t.

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