Last night, Paulina wrote a piece about the Hearts fans and the way they’ve had one of the rudest awakenings of any club’s fans in a while; they have no real allies in the West of Scotland media but for that handful of their own fans.

And there is one aspect of the Hearts title conspiracy which becomes stranger the longer it survives, and I wanted to pick back up on it.

As Paulina said, some Ibrox supporters are not merely disappointed that Hearts failed to win the league last season. They are angry that Hearts did not pursue some imagined case afterwards.

This is one of the more peculiar fantasies which has gripped sections of that support for years, and they have now transferred the same mindset onto Hearts.

The theory goes something like this: Hearts were cheated, something improper happened, somebody somewhere should have done something, and because Hearts did not launch some great campaign to overturn the outcome, they somehow failed themselves and everybody else who wanted Celtic stopped.

There is only one small problem with all of that.

Nobody has ever explained what the case actually was. Nobody has identified the specific rule which supposedly invalidated the outcome of the league. Nobody has explained which sporting body Hearts should have appealed to, what remedy they should have requested or on what evidential basis that remedy could ever have been granted.

But apparently, they should have pursued it anyway.

That is the mentality. And it is a mentality Ibrox supporters recognise, because many of them have spent years claiming that their own club repeatedly failed to “fight” supposed injustices without ever being particularly clear about what that fight would have looked like.

A conspiracy. A hidden hand. A failure by the authorities. A failure by the club to defend itself. A failure to pursue some mysterious avenue which nobody can ever quite define. And now Hearts have been dragged into the same worldview.

For reasons passing understanding, some Ibrox supporters appear to have believed that Tony Bloom’s profile and influence might somehow produce the great reckoning their own club had supposedly failed to deliver.

They waited after the season ended for some enormous intervention from Hearts. A statement. A legal challenge. A sporting challenge. Something. Anything. When nothing arrived, some of them actually became angry with Hearts.

That tells you everything about how grievance culture works. The grievance does not require a viable remedy. It does not even require a clearly identifiable offence.

The grievance itself becomes the point.

You can see the same selectivity in the way some of these people discuss Manchester City.

That conversation is particularly amusing because there are Ibrox supporters arguing that City should face severe punishment for breaches of football’s financial rules while simultaneously insisting that nothing meaningful was ever found against the old Rangers.

That simply is not true.

The Lord Nimmo Smith commission found that the old company had breached SPL rules by failing to disclose side-letter arrangements connected to the EBT scheme. It imposed a £250,000 fine, although it declined to strip titles because it concluded that no unfair competitive advantage had been established.

Separately, the tax litigation eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that the payments made through the scheme were taxable earnings.

People can argue about what the correct punishment should have been. I certainly have, and my view has always been straightforward. The sporting consequences did not come remotely close to matching the seriousness of what happened, and the titles and trophies won during those years should have been removed from the record.

Others disagree. Fine. But pretending there were no adverse findings at all is something else entirely. That is where the mental gymnastics of the Ibrox fans become extraordinary.

Manchester City must face consequences for breaches of the rules. Their own history must simultaneously be treated as entirely different. Hearts were supposedly cheated last season. Nobody can identify precisely how. Hearts should nevertheless have mounted some campaign. Nobody can explain what that campaign should have been.

And Hearts should now apparently be criticised for failing to do it.

That is not analysis.

That is grievance looking for somewhere to live.

And Hearts supporters should resist it.

Their club made allegations last season which, in my view, should never have been put into the public domain without a much stronger evidential basis. But at least Hearts did not disappear completely down the rabbit hole.

They did not spend the summer pursuing some fantasy appeal against the league table. They did not attempt to overturn results through bluster. They did not embarrass themselves trying to manufacture a legal or sporting case out of resentment.

They moved on. Their supporters should be grateful for that.

Because once a club starts teaching its support that every defeat is potentially evidence of injustice, there is no obvious end point.

Every referee becomes suspect. Every governing body becomes hostile. Every rival becomes part of the plot. Every failure becomes somebody else’s fault.

Eventually the grievance becomes more important than the football itself.

Hearts still have the opportunity to avoid that.

They can look at what happened last season, accept that they had their chance, accept that Celtic had theirs, accept that results decided the title and build again.

Or they can spend the next decade constructing conspiracy theories around a championship they did not win.

There is already one support in Scottish football very well practised at that.

Hearts do not need to become another.

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