Celtic Clearly Suspect Something Rotten Over The Silva Penalty Decision.

One of the things I’ve read in various places since the weekend is that Celtic would not have conceded the Silva penalty had we not been awarded one first.

This is probably accurate. When you think about it, the decision to award a penalty against them in a league game, at Ibrox, was massive, and against Goldson in particular, who gets away with this stuff with such regularity that you’d have thought there was a clause in the rules about it.

It felt like one of those decisions designed to even things out.

Which, of course, is not what the system is supposed to be for. It’s like refs blowing the full-time whistle right on the 90 minutes if a team is comfortably in front; officials are not supposed to assist in mercy killings any more than they are supposed to balance decisions off each other.

Why was the referee shown only an edited view of the incident?

You can clearly see that he was; the footage was only of the player going down, not of AJ winning the ball, which he very obviously did. It was a pathetic attempt to win a decision from Silva and it had hardly been his first of the day.

Not only did the decision seriously disenfranchise us at the start of the second half, but it rewarded one of the most blatant bits of cheating I’ve witnessed in a while.

Celtic clearly smells something fishy. Perhaps we also believe that this was more about levelling out the decisions than anything else. But there’s no “clear and obvious error” here and so I find it absurd that Beaton – who needed no excuse to give the home team decisions; he did it virtually all afternoon – was even called over to the monitor.

The news that Celtic has sought clarity on this isn’t surprising in the least.

It will make no difference whatsoever, but it keeps the pressure on. We should also be seeking some clarity on the crime-count in the match as well. If you compare our foul count across the season to that one specific game at the weekend, I think the difference would be so great that it would jump off the page. I have never seen more one-sided decision making in a game.

Complaining about these things is pretty futile.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it.

It is important to get our frustrations on the record and to make sure that people know we’re not just sitting watching this stuff unfold … but we all know that there won’t be any justice for us, even if we force people into admitting they got this decision wrong.

The only way we’re going to put a stop to this stuff is when we have genuine SFA reforms. Those will do more good than any complaint we could ever make, either in public or in private.

The club has to get serious on that subject if we aren’t already.