As Hard As The Media Tries, It Cannot Justify Madden’s Scandalous Penalty Call.

You get the impression, reading the press today, that they have set out to do two things; first, find some justification, no matter how ridiculous, for Madden’s penalty decision yesterday and to find grounds for backing Malky Mackay’s pitiful rationalisation that our match turned on a sending off which should never have been given.

Dermot Gallagher has given them both, and you know what?

It doesn’t matter to me how many ex-refs they pull out of the woodwork.

If Gallagher is saying he’d have given that then I am going to call him a liar.

I don’t believe he would have awarded that for one second.

That decision is a flat-out scandal and Sutton was right to say that it is one of those refereeing “errors” which makes you question the whole structure of the SFA.

Watching that as it unfolded yesterday I was in total shock, and I still am.

Morelos doesn’t go down. You could see his arms all over the defender.

When the ref called a halt to the game I thought he was going to book Morelos and give the free-kick the other way.

Judging by the look on Mad Dog’s face, so did he.

The decision to award it the other way was astonishing.

Gallagher and those others who are claiming that Morelos was tugging on the jersey must be blind not to see that he had his hands on the defender’s shirt as well. You can’t give the foul one way and not the other; their attempts to rationalise this nonsense are a joke. That was a decision that is either scandalously incompetent or it was corrupt.

The reason that we don’t ever get better referees is that every talking head tries everything they can to rationalise and explain horror decisions like this instead of doing what Sutton has done two weeks on the bounce now; stating quite clearly that some of the refs aren’t up to the job … and that, of course, is the generous interpretation.

But Madden always has a decision like that in him, and we know this all too well from our own history with this guy. When the chips were down yesterday and the Ibrox team was toiling, he stepped up on their behalf.

Had Tavernier scored that, you could have marked the referee down for an assist because that’s what it was, and I don’t care how the press tries to rationalise it as something else.