Witless Hack Casts Doubt On Celtic Decision And Ignores The Weekend’s Worst VAR Call.

I see Tam McManus is writing for The Record now, a guy so dumb that if you had two of them you still couldn’t generate the brainpower of a lobotomised chimney sweeper.

I can usually get by ignoring him because he was nothing but a glorified blogger, but now he’s part of the mainstream? Standards just continue to plummet don’t they?

I wonder if that rag and its readers are aware that his last writing gig was for an Ibrox fan site? Probably not. And it probably doesn’t matter since his current writing gig is, in effect, for an Ibrox fan site.

Which brings me around to today’s effort from him.

He wants the handball rule changed. Because Celtic got a penalty due to one and the Ibrox club conceded a penalty due to one.

They were both stonewall. I notice the outrage over the one at the home of our rivals; it took long enough for them to have a penalty awarded against them, so obviously they were would be bitching about the decision itself, all the better to make sure that it’s a long time before there’s another one given.

What I find astonishing – and he’s not alone in this but I’ve decided not to be generous to him, as he’s certainly not going to do us any courtesy at all – is that in his blubbering about how bad those decisions were (and neither of them was, and I think there’s a blue tinted thinking going on here to arrive at that conclusion) he missed the worst decision of the weekend.

How can we be talking about VAR failing yet again when the most appalling penalty kick given was the one Tavernier missed? Tillman quite clearly dived, and he did so outside the box.

How that was awarded as a spot kick should be the subject of one of those episodes on Unsolved Mysteries except that most of us know exactly why it was given.

If McManus and others want to talk about VAR then they should remember that all we ever hear is that a handball penalty is a subjective thing, so the only way to change it is that we either make any handball in the box a penalty no matter how unintentional or we make none of them penalties, in which case we will have defenders making saves even keepers can’t.

But a tackle outside the box isn’t subjective at all. It’s a clear-cut issue, and that an official actually watched that more than once and still gave it reeks to the high heavens of something other than a simple error.

You can forgive a simple error if all you have a split second to view an incident, but this was much more than that and it’s no wonder they won’t talk about it.

And until they do, McManus and others ought not to be trying to create a big song and dance over a decision that we got. Especially not when it was entirely fair and wholly justified.