The Celtic Boss Cut Through The Beaton BS Today. We Need The Club To Follow Suit Now.

Rodgers was angrier at full time today than I’ve heard him in a long time, and it’s overdue. Had we questioned some of the appalling decisions from officials when we were winning games – as some of us have long urged – we might not be here today where some of the more desperate hacks are going to say that this is sour grapes following a defeat.

But there is no smokescreen here. That’s as clear an example of a single official making ridiculous decisions that directly influenced the result of a match that you will ever see. John Beaton decided that game, and if he’d got those decisions right there would be nothing to talk about. But neither of them was even close. They are outrageous.

Rodgers got some stick from The Village Idiot for personally naming John Beaton in his attack. Well, first, I’ll accept that criticism when someone plays back what he said about the Ibrox club deliberately targeting Collum. Not one whisper to that effect escaped his mouth.

Secondly, if we don’t start naming and shaming people how are we going to get better? Nobody at Celtic is saying Beaton shouldn’t referee our games after all, and not even in tactical briefings to bloggers. I don’t think any Celtic fans wants to see him do so, but the club has not got an official policy on this one way or the other and the manager wasn’t trying to set one.

He is focussed on one game, today’s game, saying that Beaton should be personally accountable for that travesty and that’s a wholly legitimate view to take. It is exactly the view that the club should be taking as well, and they should make a statement to that end.

Celtic will never demand that an individual ref be banned from doing our games. But we can insist on higher standards and we can state our view, and it will be shared by other clubs, that officials should be accountable and sanctioned when they fall below those standards, otherwise how do you expect ever to improve them?

Beaton’s decisions today come at a critical juncture in this title race.

If the league is decided by a point, who will argue that this game didn’t play a critical role? Those decisions were so completely wrong as to render them virtually indefensible. If you think that they are just a result of incompetence and not bias you are fully entitled to that view, but in holding that view you have to accept that he shouldn’t be in charge of any further top flight game, because you simply can’t trust him to get the big calls right.

This is a perverse situation for our club to have permitted in the first place. Nothing happened today which wasn’t totally expected. We even had former ref Steve Conroy in the media this very week suggesting that officials might decide the destination of this title, and the longer we in this game continue with the VAR farce the worse it gets.

That’s something else our club should be committing itself to; ridding our league of this “technology” once and for all, on the understanding that all it has accomplished is that it gives our enemies more chances than ever to do us harm. Nobody in the game would have agreed to its introduction knowing that it would actually make matters worse, and if we were the first club to call it out and say we’re not willing to pay for its retention we wouldn’t be alone.

Something has to give. How much more damage to this campaign are we going to let those at Hampden do? On a weekend when the Ibrox club has demonstrated to other clubs that it’s beatable (just not to Hearts, who did exactly what they were supposed to today in total contrast to their utter surrender last weekend) we are damned lucky that it hasn’t completely upended our campaign and put this title race almost out of reach.

We can consider this a warning shot, not a coup de grâce. We had bloody better heed it and start working, right now, to prevent Hampden’s officials from harming us any further.