Paul Heckingbottom is blaming the ref for his team’s failure at Easter Road today.
Please note, he is well aware that it was a failure although you would not believe that to read some of the laudatory press coverage which credits his team with “frustrating Celtic” and “securing a point” instead of pointing out that it also frustrated the home support and that in fact his club dropped two points today instead of winning one.
The referee deserves criticism for today, but nowhere in Heckingbottom’s diatribe is there even the least acknowledgement that we were denied two stonewall penalties in the game.
The officiating was deplorable; we agree.
But had they been up to the job they would not have been of any use to his team, which he set up in a wholly negative way.
There are a few things to remember about the incident which led to the goal.
First, the free kick to Celtic was a free kick and it doesn’t matter that Clancy either didn’t see it or just simply didn’t want to give it. The official who told him to do it was right, so for Heckingbottom or anyone else to complain is farcical.
Even the BT Sport commentators knew it was a foul.
And Celtic took the free kick quickly!
How nasty of us!
How underhanded that we didn’t wait until he had pulled back every player in his team and crammed them into the six-yard box before we put the ball back in play!
That’s not Marquis of Queensbury rules; that’s taping your own hands behind your back and asking to be punched in the face.
This was a competitive game, for actual points, and so I’m awfully sorry that our team didn’t do more to make sure the home side had all the advantages it could get. I mean, we’d given them a goal of a start via a deflection into the back of our own net … at that point you’d have thought they’d have considered that generous enough.
This was his summation of the way we scored the equaliser.
“Some of them think it is a drop ball and they are getting the ball back or something. Others understand it is a free kick so it was a shambles. A farce, that bit of play.”
Yeah?
Funny that our players all seemed to know the drill, and got on with it.
He’s right, it does sound like a shambles, but amongst his players, so quite how he has the brass neck to blame anyone else for that is really remarkable. He should be working at Ibrox with that level of cognitive dissonance.
I thought only they could bend reality into shapes like that.
He also saw Olivier Ntcham land “three punches.”
Quite an incredible feat for our player.
He must have faster fists than Muhammed Ali in his prime, and Heckingbottom must have sharper eyesight than Phil “The Power” Taylor in his if he spotted that, as he is quite literally the only person who was in that ground today who did.
What I saw – what all of us saw – was a Hibs player niggling and needling him and big Ollie reacting.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have done it.
Lennon doesn’t think he should.
But it’s a far cry from wanting him tarred and feathered, which is apparently all Heckingbottom will settle for.
He rambled on about “injustices” and about how “something isn’t right” about the decisions … just not the ones that were clearly wrong and spectacularly favouring his own side. He also congratulated his players and said how proud he was of them for grimly hanging on for a draw which consigned them to second bottle of the table, without a league win in five games.
And it’s our goal that was the shambles?
Uhuh. Nice try.
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