The total tonnage of the problems we have with football governance in Scotland would easily be enough to stop a Russian tank division. The game here is run by corrupt cowards, and the clubs are more interested in ignoring problems than actually tackling them.
The only leadership comes from the supporters.
The press is a long-standing joke.
For years some of us have complained about the appalling standard of refereeing.
Years. It’s not a new thing.
I’ve heard excuses and justifications. I’ve heard all the conspiracy theories. I’ve long since ceased to be unconcerned whether refs here are biased or bent or simply just useless; the problem exists and there’s no getting away from it.
But discuss refs in the context of decisions which go against Celtic and you are labelled a paranoid. You are told that these things “even themselves out” over the course of a season. I still say that’s bollocks, and too often people hide behind it. The Josh Meekings decision probably cost us a Scottish Cup. It fed into the negative perception about Ronny Deila and his team that ultimately cost him his job. You tell me how that “evens itself out.”
That old tripe is an excuse for doing nothing. For not properly scrutinising our refs and adopting a policy wherein they genuinely get punished for their mistakes. And for the record, although Stokes can probably count himself lucky he stayed on the park last week, Ryan Jack wholly deserved to walk and that the ban was over-turned is ridiculous and requires an explanation from the disciplinary committee that makes sense.
John Beaton is a dreadful referee.
But there isn’t a Celtic fan, or indeed a fan anywhere, who was not wholly aware of that before last week.
That others have now come to realise it is no surprise; it really does matter who decisions go against, or indeed for, before they are subject to forensic scrutiny here. Every time Celtic gets a positive one we go through this same rigmarole of debating refereeing standards. Every time one goes against the Ibrox club the moaning can be heard across continents and the media suddenly realises we have a problem.
Derek Johnstone, every village’s favourite idiot, penned piece for The Evening Times the other day where he claimed that it’s right that refs pay a price for their mistakes. And he highlighted the Jack sending off as one. He also claimed that the appeals panel sometimes gets it wrong as well. And he highlighted Scott Brown’s “stonewall red card” and the subsequent overturning of that as an example.
Johnstone’s bias is so naked he’s barely worth bothering about, but he opens with the following line; “Referees in Scotland aren’t biased. They also aren’t very good at their jobs.” The article, in fact, is not as bad as his ridiculous comparison makes out … but see, this is the point.
Johnstone claims to have spent a long time highlighting how bad Scottish officiating is, but the only times I’ve ever heard him say so is when a decision has gone against his favourite club or in favour of ours. Where is he on other controversial calls?
Where is he when the decisions are falling Sevco’s way?
He’s one of the guys who pushes this line about things “evening out.”
I wrote a damning article on Beaton in March this year, after a performance in the Sevco-Hamilton match which had to be seen to be believed.
In the aftermath, he was given the last Sevco game, at Ibrox.
So much for the SFA punishing those who let the overall standard slip.
The media as a whole has never taken this issue remotely seriously; they supported the referees strike and were happy to apportion the blame for it to Celtic when all we did was ask for some clarity on how decisions are made, and insist that if clubs and managers routinely pay for bad calls that the refs themselves should too. They got a pay rise out of that.
Mistakes will be made by refs.
But in the failure to properly examine their decisions and question them as to why they were made we’re putting in place the perfect conditions for corruption if it’s not already a factor in our sport. That’s undeniable, but it’s something the media simply refuses to discuss. But they will happily discuss Mad Pedro’s notion that his club now factors bad decisions from refs into their game-plan. Ronny Deila used to do the same, by the way, but his concerns were never taken half as seriously.
Over on the Sevco forums, they’ve been ranting about Beaton all week long. You know what one of the things they are saying is? I swear this is true. They are piqued because they had assumed that Scottish refs still favoured them, and are blaming last week’s defeat on Peter Lawwell. I don’t know what makes that worse, the sense of entitlement or the brazen admission that they, too, for years have believed the SFA referee fraternity existed to do them favours.
But bad refereeing in Scotland remains the elephant in the room. Most of the time people simply work around it. Until it drops its backside. And depending on whether or not the stink reaches the Sevco end, the media tries to ignore that or acknowledges it at last.
This week all eyes will be on the officials because the Ibrox club wants them there.
All eyes should be on them all the time until the standards improve.
Some of these guys are just no good.
Others are up to no damned good.
It takes decisions against just one club to focus attention on that.
Otherwise, it just wouldn’t matter at all.