The Edinburgh media is running stories ahead of Sunday’s game about the supposed injustice Hearts suffered last season. I know it is convenient for them to believe that version of events, and I understand why it has taken hold, but it is not remotely helpful to Hearts if they genuinely intend to challenge for this championship again.

Every time they talk about injustice, they give themselves an alibi for a failure they should have examined properly at the time and should still be examining now.

Because you do not improve by blaming somebody else for everything that went wrong. You do not change your mentality that way, and you certainly do not prepare yourself to win a title by convincing yourself that the only reason you failed before was because somebody else cheated you out of it.

All three clubs that went into the split knowing they still had a chance of winning the league had a perfectly clear path in front of them.

Hearts had to win four of their final five games to guarantee themselves the championship. Four out of five. That was their job.

The Ibrox club pretty much had to win five out of five. So did we. And we know what happened from there.

The Ibrox club blew up spectacularly, while Hearts dropped points against Motherwell. They can point the finger at events in another game at Fir Park all they want, but it was their own failure to beat Motherwell which made that second-to-last fixture so consequential.

That was the result Celtic needed more than any other.

From that moment, our fate was in our own hands and I never thought we’d drop it. We knew that if we kept winning, we would be champions. But for all that Celtic controlled our own destiny, Hearts’ destiny was never out of their hands either.

Even on the final day, it was still there for them.

There was no injustice.

They simply were not good enough.

And if there really was some grand conspiracy to make sure Celtic won the title, then it must rank as one of the worst conspiracies in the entire history of conspiracies.

Because let us look at what we are actually being asked to believe.

Who exactly was supposed to be helping Celtic?

The SFA? Come on.

That is unbelievable, and not simply because nobody seriously thinks the SFA is naturally predisposed towards helping Celtic.

If anything, the wider mood around Scottish football was exactly the opposite. Just about everybody outside Celtic and Hibs wanted Hearts to win the title. Even the Ibrox club would probably have settled happily enough for that outcome if it meant depriving us of another championship.

And the appeal of Hearts winning had nothing to do with Celtic anyway. It was about having a champion from outside Glasgow. It was about the commercial value of a fresh story. It was about being able to sell Scottish football as a genuinely competitive league again.

So, if anybody seriously believes the SFA decided that what the game really needed was another Celtic title and then set about engineering it for us, they need a lie down in a dark room. Then there is the supposed instrument of this conspiracy.

John Beaton. If you were genuinely trying to nobble the title race so that Celtic had the best possible chance of winning it, would John Beaton really be the guy you chose?

There are other officials out there who are supposedly Celtic-minded. If you were rigging the thing, surely you would pick one of them instead.

Beaton would be one of the unlikeliest heroes in Celtic’s entire history, and there is not a single one of us who views him that way.

Then look at how much this supposed conspiracy left to chance.

It required Celtic to get the result against the Ibrox club. It required us to go to Motherwell and not fall apart. It required Iheanacho to score that last-gasp penalty. If any one of those things had gone differently, the whole magnificent plot would have collapsed.

And that penalty itself depended on an extraordinary sequence of events. It depended on Celtic refusing to settle for the point. It depended on Motherwell making a shocking late error. It depended on an incident occurring which was just borderline enough to make awarding the decision plausible.

That is not normally how conspiracies work.

A conspiracy tries to remove uncertainty.

It does not leave the entire outcome dependent on a Motherwell player’s hand going up at precisely the right moment in stoppage time.

If somebody really wanted to manufacture a Celtic title win, there were a million easier ways to do it long before the final day ever arrived.

You could have sent off a Motherwell player in the opening five minutes. You could have punished their goalkeeper for the foot-high challenge on Daizen Maeda which did not even result in a foul. You could have made any number of interventions which would have reduced the number of things left to chance.

Instead, Hearts arrived at Celtic Park still needing only a point.

That is one hell of a conspiracy.

And it seems to me to have been spectacularly badly organised.

Whatever people think was riding on it, this was apparently a plot which left almost everything in the hands of the gods. It required too many results, too many moments and too many separate events to fall into place.

All of this talk is absolute rubbish.

And worse than that, it is damaging to Hearts.

Because if they genuinely want to win this championship, they need to understand why they failed last time.

So let them come to Celtic Park on Sunday with their sense of grievance intact. Let them arrive believing they have something to settle.

The only thing Hearts should really be thinking about is whether they have what it takes to get the three points on the day and do this time what they could not do at Celtic Park the last time.

And it is not particularly difficult to work out what went wrong then.

The man responsible is sitting in the dugout at Ibrox now, already out of Europe and two points behind Celtic despite having beaten us at Celtic Park.

Derek McInnes is why Hearts are not champions.

Not John Beaton. Not Iheanacho. Not whoever they imagine was lurking behind the great conspiracy of the unseen penalty hand.

Derek McInnes. He brought a team to Celtic Park needing a point. Hearts went a goal in front and he could not close the deal.

Does it really get any simpler than that?

This is a manager whose teams have repeatedly reached moments when something significant was there to be won and failed to finish the job. Hearts had their chance. They knew exactly what was required. They did not get it done.

Sometimes the answer genuinely is not complicated.

And despite all their efforts to convince themselves otherwise, Hearts have produced absolutely nothing to suggest this is one of the exceptions.

There is nothing to see here.

This is one of the great nothings in Scottish football history, perhaps the dumbest conspiracy theory the game has ever produced. And think about the competition for that title, with the club across the city churning them out like a machine spitting fake twenty-pound notes.

Yet Hearts still want to push this?

At some point you have to ask where the pride is in that. Where is the willingness to look honestly at your own failure, learn from it and make sure it does not happen again?

Because if Hearts really want to win this title, that is the lesson they need.

Not another grievance. Not another conspiracy theory. Not another excuse.

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