Former referee Charlie Richmond spoke to The Daily Record over the weekend about the quite scandalous display by current whistler John Beaton. I wrote about it on Saturday, scarcely able to believe my eyes as three absolutely key decisions went Sevco’s way in circumstances that it would be generous to call controversial.
I said in the aftermath of that game that Beaton is either corrupt or he is incompetent to a degree far beyond what is acceptable in a Grade One official, and he is one of many who’ve been at the heart of decisions which have baffled observers this year.
I used the word corrupt very deliberately at the weekend.
Others wanted me to use the word biased, but that’s not what I meant and I want to be very clear on that. Yes, biased refereeing is a kind of corruption, but I didn’t want to narrow the focus onto that one specific cause, because there are others and they almost make you wish it was favouritism.
Match-fixing is something I’ve written about before, on a couple of different football sites. It is my strong belief, one I’ve held for years, that at least one game in which I had an emotional stake, was at least partially, if not wholly, fixed or the result influenced. I do not have a specific game in mind. I have no proof for this belief. But I’ve looked into match-fixing elsewhere, and there are examples in every major league where football is played.
We know that because the authorities there have uncovered it.
Because they’ve gone looking. Because they wanted to know, and weed this stuff out. Here, in Scotland, there’s no such desire. They don’t want to investigate stuff that they might have to do something about. They don’t care whether the game is clean or not.
I’m going to say that again; the governing bodies in Scotland do not care if the game is clean or not. If they did they would fight to make sure of it. These people haven’t even met their obligations to WADA, the anti-doping agency which monitors sport. They released a startling report last month which said the SFA did not do one single drug test in the nine month period towards the end of last year. That’s absolutely diabolical.
They blamed funding cuts, and have said they’ve started a program and will publish results later this year, but WADA have been unimpressed by previous efforts and a BBC Scotland program in 2015 found that they’d only done eight tests in eight months.
They can blame money as they like; if it was the only example of their failure to look into possible cheating that would be one thing, but if we can revisit Lord Nimmo Smith for a moment, it was the SFA’s own head of registrations who outlined a veritable “Cheats Charter” when he said that as long as a crime goes unseen and unpunished at the time it was committed the perpetrators are forever safe from association sanction. And how hard do they look for evidence that such things are going on? I will say one name; Campbell Ogilvie, and leave it at that.
In every top league in Europe and around the world, there have been investigations and scandals about match-fixing. Some have involved refs. Others involved players. The objective in most of these cases was to rig games for the benefit of betting syndicates. The exceptions involved matches where refs had been bought by one team or another.
The idea that Sevco pays refs is pretty ridiculous. They are skint, so unless refs would be willing to take IOU’s it’s not that. (Note that I am not saying they wouldn’t. Just that they couldn’t. I would not put anything past the club playing out of Ibrox.)
But take yourself back to what Hugh Dallas was fired for; he sent a sectarian email on the SFA’s internal communications system, to various other parties. I’ve long wondered they weren’t investigated along with him, because these are people he knew and thought would find that email funny, which strongly suggests he was not the only bigot up there. (Of course he wasn’t. We all know he wasn’t and that’s part of a wider problem.)
Yet I’m not alleging pro-Sevco bias either; even at the weekend, I didn’t say anything of the sort or spin a conspiracy theory. I said his performance was either incredibly, unforgivably bad or it was bent, but that’s not the same thing.
This is Bet365’s page on how many cards there will be in tonight’s Chelsea game.
This is their “specials” page, which includes, amongst other things, red cards and penalty kicks.
You only have to look at those two to realise the potential for corrupt practices in the game here and elsewhere.
Every top flight match in Europe can be bet on like this; this is not limited to those huge games involving huge clubs. This problem exists, and it doesn’t even have to be about betting syndicates. A couple of individuals close to a ref can place a series of bets with various online bookies on the time of the first yellow card, or on the number of free-kicks in the first half (with an over or under) or anything else they like.
Scrutiny of that is impossible.
You can’t cover all the bases to entirely prevent something like this from happening; what you can do is examine decisions involving individual refs and try to see if they fit a pattern of consistent, baffling, decision making. And Charlie Richmond, today, has said that senior refs have a sort of blanket immunity from having to explain those kinds of decisions.
Corruption amongst refs here doesn’t need to be about bias. It could be about financial gain. It could be about individuals acting alone for money, influencing games in small ways, or about outright tampering with the result of one.
But we are mugs if we pretend that it couldn’t happen.
I suspect it has happened. I suspect that it does happen.
Preventing it is impossible, but the SFA can try to deter it by operating a more stringent process for scrutinising individual performances. If players break the laws of the game too many times there is a sliding scale of punishments. It’s the same with managers. Only refs seem immune from this, but if such a system were introduced and performances graded and those grades made public then refs would have to watch themselves like everyone else.
Yes it would put officials under more pressure. Yes it might result in the more timid of them giving nothing or being afraid to risk a fifty-fifty call … that’s not what concerns most of us. Those decisions at the weekend, the penalty Celtic got a few weeks ago, the goal Hearts had chopped off against Sevco, the decision not to red card Harry Forrester against Dundee earlier in the season, two of the challenges Craig Gordon got away with, or the disgraceful decisions at Hampden against Celtic in the last couple of years … those are not fifty-fifty decisions; those were straightforward, open and shut and beyond argument.
And referees got them 100% wrong.
Some will call this paranoia; I call it due diligence, something the SFA clearly has a problem with.
Refs in this country have been a protected species for too damned long, and many of us have long argued that in failing to punish them for these kind of glaring errors we are either creating the conditions for cheating or we are making worse a situation that already exists.
How much longer are we going to pretend the potetial for it isn’t there?