Celtic’s appeal on the Scottish Cup ban had to happen. It is scandalous.

The news last night was that Celtic intend to submit an appeal against the closed-door sanction imposed over the events at Ibrox.

The press has generally announced it as both clubs submitting appeals, but unless the two clubs are somehow coordinating their cases — and I do not believe even this Celtic board would do that, mostly because there is simply no reason to — I would expect our appeal to have a very different tenor from theirs.

At the end of the day, Celtic has maintained from the start that we acknowledge a certain amount of responsibility for what happened. But to be punished in this way for what we have acknowledged is preposterous.

We have seen pitch invasions since then in other matches, and those games are not going to result in stadiums being closed. If this sanction is about Celtic supporters damaging seats, pulling up stickers or causing other forms of criminal damage, then somebody at the governing body needs to explain when that sort of conduct has ever resulted in an entire stadium being shut.

To my knowledge, it has not. So, what exactly is this sanction really about?

The Ibrox club absolutely and positively deserved a punishment on that level. I do not think anybody can seriously deny that with a straight face. What happened at their ground that day was scandalous, and it was elevated far beyond ordinary crowd disorder by the behaviour of supporters who came onto the pitch and attacked Celtic fans.

The fact that some were masked and armed only made the situation more serious.

The home club should bear responsibility for that. Yet the Ibrox club has never meaningfully accepted responsibility for what happened. It did not condemn its supporters in the manner the circumstances warranted.

It did not close sections of its ground or withhold tickets from large numbers of those involved. In the immediate aftermath, it praised its own supporters and said it would fight on their behalf.

So, it is not even clear that the club itself treated what happened with the seriousness it deserved. The sins of the two clubs were not equal.

That is the fundamental point.

Yet the punishment handed down was identical, and that is an historical outrage even by the standards of a governing body which has never been particularly comfortable taking the difficult position when an easier one is available.

Had Celtic and the Ibrox club been sanctioned differently, the authorities would have had to acknowledge that one side’s behaviour was worse. They would have had to acknowledge that the failures of the home club were greater and that the conduct of sections of its support crossed lines which ours did not.

Instead, they turned the whole thing into a plague-on-both-your-houses exercise.

That was gutless.

It was an abrogation of their responsibility to examine what actually happened and judge each club on its own actions.

Celtic Park should not have to close because the Ibrox security operation failed. Celtic Park should not have to close because supporters of another club were allowed to behave as though they could do whatever they wanted, no matter how aggressive or dangerous it became.

Celtic should pay the price for the behaviour of Celtic supporters. Nothing more.

We will have to pick up the bill for damage caused by our own fans. We will have to pay whatever fines are legitimately imposed. If evidence links particular Celtic supporters to specific incidents, those individuals should go through the same disciplinary process as anybody else who gets into trouble with the club.

If it is proved that they committed criminal damage, then frankly they deserve what they get.

There are other cases where I might think losing access to a season ticket is excessive. Somebody running onto the pitch to celebrate, for example, is not automatically in the same category as somebody smashing up property or attacking another supporter.

But that is exactly the point.

Different conduct deserves different consequences.

Celtic has never refused to accept responsibility for what Celtic is responsible for.

What we should refuse to accept is being punished as though we were the home club, as though our security operation failed, as though our supporters were the ones who came charging across the field and almost triggered a riot.

That is disgusting.

Of course Celtic is appealing it.

Of course Celtic should refuse to accept that sanction.

And we should be aggressive in our pursuit of justice here.

That does not mean demanding that another club be punished more harshly simply for the sake of it. But if the Ibrox club were somehow to get off scot-free because Celtic succeeds in making a compelling case against the identical sanction, that would not be justice either.

It would simply be another version of the same stitch-up.

All the governing body had to do from the beginning was separate the two clubs cleanly and judge each according to its own actions, failures and responsibilities.

Instead, they lumped them together.

They made the sins of one club the sins of the other and imposed the same punishment despite there being no identical culpability.

And that tells you something important.

This was never really about accountability.

It was a public-relations exercise.

The governing body wanted to look tough without doing the difficult work of explaining why one club’s behaviour and failures might have been worse than the other’s. So both clubs were punished in the same way and everybody could pretend that balance had been achieved.

It had not.

This appeal cannot simply end with another public-relations exercise.

It is high time the governing bodies got off the fence. In fact, it is high time Scottish football itself got off the fence and started judging Celtic and the Ibrox club as separate institutions with their own responsibilities, cultures, leaderships and supporter bases.

The idea that whatever happens with one club automatically provides the template for how the other should be treated is one of the most backward and narrow-minded concepts in Scottish football.

No other two clubs would routinely be treated as interchangeable parts of the same phenomenon.

Yet Celtic and the Ibrox club constantly are.

That is exactly what happened here.

Scottish football has spent far too many years pretending that the particular problems around Ibrox either do not exist or must somehow be mirrored elsewhere in order to make them easier to discuss.

This was an opportunity to confront those problems honestly.

The governing body failed to do it.

That failure is another scar on the Scottish game and another insult to Scotland’s Irish and Catholic communities, who have spent generations on the receiving end of the bigotry and bile which flows from those stands.

Eventually there will have to be a reckoning with that.

This appeal is probably not where the dam finally breaks.

But if it was necessary to challenge a sanction which pretended the conduct and culpability of both clubs were identical, then the appeal is entirely welcome.

And every Celtic supporter should back it.

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