Celtic Fans Are Listening Carefully To Collum’s Reform Plans. Others Just Want To Wallow In Bile.

esterday, Willie Collum laid out his “plan” for officiating and I found a lot of what he had to say interesting. A few of the other Celtic sites covered the story and gave his comments a good write up. I am never going to be his number one fan, but he’s said some – not all, but some – of the right things here in terms of VAR, the handball rule and other things.

We want VAR decisions to be more transparent. We want officials to be better trained on it. So when he talks about that stuff, and particularly how they will be seeking to explain decisions in stadiums, I welcome it. I applaud it. He also told officials to step up their game so that VAR isn’t needed so much in the first place as it is quite literally only supposed to intervene when they get something wrong and for a handful of them, they don’t take responsibility for big decisions anymore and wait for the guy on VAR to bail them out. He knows that can’t go on.

Changes to make the handball rule simpler to understand and which people can more easily grasp because a certain amount of ambiguity will be removed … it all sounds good. Connor Goldson’s departure from Scottish football will certainly change things if he actually does leave, as he seems to be refereed to a different version than everyone else.

So I was interested in his comments around these areas and we should be willing to give this guy a chance to see how what comes out of this. The standard of officiating here stinks, and he has to know and the SFA has to know that when we’re not having officials invited to the Euros that things have gone badly wrong here … Collum is experienced and knowledgeable and I think it’s a job which needs a former official in charge and not some placeman.

Someone in the media asked him whether or not he had “repaired” his relationship with Ibrox, as if that was a question of any relevance. Why in God’s name is it his responsibility to stop them behaving like lunatics?

He waived the question aside, as you might expect, by saying that it’s just fine and there is no issue. I’m sure there is, but he’s no longer in a position where he has to care what they think. They tried to get him banned from refereeing their games; now he runs refereeing.

And so, whilst Celtic fans have their ears open and are listening to what he’s saying and thinking carefully about it and some of us – perhaps foolishly, perhaps not – are taking it seriously over on their forums the reaction is entirely different; the bile that is flowing there is what you would expect; anti-Catholic venom leeching out of every page.

The default over there is hate. That’s their starting position. So Collum was never likely to get a fair or proper hearing from them, but the level of the bile is quite deranged, and the focus on his religion would be regarded as absolutely barmy anywhere else on the planet.

On top of that is the whingeing over past decisions, most of them not even involving Collum either directly or indirectly. “Never defeated, always cheated” seems to be their general philosophy, and their sense of grievance and victimhood continues to grow.

Collum knows that as far as they are concerned, he’s on a hiding to nothing. Our fans will be monitoring every performance from the officials looking to see if there have been improvements, trying to discover if anything has really changed for the better.

Not them. They will be monitoring every decision from an entirely different viewpoint; always hoping for the proof that things are getting worse as far as they are concerned, and every time there’s a decision that they don’t like Willie Collum will get the blame.

Our officiating is not fit for purpose, as we’re all well aware. Changes to the system are always welcome, even if some of the reforms we badly need are still not being considered. The difference between us and them is that we’re willing to wait and see. Because it’s Collum, a true Ibrox hate-figure, they have already made their minds up.