Hugh Keevins: If I was Leigh Griffiths I wouldn't want Celtic to appeal Saturday's diving yellow

If I was Leigh Griffiths I wouldn't want Celtic to appeal the yellow card picked up in the game against St. Johnstone on Saturday.

I'd rather take the moral high ground and ask why I needed someone at the SFA to prove I was innocent of cheating but guilty of trying to do my best for my team.

Why ask for written confirmation of your honesty when you have subconscious proof of it for yourself ?

If I was Celtic I wouldn't distract any player at the club with a disciplinary sideshow played out for the benefit of supporters who fall into two distinct categories; one being the Celtic fans who have an implicit belief that no player in their shirt would ever fall beneath the behavioural standards of your average saint and the other group representing those fans who instinctively believe the worst of any member of Brendan Rodgers' squad.

Just because.

One of the most over-worked cliches in the punditry game was immediately applicable to the moment when Griffiths went to ground after a challenge from St. Johnstone's Richard Foster.

I've seen them given. And so have you.

All we have left in the aftermath of the game is a redundant controversy over whether Griffiths took a dive in a deliberate attempt to con the referee into giving a penalty. The player got booked. Celtic won the match after belatedly going to sleep in defence. And a sequence of league wins is now able to be carried into the next domestic match.

But first there is the small matter of the Champions League qualifier with the £20m sidestake, against Happoel Beer Sheva in Israel tomorrow night.

Having won the temporary backing of the Celtic fans by refusing to think the worst of Griffiths, my approval rating in their eyes then suffered a sharp decline when I declared that I hoped Celtic would make the group stages of the Champions league and thought that they would make it there.

The reason for disquiet being my assertion that there could be no guarantee the first leg result of 5 - 2 in Celtic's favour meant job done in terms of qualification.

Guard against presumption was my advice. Get knotted was the gist of the reaction to that suggestion.

But I shall ignore all of that and repeat my assertion that if Happoel, minus their two best players in Glasgow, could score twice at Celtic Park, and be denied a third because of a magnificent save from Craig Gordon, then they can hardly be dismissed as an irrelevance in their own country.

And certainly not discounted by a team who have shipped four goals in four days at European and domestic level that have been the result of an alarming series of errors at the back.

But simply offering a reminder to the side who actually started this qualification campaign by losing to Lincoln Red Imps in Gibraltar that concentration and fortitude are essential on tuesday night hasn't met with universal agreement.

Still, it's only one man offering an honest opinion. No axe to grind. No hidden agenda. Only a wish to see Scotland's last representatives in Europe make the most prestigious club competition of them all.

But it would seem that even the most innocent of intentions are misinterpreted by those who have a convoluted caste to their minds.

A listener to Superscoreboard on Saturday night actually told me I had tipped Rangers to win the league title this season because I knew I was so bad at forecasting the prediction would come out in reverse order and Celtic would get the championship.

I thought about that as I went home after the programme and stopped to buy a bottle of wine. The shop assistant gave me twelve cans of lager instead because she said she knew that was what I had really wanted all along.

I thought Griffiths was unfairly stigmatised and said so. I think Celtic have to tighten up in defence while wishing them well in Israel, and said so. And I stick by my league title prediction while being prepared to take the protracted consequences of getting that guess wrong. And I know so.

Onwards and upwards, even though I really mean backwards and forwards.