Alan Muir, the disgraced official who “missed” the Josh Meekings handball that ultimately cost Celtic their shot at the domestic treble last season yesterday “missed” two new stonewall penalty kick claims as the Hoops beat Motherwell by 1-0 to top of the SPL.
Yesterday’s victory came courtesy of a goal from Nadir Ciftci, the big striker we signed from Dundee Utd in the summer.
It’s his second goal for the Hoops, and his first match winner, and I was pleased for him and for the manager.
It must have been a difficult decision – it was certainly a risk one – to leave Leigh Griffiths on the bench, but it paid off.
Nir Bitton appeared to get injured late in the match – which will worry the Hell out of all the fans before Thursday’s Europa League tie – but the return of Stuart Armstrong to the side will have given the troops reason to believe.
Scott Brown was also excellent, and I don’t think there’s a single Celtic fan who would be sad if he did decide to give up on international football to more fully focus on his career at our club.
We defended well, not that Motherwell pack much of a punch.
But we were comfortable, although they did their best to frustrate us.
It was Alan Muir who really managed that.
How does this guy get a gig refereeing top football matches?
Even if you don’t assume that his eyesight fails him any time it’s a decision involving a player in Hoops, this guy is clearly useless.
The decisions yesterday weren’t even close, and if he can miss those he has no business being a Grade One official.
After the League Cup debacle last year, which we still don’t have legitimate answers to, there were a lot of people within Scottish football who were so appalled they said he should never get a high profile game again.
But he’s worked his way back in, and yesterday’s match was live on BT Sport.
It’s simply inexcusable for an official of such lamentably low standard to be given a game like that, and the best defence he’s got is that he’s useless.
Otherwise we’re watching one of the most biased officials since Hugh Dallas.
There are some who will say that I’ve no basis for saying that, but Dallas was fired for sending a sectarian e-mail when everything is said and done.
I don’t care that he’s still the darling of the refereeing community; he was a bigot and the game is better without his sort.
His reputation was destroyed by that dismissal, despite landing on his feet at UEFA for a while, and if you ask me it’s not wrong to go back over his performances and scrutinise them for potential wrong-doing and the virulent anti-Celtic bias we’ve often alleged he showed.
Numerous games come readily to mind, including the one where he was hit by a coin and within seconds had awarded Rangers one of the most dubious penalties you’ll ever see.
Dallas, of course, was the refereeing supervisor and was well placed to advance the careers of those who thought about things the way he did, and if you’ve read Paul Larkin’s book By Any Means Necessary you’ll know this isn’t a paranoid fantasy.
Am I saying Muir is biased?
I’ll let the individual readers decide, but we’ve got three incidents here which aren’t even close, aren’t even remotely debatable, in which he’s been on the scene and he’s given us precisely nothing.
In addition to the penalty incidents yesterday, Motherwell players were allowed to inflict brutal tackles on Celtic players without sanction, and that adds up to something we ought to be keeping an eye on as a club.
What was he? “Temporarily unsighted” for the whole 90 minutes?
I don’t really care whether he’s biased or not.
The point is, he’s clearly an absolute waste of space who shouldn’t be near a top flight game and that’s the issue, above and beyond whether or not he develops myopia whenever there’s a Celtic shirt in the vicinity.
At every other organisation in the game, people pay a high price for failure.
Managers are sacked, players are sold, careers hang in the balance and millions of pounds are at stake.
At the SFA, its leaders never suffer the consequences of their actions and that percolates down through every level.
Dallas himself was sacked because he was caught cold; but there was ample reason for running him out of town on a rail before that moment arose.
At the SFA they think they are untouchable, and match officials have long wanted to be the only people in the game exempt from criticism or examination.
There’s a bloody good reason for that.
Some of them simply wouldn’t survive scrutiny.
In any other business, Alan Muir would already have gotten his jotters.
Bang on the nail remains to be seen if any action will be taken against this guy or brushed under the table as norm
Peter,surely the footballing community would have seen last night on Sportscene the incidents we are so angry about.If he does not recieve a censure for this or gets demoted,then there deffo is a conspiracy against us,even the linesman must have seen both incidents…
it will be brushed under the carpet
Cracking piece!!
This type of Honest Mistake has been going on since 1889 and cannot be allowed to continue we should look at all laws in football and stop this i am so feckin angry HH
Over to you Peter,Mr Muir in a refereeing term has to walk,and keep walking…………
The guy is a cheat plain and simple.
A blue nose to the core and will always be biases against Celtic.
He should be fired never mind referring another game against us but we all know that the sfa back him and he will probably ref the game against hearts in the LC quarter against us.
Spot on. Though I think the childish sectarian email gave the SFA the perfect excuse to get rid of Dallas before the can of worms opened by Dougie Gate (the curruption, lying, bullying of referees who dare to strive for fairness, amending and falsifying of match reports, etc, etc, etc) could be properly investigated and they were ALL exposed for what they are.
You’ve got it wrong Celtic do get penalties …………………. but they virtually only ever get them when they are already two or three goals up.
It also helps if they can get a particularly dubious one when they are three nil up as the media can then point to it at a later date when we do not get a game defining one.
This is part of the ritual we go through. The imbeciles in charge at Hampden are happy to appear as imbeciles and hapless if it covers their true agenda.
I wouldnt count on any action being taken by SFA.If they can allow an ex-Player referee a game at Ibrox they are capable of ignoring bias/cheating by one of their number.
Good versus Evil……The fight continues and the Good guys always win eventually…And it makes every championship,Cups,points all the sweeter as you know that our Football custodians will be spewing in the gutter at us interferering fenians..
that was the worst refereeing that i have seen leave out the penalties that he missed, the tackles alone it makes my blood boil.Paul Larkins book anyone but celtic should be read by every football fan
The reason I came to Canada was to get away from the BIGOTS and give my family a better life. Unfortunately the BIGOTS appear to be getting worse. Not only certain referees but the SFA who do everything humanly possible to help the team from the southside, not much has changed in 50 years.
We can also look forward to Dallas Junior coming on stream in time for our friends from the dark side joining us next season!
Correct me if I’m wrong…but I think Dallas Jr. has followed “the dark side” up through the ranks, in their 3 yrs. of existence. I fully expect to see him in SPL…if the peeple make it, that far.
Sweep sweep
Am I able to state with a significant degree of confidence that a policy of bias, seeking to undermine the efforts of Celtic FC exists within the current refereeing system? The simple answer to that question is no. It may be the case that underhand tactics are employed by individuals or individuals that collude with one another however, I cannot prove that that this is the case. Nevertheless, what I am confident enough to state is that we are definitely witnessing the manifestation of implicit bias in officiating.
As cognitive organisms, our decision making process is not always ‘conscious’. When you find your hand or foot in boiling water, there is no thought process concerning whether or not it is the right to move your foot or hand, an intrinsic reflex response causes you to move your respective body part. There is no ‘reflexive’ thinking and there is no implementing of this latest experience into your abstractive worldview. In the spilt second that a referee has to make a decision, they are at the mercy of not only what they’re seeing in front of them, but the implicit associative ‘junk’ that’s already located in their brain.
I refer you to the peer-reviewed Price and Wolfers academic study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics regarding NBA referees and the racial bias that they concluded was prevalent in refereeing decisions. It offered evidence that referees exhibited a negative bias against those of a different race. The research indicated that white referees would call more fouls on black players and vice versa. This wasn’t about racism, it was solely about implicit bias; we all have it and nobody can be truly objective.
As far as football in Scotland is concerned, simply replace race with religion, immigrant status, class and any of the other many facets of Celtic’s founding social, cultural and economic history and its associations that, for decades, have been sneered at by Scotland’s ruling elite, its henchman and their acolytes. I would go as far as to suggest that these differences are potentially more complex, ingrained and insidious than the issue of race which is on the whole, a unilateral issue with for example, no religious consideration (that’s not to suggest that what is more complex is more serious…..). The more complex and multi-faceted the issue, it is logical to suppose that there will be a greater chance for such implicit bias to be expressed.
We see such atavistic behaviour rear its head often enough. Hugh Dallas, is a fine example of this. We know that he is a sectarian bigot, I can claim that with confidence, that is proven and he lost his job because of it. The notion that what Hugh has learned through his life has not manifested its way in his split-second decision making as an official is laughable. Prejudice exists at the intuitive unconscious level, even in individuals whose attitudes are not consciously prejudiced and herein lies the rub: most referees have been exposed to and come from the same ‘culture’ that Dallas comes from and still exists within and if we were to statistically analyse the proportion of referees that are of a similar ‘hue’ to Hugh, I’m sure that we would find a disproportionately large number of them. Dallas wasn’t sharing emails with himself….The green and blue divide in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow is inescapable.
Over time, one would expect a correlation to become evident: it has. This is a causative mechanism for the poor officiating that we see. Have Hugh’s attitudes been transmitted to his referee son? Probably. The little bit more pressure to beat the local catholic school at football here, and the refusal to wear green there accumulates over time. All of this information is perceived and processed….it’s where it’s expressed later on that is now the concern. Ultimately, people from one section of our society are in a predominantly superior position to express their implicit bias, particularly within the area of the national game.
We’ve shouted conspiracy for years and it’s got us nowhere: let’s change tact. Put forward the empirical and factual evidence for bias in sports officiating and go from there. It’s not ‘inferiority-complexed’ or ‘paranoid’ Timmy that’s suggesting that implicit bias exists but some of the world’s foremost academics. There’s a case to answer.
Makes Collom and his decisions all the more baffling, if true.
Either that or the man is under strict orders to go against his natural instincts.
The SFA is rotten to the core.
Was listening to the preamble to the game on Satuday and a guy from the SFA got a mention he was called, John or something OGILVIE. Are they also guilty of neopotism? Young Dallas is a case in point, no need to be the best man Daddies legacy is in place and shows the place needs totally wiped out.
Maybe Alan Muir should go and get his eyes tested at Specsavers b 4 refereeing a game at top level how many more times is he going to deny Celtic or any team 4 that matter stonewall penalty’s the 2 Celtic denied on Saturday were very poor decisions 4m a grade 1 referee who was up with play not good enough Alan Muir
Absolutely spot on mate,but I am afraid I have said this consitantly,this is a protestant country,run by protestants,for protestants.I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
Just finished my shift here in Oruro ( Bolivia- mining industry) caught the game , god does nothing ever change? When in Scotland I remember well the bandits Mcclusky, Davidson, Wharton, Dallas I may have missed a few ( all) please forgive me , I’m hoping to be back in Scotland in the new year, hopefully the SFA will have their officials sorted out. Saying that we should be finishing teams off, despite the officials trying to frustrate us and hiding behind their cloak of accountability. Hang in there ,keep the faith. HH
We must do everything to eradicate all traces of sectariani am from our song book , will it stop these biased officials , no .
But show them up for what THEY ARE, and us for what we are , bigger , better lovers not haters HH
Put a sock in it.
You have no idea what the fuck you are rattling on about you fucking cretin.
Name ONE sectarian song that Celtic fans have in their songbook? ONE!
You fucking skidmark.
My grandfather on my fathers side was Scottish,my grandfather on my mothers side was Spanish.I have supported Celtic for over 60 years,I am disgusted with what goes on at our club today.
We have a bunch of supporters, who use our club for their political views,thats the green brigade.Before you start jumping up and down and calling me allsorts,look up the word brigade,nowhere in the explanasion does it mention football,in fact it has nothing to do with even Sport.This group of so called Celtic supporters have cost us over £100.000 in fines,but worst of all they are slowly killing the world wide reputation we had,the world govrning bodies even entrusted us with a trophy for our exemplary conduct,this lot are erasing it.Another thing that bugs me is the manager blaming the players for his incompitence,he picks the players,and he lays down the tactics not the players.
Finished he should be its over
Two of the most blatant missed penalty free kicks that I have ever seen, and I am a referee!!!! Also I was at the ‘Camp Nou’ last night and saw Neymar “win” two penalties, the first was no where near as clear cut as was the Scott Brown incident. The hand ball??? Well goodness me, so obvious, even the players guilty gesture of pulling his hand away was a sheer give away. I like support fellow refs’ but my goodness!!!!
Hail! Hail! Anyway, we won and that’s what matters.
P.S. I knock back games where I think I may have a conflict of interest, I think Muir should consider that option with CELTIC games. We don’t want him again.
Sorry Paul,but this is about more than Mr Muir.
They have previous i.e. J.Farry,Dougie McDonald,H.Dallas C.Ogilvie,and even Donald Findlay.
No Paul its more than just Mr Muir.
My mate said that it’s incompetence I disagreed it’s downright cheeting
Big Jock even had to tell the players they would get nothing from referees, they can’t just be incompetent, the decisions are laughable!
DOBS!