Some In The Media Are Misrepresenting Celtic’s “Controversial” Penalty Call Again.

Earlier on I wrote about Crawford Allan and those comments he made yesterday. As The Celtic Star and other sites have stated, it was listed as a “mistake” by Allan and his report, but the decision itself has been held up as correct.

Some in the media would prefer it if you ignored the last part. The mistake was in the way the decision was arrived at. The decision itself was legit. Because, and I keep saying this, that’s not a penalty kick regardless of anything else.

The press would love to push this line that some big injustice was done there. They would love to push a version of this story wherein the VAR officials and others conspired to explain away a decision that was either mistaken or corrupt.

Neither of those things is true. The Ibrox board can howl this from the rooftops and people like The Village Idiot can howl at the moon but the correct decision was arrived at regardless of timing, the VAR view or the offside.

It’s like the decision earlier in the season involving their disallowed strike at Ibrox; that wasn’t a goal. The foul on the Celtic man was obvious. There were months of fury and foot-stamping over that one too, but the correct decision was made.

The way the press is covering the Allan report is hardly a surprise. Some of them still refuse to accept that the decision was right, and they never will. Hell, there are evidently some of them who believe that The Unseen Fenian Hand was pulling the strings of every official at Celtic Park that day, or that it operates Willie Collum by remote control.

Some of them have said as much in print.

The likes of Keith Jackson get most of their views and opinions from the Ibrox fan forum basement floors. They believe every mad theory that percolates down there. And for all of it, they have never produced a single concrete example of their club being prejudiced again. Look at how many we can name off the top of our heads.

There is much less attention given to some of the other findings in that report, such as the ones involving penalty incidents involving the Ibrox club. There are a couple of those where the inference is clear that major errors have been made. In a close title race, why isn’t that the lead story? Why aren’t they the key findings?

The double standard stinks, doesn’t it?

There are questions which arise from some of these issues. How many involved the two “full time VAR officials”? The SFA knows the names of every official involved; how many are common denominators? Who are the repeat offenders and which games involved them? If the same people are consistently making mistakes, what happens to them?

There are plenty of stories which come out of this dossier, and the admission that there have been all these mistakes. So much for VAR having made decision making better; this suggests the opposite. But some in the media are determined to get the story they want out of it, and the story they want is that the Alastair Johnston decision is even more controversial.

And in point of fact, that could not be further from the truth. In fact, it is more vindicated than ever.