As Bobby Madden Quits Scottish Football Celtic Fans Say Good Riddance.
Football - Aberdeen v St Johnstone - Scottish League Cup Semi-Final - Tynecastle, Edinburgh, Scotland - 1/2/14 Referee Bobby Madden Mandatory Credit: Action Images / Graham Stuart Livepic EDITORIAL USE ONLY. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or live services. Online in-match use limited to 45 images, no video emulation. No use in betting, games or single club/league/player publications. Please contact your account representative for further details.
Bobby Madden is quitting Scottish football to go and manage in England. Obviously he is not going to manage in the Premiership. This sub-par whistler will not get near the elite level of the game there. In a stunning rebuke to our refereeing fraternity, he’s not even going to make it to the Championship, at least not initially.
He will referee League One and League Two games. That’s the level he’s rated at down there. It is a disgrace that someone of such an abysmal standard was a regular in our top flight. That he’s got to start three or four leagues down in England tells you everything that you need to know about how bad our officials are. It’s time that was acknowledged.
Madden has been a bad joke on this game for years. Not a single one of us will miss him. We can recount too many occasions when his decisions have bordered on the scandalous and the idea that he was impartial was frankly ridiculous.
I sincerely wish he’d take a handful of his colleagues down there with him. The game up here will be better off without his presence. Doubtless if it doesn’t work out in England we’ll see him on the BBC. That’s the retirement job up here for ex-Ibrox players who can’t get a gig as managers and basically for anyone who will offer a negative view on Celtic.
Madden is one of the guys who inspired my “you are the official” quiz which you can do below. He had that version of the regulations down cold.
Only someone who follows a completely different standard could have taken the decision not to book the thug Lundstram in the Scottish Cup semi-final. If he gives that much leeway to any player south of the border he’ll get excoriated by their media. But then, he won’t be refereeing Celtic games so perhaps that’ll not be an issue.
Roll up your trouser leg and put yourself in the shoes of one of our “esteemed” officials for a day … take our quiz on You Are The Ref, and find out how well you understand the famous Lanarkshire rulebook …
A Celtic player goes in for a 50/50 ball and the oppositon player comes over the ball with his studs raised and takes it and snaps the Celtic player's leg in the process? What is the correct response?
