We play Aberdeen at the weekend, and they are almost certainly going to be without their player Funso Ojo for the game after an appalling refereeing decision on Saturday when he was red-carded for a second bookable offence after an altercation with a Dundee Utd fan.
Ojo was the innocent party, but Bobby Madden thought he was the perpetrator and issued him a yellow to match the one he already had, and so off he went.
The decision was utterly ridiculous, but what makes it worse is that there is literally no mechanism for over-turning it and the SFA doesn’t want to simply create an exception because they refuse to go outside of the rulebook.
If you’re laughing at that you aren’t alone.
Hey, we all know that they will throw aside that book when it suits them.
It’s just that the fate of one footballer isn’t seen as a worthy enough cause, although I wonder if they’d be singing a different song if he played for a certain club at a certain ground.
But there are times when you just feel that common sense is necessary and this is one of them. The man does not deserve this. He did nothing wrong. Indeed, if you’ve watched the footage Ojo shows remarkable composure and restraint.
He is the one physically shoved and he does not retaliate. The decision to book him is mind-bending. The excuses being offered by the SFA as to why they can’t just rescind the card are absolutely ridiculous.
For years I’ve said that the rules need to be followed precisely as they are written, but that doesn’t simply mean that we allow obvious miscarriages of justice to happen when all we have to do is accept that’s what they are.
These are exceptional circumstances not covered by the regulations; Broadfoot on Radio Scotland last night admitted that, saying that the only way it could have been challenged was if the incident involved a fellow player and not a fan; then, under the regulations, it would have been a “mistaken identity” case and would probably have been reversed.
In short, we’re to believe that there is nothing whatsoever in the provisions for a flat-out screw up by the referee. This is not a case in which there is the least dubiety at all.
The cameras caught the whole incident.
The guy did nothing wrong, and still got punished.
Nobody is in the least doubt that banning him would be ridiculous … but he will be banned anyway.
Celtic will be the immediate beneficiaries of that outrageous judgement, of course, but I don’t want and I don’t think any Celtic fan wants to gain any sort of advantage from something so wrong as this.
The SFA rulebook is such a shoddy document that it doesn’t even contain any sort of provision for reversing a decision when everyone agrees it’s the wrong call … how are we supposed to respect a system which runs like that?
And how can anyone defend the clubs which continue to allow the game here to be run in this disgraceful fashion?
Why have any rules because they are one sided always have been always will until the board stand and up to the bias referees, linesmen, officials, especially the media / press nothing will change, as for the carryon re Chris Sutton the Celtic fans should hit back cancel their subscriptions.