I got a spectacular email yesterday morning; more a rant, actually. It accused me and other Celtic bloggers – and the club, of course – of putting refs under pressure in advance of the game on Sunday. This, so I was told, explained the penalty decision.
I wasn’t surprised to get such a sterling missive.
I had expected as much.
The absence of logic, of coherence to the argument, defeats understanding though. There are few people – save Tavernier himself and a handful of folk who can’t see past the blue tint on their specs – who disputed the decision.
It was, without doubt, the correct one.
So what did our pressure really buy us? Basic fairness.
No favours. No advantage.
The level playing field.
We made sure that the officials knew they were being scrutinised, that every decision would need to have iron clad justification. I still think some of them were badly wrong; how Halliday stayed on the pitch is a mystery. How Beerman stayed on is a scandal.
But that aside, fairness is what we got.
It is outrageous that we feel like we have to go to such lengths just to guarantee that.
What makes some people lose their minds over this is that once you take Honest Mistakes out of the equation you make a game about the respective skills of the two teams and in that kind of environment there was only ever going to be one winner.
Halliday might have been lucky to stay on the park – he most certainly was – but the early booking at least drew a line in the sand and let him know what he could and couldn’t get away with for the rest of the game. His utter anonymity after that point was unsurprising.
And there might well be a silver lining to the incident; Patrick Roberts has suggested that it ought to be used to clear Scott Brown. He’s right.
Likewise, Garner would have looked at the early yellow and known he too had to reign it in.
He did the sum total of nil and like his mate he was gone at half time.
That’s all there is to their respective games; those two don’t have an ounce of skill between them. They are hammer throwers. The second it became clear they couldn’t simply throw elbows and lunge into tackles with abandon their utility on the pitch was zero.
That’s why it was so important to highlight past mistakes and make sure these two, and others in that team, were forced to play it straight.
On another day, I wonder if we’d have got the penalty.
Watch the incident again; although Collum has been credited with awarding it, you can see clearly that Don Robertson pointed to the spot straight away.
Tavernier can complain all he likes; it was a stonewall decision, but I am not 100% convinced it would have been given every time.
We simply made sure that it was. We kept these guys on the straight and narrow. We ensured we got a fair crack of the whip. Nothing more. We weren’t asking for every 50/50 to go our way. We weren’t pushing anyone to lean in our direction.
Celtic doesn’t do that.
We earn every success.
We don’t ask for special treatment or for handouts.
We don’t want a helping hand; when our players show up for business we don’t need one. Have we had some honking decisions this season, in our favour? Yes we have, and I like to think websites like this one have highlighted how bad they were at the time.
But those things still get used against us, in the main because they fuel this ridiculous idea that over the course of a season “these things even themselves out.”
But I do not believe that and I never have.
What if one of those decisions costs us our unbeaten record? How does that “even out”? Josh Meekings diabolical handball of two years back didn’t “even itself out.” That happened in a cup semi-final, for God’s sake. How is that meant to “even itself out” if it costs you a return to Hampden and a chance at a treble?
So yes, my emailer had it right on.
Yes, we – the club, the bloggers, the fans in general – put pressure on the officials, and on Don Robertson in particular, in the lead up to the game, and I’m awfully glad that we did.
Because it removed part of the uncertainty over the outcome, the part that most worried a lot of us.
We didn’t make demands, we simply made it clear that we’d be watching, that they weren’t operating in the dark.
We drew attention to mistakes that had been made and made sure nothing slipped by on the day and deprived us of our shot.
We got fairness, that’s it, and it was all we were ever really interested in, and you know what? On the pitch isn’t the only place we’ll be pushing for it. Today, in court, we got the first major “smoking gun” moment which opens wide a door the SFA hoped was firmly nailed shut.
Watch this space.