Celtic Doesn’t Need Telling Where The Threat Lies, But We Were Reminded Today Anyway.

Last week, a friend of this website, Auldheid of the Resolution 12 campaign, drew my attention to a piece that was penned a piece for the Sentinel Celts site laying out a brand-new project in which he’s playing a role; a shareholder resolution on refereeing standards.

The article on the site is tremendous and well worth paying attention to.

You can read the whole piece here.

Basically, they need 100 shareholders to commit and to sign up for it, and then the resolution can be submitted to the club. Beyond that, they’ve invited season ticket holders to get involved to add further weight to it, and that could be the bit that really changes the game here.

It seems especially important now, in the week of the Rodgers hearing.

This scheme has been promoted on ACSOM recently, where they also brought the brilliant Alan Morrison on to talk about the “pattern of assistance” you’ll doubtless have heard about.

I first listened to this evidence on one of Graham Speirs podcasts; as good as those shows are, their audience is limited because they are behind a paywall, although I believe that particular episode has been made available to anyone who signs up for Patreon.

But the ACSOM episode can be found just by Googling it, not that you’ll have to because you can go to it from this link right here and check it out.

Believe me when I say that it is as worth your time as everything you’ve heard about it is true.

Having heard Alan on this subject before, I put this off until this afternoon when I knew I would be able to fully focus on it, and I was sitting watching it when my phone started vibrating with the news that the Ibrox club had gotten their latest dodgy penalty kick.

How bad was it?

You can watch the reaction from Michael Stewart here; this will sum it up nicely, as does McIntyre’s effort to find some way to justify what was an outright shocker of a call.

And yet, it leaves me less than shocked.

Just disgusted that this continues to happen, but more to the point that it is permitted to keep on happening. As I posted earlier, Hibs even used their official Twitter feed to joke about it; it’s as if this is now just an accepted part of football in Scotland, like a match lasting 90 minutes (unless Ibrox needs a late goal.)

The Rodgers hearing – the fact of it, the timing of it – gave our club a shake, and we reacted aggressively by bringing in a top lawyer to represent the club, and I don’t think for one minute that we’re finished here yet.

Crawford Allan is gone; one of the most powerful things about Alan Morrison’s numbers is the clear line he draws between his appointment and some of these more ridiculous “anomalies.” It all seems to track right to his door.

Allan’s demise came in the midst of the Rodgers case; coincidence?

It would be a Hell of a one, would it not?

Regardless, it is not something we should be weeping into our beer about. The only issue we might have is that he’s there for the rest of the season and that could not have happened at a worse time; an unaccountable head of refs with a grudge.

We know what the stakes are here. We’ve got seven games left to play, two of them against the club from Ibrox. If we win tomorrow, we go back top but their team has a game in hand. We can’t afford a single slip, and the Hearts game proves that the officials are more than capable of throwing this race where they want it to go.

But I suspect that one of the messages we’ve sent behind the scenes is that we certainly won’t tolerate that. If an “honest mistake” cost us the league title then the financial consequences alone are potentially so severe that I don’t believe we could, or would, meekly accept that outcome.

This morning, I wrote about our big perception problem with Lawwell at the helm; one of the best ways to counter that would be for us to start getting the messaging right and the coming week would be a good one in which to put some of our concerns in the public domain. I just don’t know that Brendan and the players would welcome that distraction.

Still, if officiating costs us this league I do expect that there will have to be blood on the walls, simply because of the money that’s at stake and that’s a message I have no doubt that we will either have sent or will very soon be sending behind the scenes.

Nobody at Parkhead needed reminding about where the true threat lies.

The timing of the Rodgers case, as well as the mere fact of it, did that for us but nevertheless, we were handed another example of the “pattern of assistance” at Ibrox this afternoon with David Dickinson and Andrew Dallas on duty to make sure of it.

Winning tomorrow is crucial.

But beyond that, we need to start ramping off the pressure both on and off the pitch for the next two months, starting with sending that very clear message that an “honest mistake” will not just have consequences for Celtic.