Gordon Smith: Forever Attacking Celtic And Making Up Nonsense About VAR.

Radio Scotland really does enjoy embarrassing itself, doesn’t it?

Today Gordon Smith is in the news after going on their football show and “proposing” a VAR appeals system.

The proposal itself is utterly moronic and nonsensical; both clubs in a match would get two chances to recommend a decision be looked at by VAR and if one resulted in a change, they would get another “turn.”

In theory, then, teams could demand VAR review everything that happened in a game with which they disagreed as long as refs overturned their own on-field decisions.

Christ’s sake, hasn’t this technology done enough damage without this goon trying to make it worse? Gordon Smith is a former SFA chief executive, which only demonstrates how backward and bent their own decision making has been. The SFA advertised that post at the time and then hired a guy who did not tick a single box of the criteria for applying.

No sooner was he in the job, but a book came out in which he had made the preposterous claim that the SFA was historically biased against Rangers. He offered not one scintilla of proof for this, and from 2007-2010 he ran the organisation without ever being asked to do so. When he quit, for “personal reasons” he was in the firing line for a variety of controversies and there has always been talk that he was on the verge of being sacked.

Here’s the one thing nobody ever says; he was the CEO at Hampden during the final years when the Ibrox club was operating its EBT scheme. He certainly knew more than he has ever let on, more than he has ever been asked about.

His part in that whole scandal has been airbrushed out of the narrative except by sites like this, which continue to pose the questions that the media point blank refuses to ask him. He later went on to work for Craig Whyte and holds the historic record of being the last Rangers chief executive.

Someone whose judgement and character are so questionable should not be feted by the national broadcaster, except in some footballing banana republic, which I suppose is how some people might consider our game. He is a national disgrace.

But what made this weekend’s intervention from him all the more ridiculous is that this is the second time he’s claimed that he essentially invented VAR. The claim is nonsensical. A FIFA article on this tells us that VAR was the brainchild of Dutch officials and pioneered in a program called Referee 2.0. Smith has been getting away with this for years.

He first made this claim back in 2019, and guess what? It was in relation to a game where we’d beaten the Ibrox club and he thought they should have got big decisions they didn’t.

Smith was doing nothing more than banging the drum on behalf of his favourite club on both of these occasions. You barely hear of this idiot unless he’s doing that.

But it absurd to hear him repeating this dire claim that he is responsible for video assisted referees. He claims to have brought it up at a FIFA working group back in 2008, a year before the Dutch officials actually proposed it and got the go-ahead to test out the idea.

Even if this actually happened, which I have my doubts about, if Smith thinks that an off-hand remark at some backroom talking shop means he invented something he needs a lie down in a dark room.

Because I very much doubt that the idea was new even then.

People have been talking about something like VAR since games were first recorded for TV., so this daft claim from Smith is like one of the thousands of people in between Leonardo Da Vinci and the Wright Brothers claiming to have invented flying because they had a brief discussion about it a hundred years before the first piloted aircraft got off the ground.

You can tell the state of a game by the people it considers its elder statesmen. When The Kaiser died recently, all of German football was in mourning. That was a player, a manager, a director, a visionary, an example of greatness in the game. He was an icon of club and country and a fantastic administrator to boot. We get people like this.

Honestly, Smith only ever emerges when he can have a pop at officials who have given decisions in favour of Celtic. He is one of the bitterest men in Scottish football and completely unable to be in the least bit objective. His judgement is hilariously flawed; he hired both George Burley and Craig Levein for the Scotland job and was last man standing in the Whyte regime at Ibrox … and yet he’s supposed to be a voice we take seriously and respect?

Give me a break. This is why Scottish football is a mess.