This morning I wrote about why last night’s podcast debate wasn’t really a debate at all. And tonight I want to go a little bit further and talk not only about our opponent last night, but about our opponents in general.

There are some people who genuinely and intellectually believe in what they are saying when they defend the Board of Directors. They actually have coherent answers. They have arguments which, at least from their point of view, make sense.

But I have looked over all of the arguments in favour of this board, and I can only come to the same conclusion I reached a long time ago.

Whether these are good people or bad people is irrelevant to the whole discussion. They are flawed in their understanding, not only of what they think they know, but also in their assessment of what they think we know.

And there is one film I keep thinking about over and over again when I consider that problem. That film is the 1957 classic Twelve Angry Men.

That story revolves around a group of people who bring their own prejudices into a jury room, and at first they are prepared to let those prejudices determine the direction of the verdict. One by one, however, they are convinced to re-examine the evidence, to look again at the facts and to think about things rationally rather than emotionally.

Slowly but surely, they begin to change their minds.

The most profound, and I think the most important, character is the one juror – Juror 3, played magnificently by Lee J. Cobb – who holds out until the very end, the one who will not allow himself to be swayed by any of the changes in the evidence. And he plants his flag early in the story when he talks about his son and how the two of them once got into a fight.

At the end of that story, he says, almost wistfully, that they haven’t spoken in a long time.

Everything in the verdict he returns over and over again, the guilty verdict, is tied up in that emotional response and all the complicated things he feels about his own kid. And it is heightened by the fact that the defendant is accused of murdering his father.

Because of all those unresolved issues with his own son, he refuses to reconsider the evidence right up until the end. And what finally changes him is not really an intellectual breakthrough. It is an emotional breakdown.

That is the moment when he finally realises just how blind he has allowed himself to become.

Maybe I should make more of an effort to understand the people who back the board better.

Because I always understood the guy in Twelve Angry Men.

I always understood Juror 3, that holdout.

I understood exactly why he does every single thing in the film that he does.

And if there was a character to feel sympathy for in that film, it is him.

He doesn’t know what to do with the rage, the frustration and the love that he feels for his son. He doesn’t know how to process those feelings into something that makes sense to him. And I think that is what breaks him in the end: the realisation that he is willing to see this other young man die because of it.

His feelings about what happened with his own son are so strong that he is prepared to be the one who sends another young man to his death and the truly amazing thing is that he would not make that decision if it was his own son sitting there on trial.

Because underneath all of it, there is love.

He is a complicated character. He is angry. He is frustrated.

But the anger and frustration are really about the fact that his son has grown into a man like he is.

They are about the estrangement between them, the distance that has opened up.

They are about the fact that his own attempts to turn his boy into a man have actually pushed his son away.

And I always respected the decision he makes at the end all the more because it is such a painful emotional realisation.

And I understand, therefore, that there may be emotional reasons why those people whose views on Celtic differ from mine.

I can understand why they feel as they do. They care about this club in the same way that I do. That is undisputed. That is absolutely beyond question.

They would not be so angry towards those of us who criticise if they did not care deeply about Celtic. The ones who piss me off are the ones who refuse to acknowledge that we care too, and that our motivation may actually be the same as theirs.

The guy who was on last night opened his statement by saying that, at the end of the day, we have more in common than divides us. If I thought that he genuinely believed that, the whole tone of the thing would have been different.

But I don’t think he does believe it, because he has repeatedly said very different things online. Those guys are lost to us. Those guys are the antithesis of that final juror in Twelve Angry Men, the guy who changes his mind, the guy who realises that he is about to send a kid to his death because he has never sorted out his own shit with his son.

If I thought there was going to be a Damascene conversion like that in any of these people who have spent the summer calling their fellow supporter’s traitors and everything else, I would be happy to sit down and talk to them.

Thankfully, I believe they are a minority.

It is all those other people out there who have genuine reasons, or believe they have genuine reasons, for supporting the board whom we can actually reach. And at the centre of all of it is their love for Celtic, the way they feel about the club, the way they respond reflexively when any element of Celtic is criticised.

And I would not be much of a fellow supporter if I did not completely sympathise with that.

All we can do, over and over again, is present the evidence and hope that the emotional reflex they feel when criticism is offered is not enough to blind them when it becomes ever clearer that this is a club which has to change.

Because here is the thing I find fascinating. Almost everybody on that side of the argument is willing to concede something.

They will concede that Celtic could communicate better. They will concede that mistakes have been made. They will concede that recruitment has not always worked. They will concede that certain decisions have been poor. They will concede that things could be improved. And once you reach that point, the argument is not really about whether Celtic is perfect. Nobody thinks it is.

The argument is about how serious those flaws are, how much they matter, and whether the people currently running the club are capable of fixing them.

That is the actual debate. Not whether somebody is a “real fan”. Not whether criticism is disloyal. Not whether people who question the board secretly want Celtic to fail.

Those are emotional evasions. The serious discussion is about evidence, competence, ambition and whether the structure at Celtic Park is capable of moving this club forward.

And I think that is where those of us who want change have to be better too.

We should not simply dismiss everybody who disagrees with us as stupid, deluded or brainwashed. That is lazy.

Some of them have thought about this. Some of them have genuine arguments. Some of them look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions. And if we believe our own case is strong, we should not be frightened of that.

We should welcome it.

Because the purpose of a proper debate is not to humiliate the other person. It is not to shout louder. It is not to force somebody into submission. It is to put the evidence in front of them and ask them to look at it again.

And maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. But if there is any chance of changing minds, it will not come from treating everybody on the other side as an enemy.

That is the lesson I keep coming back to in Twelve Angry Men.

The final juror does not change his mind because somebody defeats him. He changes his mind because eventually he understands what has really been driving him. He sees himself clearly. And once he does, the verdict changes.

And that is why there are people on the other side of this argument I still want to talk to.

And because underneath all of this, underneath the anger and the insults and the bitterness and the suspicion, there is still one thing most of us share.

We love Celtic, and that should be enough to start a conversation.

It should never be used as a reason to end one.

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