Hibs Twitter Account Jokes About Ibrox Injustice, But Is Their Club Willing To Do More?

You know what I was doing when I heard that the Ibrox club had been awarded a penalty kick against Hibs this afternoon?

This is no joke. I was listening to the ACSOM podcast with the ever-excellent Alan Morrison on it, talking about “patterns of assistance” and the way the Ibrox club has benefited from decisions. Alan’s case is compelling. It was just made more so.

What makes it astonishing – their club getting an SPFL penalty when in dire need is not in the least bit surprising far lest astonishing – is that this was so certain today, so absolutely nailed on to happen, that the Hibs official Twitter feed actually joked about it when it happened.

This is what they put up on their live match thread.

Maybe some of their fans find that funny. I know a lot of the Ibrox fans do; they laugh at the whole of Scottish football every time something like this goes down. Every time.

They know what they are watching as well as we do, and they know upon whom they can rely. David Dickinson refereeing with Andrew Dallas on VAR?

Remember Andrew Dallas? Remember his dad?

When I put together the data on who has refereed the Ibrox club’s league games since Willie Collum was banned from doing it, Dickinson and Dallas are two of the names who come up over and over again. Dallas is one of the “full time VAR officials” when there’s not even the remotest doubt what his personal proclivities are. It runs in the family.

Alan Morrison’s work on this stuff is quite brilliant, and this was a good time to highlight the issue again. A Celtic fan initiative has just been launched which is seeking to get the signatures of 100 shareholders and present a submission to the club over the need for refereeing reform.

The idea is to start a proper debate about this stuff instead of having it on the margins; I’ll be doing a larger piece on that subject, but the margins are where this debate has traditionally been had, and it’s there in part because no club wants to put it front and centre.

Which isn’t the same as saying that no club recognises the issue. They all recognise the issue. They recognise it so much that they openly laugh about it. But there’s a difference between recognising what’s going on and being willing to do something about it and that’s the grey area in which too much of Scottish football seems content to live.

One of the most fundamentally important things that Alan Morrison says in that ACSOM podcast, and which he’s repeated numerous times on social media in the immediate aftermath, is that this is an issue affecting more than just one club.

Not that you would know that to see the way the debate is viewed elsewhere, with most supporters outside Glasgow scorning it as a local obsession. But they aren’t as stupid as this makes them sound, and they aren’t unaware that going to Ibrox presents a very different challenge, in terms of the officials, than coming to Celtic Park.

There is no discussion in this game more requiring a grown-up examination. Hibs should raise Hell over that decision, although the penalty was missed anyway.

They certainly expected something along those lines, but bizarrely have done nothing about it to make these events less likely.

But hey, the Tweet was funny, but I would hope that the fans of a team sitting seventh in the table before that game started today didn’t find it amusing in the least.

A defeat today virtually condemns them to the bottom six … so I wouldn’t be joking about it if I were in their shoes, I’d damned well be determined to confront this issue, all the better to try and fix it.