Celtic’s Rivals Cling To The Only Successful Tactic They Have. Blame Refs For Being Losers.

During this season we’ve seen some truly abysmal refereeing performances and some even more shocking managerial setups at our ground. The joke of it is that if you believe the Hibs manager we saw the first of those yesterday.

The thing is, his solution – his proposal – for how we fix refereeing in Scotland is both ridiculous and sublime in equal measure.

I am loathe to give this guy a single iota of credit after the disgraceful way that his team handled the game, but there is something to be said about it just the same, just not in the way that this idiot clearly thinks that there is.

His idea is that we have full time, professional referees.

Great idea.

This blog and others have proposed much the same thing several times.

But to make this proposal on the same day as he is doing nothing but bitching about the standard of officiating in Scotland is almost testing the limits of parody.

Lee Johnson’s team offered nothing yesterday but brutality and that saddens me as someone who has watched Hibs for years, who has a great deal of affection for that club and whose reaction to that insult to football yesterday is as grounded in regret as much as anything else.

His club’s tactics were despicable. But you know what?

The tactics in the aftermath of the game were proven winners, although equally cynical.

To criticise officials as the reason their team lost.

There will always be a willing audience for that particular message and if they want make it about that then they are welcome to do so, but the idea of full time refs is one whose idea came long ago and should be debated properly … but that’s not the simplistic conversation some of these people evidently believe that it is.

Who are these people going to be?

We can use the same people running the show right now and what will happen then? Higher standards? Oh please. Only a fool believes that, and we have fools running the SFA already.

The only way to get higher standards is to bring in proper full time officials hired from outside of Scotland. People would still find reasons to complain, but they’d be different reasons than we have now.

And slowly but surely the standards would creep up.

In the meantime, in the absence of a tactic to stop our team on the pitch people will reach for the tried and the tested; to bitch about us off it. That gets headlines. That gets attention.

What a shame it doesn’t get any of these jokers points.