Ange Blasts Back As Celtic Finally Ramps Up The Pressure Over Dire Decisions.

Ange Postecoglou is a man the media has to take seriously.

There are two reasons why. The first is that his experience in football is vast, and he has watched the game and managed in it on three continents, and in all of them he’s won things.

The second reason is that he is the manager of the biggest club in the country and that conveys on him an authority and status in itself.

It easy to dismiss people like me, although there’s a certain level of arrogance and spite in those in the mainstream media and elsewhere who try to do it on the basis that all the bloggers do is reflect the worst sort of paranoia. As I’ll demonstrate later in a lengthier piece, it’s not paranoia at all but a clear understanding of the culture surrounding our game.

But today this deeply serious man, a man who has come to manage here from the other side of the world and who the media simply cannot dismiss in any sort of way, sat in front of them and openly mocked the idea that what we watched on Monday was anything other than a penalty and accused those claiming otherwise of “mental gymnastics” as they attempt to justify it.

He hammered the point across.

He rejected utterly the “interpretation” of the rulebook which is being tossed around in an effort to cloud the issue. He knows that decision is given as a penalty in almost every game in every league and he certainly knows that it would have been given against us because he highlighted the pattern we’ve all watched … that every major decision VAR has made so far in our games has gone against us.

He rejected the idea that these things will “even themselves out” and he nailed the media on how they would have covered it had the decision gone the other way, against the Ibrox club.

“I guarantee you, if that game finished 2-2, and it was (them) that were denied that decision, the talk this week would be about how that was a title-defining decision,” he said.

And he’s right, because this would be the subject of wide-ranging debate just as a decision last which went Celtic’s way –in August last year against Hearts – provoked a firestorm and it wasn’t the first time.

Towards the end of last season, I wrote a half dozen articles over how every decision in our favour was the subject of a week long forensic investigation.

The game was on the brink of a full-scale inquest last season because we got a throw in.

Another “controversy” exploded after we got a corner against Livingston from which we scored a goal and which the press were determined to turn into a thing. As I said in the article I wrote at the time, they were strangely silent on how a Livingston player had avoided a second yellow card in that game and on not just one but two penalty claims which we were denied.

One of the things that bothers me most about the hacks is that they think we’ve all got short memories. That’s why I take such pleasure in reminding them that we don’t.

The boss knows all this, and he remembers it well.

That’s why when he talks they have to listen and they have to pay him the respect they don’t pay the rest of us.

There is nothing he said today with which they can argue, even those who have chosen the “interpretation” of that penalty decision that best suits their own bias. Ange called it what it was.

“I’s a penalty in my mind,” he said. “Before we even started introducing VAR, it’s always been a penalty. There were only two saves in the game; one by Joe and one by Connor.”

There would have been some scattered laughter at that comment, but big Ange wasn’t joking and everyone in the room knew it. He sometimes gives the impression that he’s a big, genial friendly man who never lets anything bother him … but he was angry today as I suspect he’s been angry for a few months now and he did not miss the target.

Coming at the end of a week in which the club has demanded a meeting with SFA officials over all this you can see clearly that the days of maintaining a dignified silence the kid-gloves are coming off.

The amazing thing is that we’ve come through this spell without it costing us … thank God, Celtic appears no longer willing to wait until it does.