Celtic Needs To Warn The SFA Of The Consequences Of An “Honest Mistake” This Weekend.

The news that John Beaton is refereeing Sunday’s match should not surprise a single one of us. Crawford Allan is going out with a bang. They’ve already given us Don Robertson for Livingston and now we’ve got Beaton. Celtic should be outraged, and behind the scenes I am sure that we are. But on their own heads be it, at Parkhead and Hampden both.

We did what we had to do in the Rodgers case. We secured our primary objective. But we remain at the mercy of decisions such as this, and it’s a decision which reeks, which stinks to high heaven, and especially in light of Willie Collum’s complete absence at league games against the club across the city.

Beaton is an open insult to us. It is an open challenge. It is an implicit threat from Hampden that we might have won a battle, but they can win the war.

Well, Celtic needs to send the clearest possible message to them about that, and I would prefer we did not do it in private but in public. I would prefer that we considered the full range of effects should the match be decided by an “Honest Mistake.”

There are tens of millions of pounds at stake here. At what point does an intervention from Crawford Allan’s little toy soldiers represent an unacceptable risk?

Let me put it this way, Celtic has a responsibility to its own shareholders.

None of us cares about dividends or profit and loss statements when it comes right down to it, but that doesn’t mean that the club does not have a legal obligation to protect those things, to protect the share price, to assure that the club is not disadvantaged.

The potential loss of a guaranteed Champions League bounty, this season of all seasons, is too large to just ignore. Shareholders won’t let the club away with doing that, and nor should they.

Bad enough to lose this title when our own board is responsible for the gross failure to strengthen the team properly … to lose it to the “pattern of assistance” would be a scandal for the ages, and all the more so as it’s being so blatantly telegraphed in advance.

If the people running Celtic have any sense, they will get in front of this.

They should release a statement this week on our concerns over officiating.

They should make it abundantly clear that they will protect the institution from any such intervention. They will send a clear warning to Hampden that if this campaign comes down to an “Honest Mistake” that we will aggressively pursue that matter as far as we can and deliver whatever evidence we’ve accumulated along the way to whichever body is qualified to hear it.

There cannot be any question of meek acquiescence.

There cannot be any question of simply shrugging it off as one of those things.

If we’re robbed of this title – and that would be the appropriate word in the circumstances – there would be no question of simply accepting it in and moving on.

My generation of fans have already seen cheating on an industrial scale go essentially unpunished and it’s the fervent belief of many of us that those currently sitting on our board were guilty of doing too little to prevent that. We’re simply not going to tolerate that again, especially with Desmond and Lawwell still holding the controls.

This club is duty bound to guard us against that to the best of its ability or to take robust action in the event of it. If those running Celtic won’t serve the best interests of the small shareholders then our issue will not only be with Hampden, it’ll be with Celtic itself.