Don’t Underestimate The Threat To Celtic Posed By Willie Collum This Weekend.

So we know now that the referee for the weekend will be Willie Collum.

That’s the news of the day.

That he’s gotten this game should tell you how our club’s alleged conspiracy against officials, and the alleged pressure we’ve put on behind the scenes.

As this blog has said many times, in riposte to some of the paranoid nonsense on the Ibrox fan sites and elsewhere, our club has done virtually nothing to challenge refereeing or the people who get our games.

Collum, Madden and Beaton get our matches with depressing, and infuriating, regularity and let’s be honest, if we reformed this thing they wouldn’t get near us.

We are a better team than the home side. Definitely.

We have better players in every position on the park. Our squad is better than theirs. That’s reflected in the fact that we’re top right now and we’ve won the only trophy of the season so far.

We are challenging on three domestic fronts, and we look strong. I have no fears whatsoever about our ability to win a purely footballing contest.

But we are forever putting ourselves on the line, leaving too much to chance, by continuing to do nothing about refereeing. Ronny Deila was denied a treble in his first campaign by a blatant, scandalous, decision at Hampden.

Ange could be denied his own glory by officialdom.

Don’t, for one minute, underestimate the damage a referee could do in a single moment of a game.

Collum has made some of the most appalling decisions I’ve seen from a Grade One official … in failing to get big changes made to the SFA system we are very much putting ourselves in his hands.

On the day, it is up to us to do enough to negate any influence the officials might have.

This much I accept, and always have. But this is an extra hurdle that we shouldn’t have to overcome, and there will be times when it will be what costs us.

I sincerely hope this weekend isn’t one of them.

Our club should be making it clear over the next few days that we’re watching every decision this guy makes and that we’re not going to simply ignore an “honest mistake” like the one we saw in Dundee just over a week ago.

That’s the kind of pressure we need to put on; not for special favours, but for basic fairness.

A clean game, cause if it’s that then we’ll win it.