Earlier this season, I came to a conclusion about Hearts that I did not expect to reach.

I actually think Tony Bloom is better positioned now to do what he wants to do, and what he claims to believe Hearts can do, than he was when Derek McInnes was the manager and the club was following that particular path.

And you know what? I have not allowed today to change my thinking on that one bit. Neither should Tony Bloom, and neither should his manager.

Hearts fans surprised me last season by behaving in an incredibly entitled way.

For a support that has gone more than 40 years without a league title, and decades without a major honour of any sort, there was something strange about the anger and frustration. It was as if the league was something they were owed rather than something they still had to earn, and some of those same supporters will be up in arms tonight.

They will be barracking the chairman, the major shareholders, the manager and everyone else connected with the club.

But Hearts came up against an exceptional Celtic performance today. I have already described it as one of the best displays I have seen from this club in years, and I stand by that. With attacking players showing that level of movement, pace, vision and creativity, Celtic would have turned the lights out on plenty of teams.

Outside of the games Hearts will play against us this season, they may not come up against an opponent as dangerous as that.

They cannot allow themselves to be rattled by one bad day.

It is not a reflection on the whole club, and it is not, by itself, a reflection on where they are with the plan. I did not expect to be saying nice things about Hearts on the day after we had beaten them 7-1.

They are now eight points behind us, but they should not panic about that either.

There is always an adjustment period when a new manager comes into a club. Hearts will get over today if they give themselves the time and space to do it, if they treat this as a learning experience, albeit a particularly chastening one, and if they do not allow one terrible afternoon to knock them off course.

There will be plenty of moon-howling. They should ignore all of it.

They have chosen a road. They should follow it.

Because when I look at the way the two clubs are being run, I see one being managed in a manner that is professional, ambitious and structured, and another that is not being run that way at all. And, uncomfortably enough, the comparison is more favourable to Hearts than it is to us.

The plan they are following is the kind of plan I wish Celtic were following.

That does not mean Hearts suddenly have better players than Celtic. Clearly, they do not. What happened today actually demonstrates the opposite.

We did not spend as much money as we could have in the summer, but most of what we did spend was spent well and we have the best individual talents in the league.

Camilo Durán is a fantastic player and, at £6 million, may prove to be the bargain signing of the entire summer. Haissem Hassan terrorised Hearts every time he got on the ball. Callum Osmand playing wide on the left helped unlock the full potential of what that front line can look like. Mika Baur, pound for pound, might be the best piece of business we have done and perhaps will do for quite some time.

Even Kasper Høgh, who came on after the game had slowed considerably, remains a player I rate enormously. I still think he is exactly what I said he was on the day he signed: an elite-level striker who simply needs to be used properly.

Had he started that first half in place of Durán, with Hassan and Osmand flying down the sides and Celtic moving the ball at that pace, I think we still win comfortably and I would not have been surprised to see Høgh score a couple himself.

By the time he came on, we had already taken off the two quickest wide players and changed the nature of the game.

That is no criticism of James Forrest or Jota. I thought both were excellent when they came on, and Jota in particular was pure entertainment.

But we no longer carried the same attacking threat.

That matters to the Hearts argument because this is what they ran into. They came up against a club with far greater financial resources, far more expensive attacking talent and, for perhaps the first time this season, a system that allowed those players to function properly together.

They did not suddenly become a terrible football team. They ran into the consequence of Celtic finally making better use of the advantages it has always possessed.

There is no shame in that whatsoever.

So, Hearts should put today aside as a single afternoon when nothing went according to plan, when they came up against a side in full flow and were punished by players operating at a higher level.

That is all it needs to be. They have plenty still to look forward to.

They have European games ahead of them, with the chance to win points and prize money which can help fund the next stage of their development.

Unlike us, they also have a cup semi-final to look forward to, and if they get through that, Hearts can start thinking very seriously about winning the first silverware of the season.

If they do, then today becomes nothing more than a distant memory.

The first trophy of the Tony Bloom era would matter far more to that club than one horrible afternoon at Celtic Park. It would be a genuine turning point and would validate a lot of what they are trying to build.

That is how they should look at what is in front of them.

Forget about today. In the short term, it hurts. I am sure it does. In the medium term, it matters only in how they respond to it. And on a long enough timeline, it becomes so insignificant as to be almost irrelevant.

Hearts have much bigger things to think about and much bigger lessons to learn.

They will get plenty of stick for the way they tried to play today, but I do not think retreating into a shell would have saved them. They were coming up against a Celtic side operating at something close to full power.

They were probably getting beaten heavily either way.

The important thing is that Hearts know where they want to go. And unlike Celtic, I do not expect them to abandon the plan simply because circumstances become uncomfortable. Theirs is structured, thought through and coherent. It’s not clear that our own plan is any of these things.

A plan should survive afternoons like that. If Bloom and the people around him genuinely believe in the model they are building, then 7-1 should not alter it. It should inform it.

Learn from it. Understand where the gaps are. Work out what needs strengthened. Then move forward. Because today was one game.

Their project is operating on a completely different timescale, and if they are serious about what they say they want to become, they should treat it that way.

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