Ibrox’s Sudden Respect For Referees Is Entirely Phony And All At Celtic Know It.

So Giovanni Van Bronckhorst has expressed the view that refs are due respect and that people should back up and give them some. This guy isn’t long in the door, but already he’s playing Ibrox’s game like someone who’s been at it twenty years.

Whenever I hear anyone at Ibrox talk about respect, in any context, a laugh catches in the back of my throat. By instinct, I simply don’t believe a word of it. I automatically suspect that there is either a hand around someone’s throat or one in somebody’s pocket.

So to hear their manager talk the talk about refs this season, when refs have been under attack – constant attack, sustained attack – from Ibrox and its proxies all the way through this campaign is rich. Nobody should believe a word of it.

Ibrox will howl at the first decision that goes against them. This is simply another deception from them, a sniggering nudge and a wink to their own audience who know exactly why they are suddenly singing the praises of one of our officials … it’s the same reason that their moon-howling websites are no longer squealing like pigs.

These decisions fell for them, and that’s the only reason. They can pretend sympathy for refs in light of that as they will but those words will come back to haunt them the first time they are back, again, behaving little bubbling little bitches.

This site has suggested that Celtic make a statement at the end of this season calling, at last, for a full scale review of refereeing, preferably by an outside agency who can make recommendations to the clubs which will have force and effect.

I was delighted to see that some of the other sites endorsed this suggestion, and I was particularly pleased to see that the ever excellent Niall at The Celtic Star wrote about it and in fact elaborated on the suggestion to recommend that we call for a full-scale review of Scottish football governance whilst we’re at it … I cannot support that enough.

Is Ibrox saying that they believe the system works just fine and that they would vote against such a review? Of course not, they’d bite the hand off us to get it because they have their own concerns (what we would call mad paranoid fantasies) about how the game is run and how refereeing works, and so I’d expect them to be on board with an independent review.

And that’s just one of the reasons why we should all treat Van Bronckhorst’s comments with the contempt they richly deserve; he doesn’t mean a word of it and we know he doesn’t. Neither does his club. They have no respect for anything or anything, far less our officials who they have spent the entire season trying to undermine.