How nice for the SFA and refs that the media continues to have their back.

Last week, Willie Collum gave his first series of interviews since the launch of the SFA’s new weekly VAR programme. In the aftermath of Saturday’s game at Celtic Park I think there’s at least one official with questions to answer on the next VAR show.

But let’s talk for a minute about the first one. There were three main points of controversy about incidents it addressed, but just as many about those they conveniently ignored. Let’s focus on the incidents they chose to discuss.

The first issue involved Andrew Dallas’s hand-drawn lines on the offside decision in the 15th minute of our game against the club from Ibrox. The idea that Dallas was tasked with drawing these lines causes the SFA some problems right away.

Andrew Dallas should not be anywhere near a Celtic game, let alone drawing lines to prove a Celtic striker was offside. Many of us assumed VAR technology would be more advanced than something that requires Andrew Dallas to create the evidence himself, like a kid handing in a note from his mum in his own handwriting.

To me, that’s absurd, yet it’s exactly what Celtic supporters are being asked to accept.

I don’t think we should be willing to accept that, nor do I think it’s reasonable for the club to ask us to. This farce is one I tackled at length last week. The “Behind the Whistle” podcast—made up of ex-referees—highlighted this situation, exposing the weaknesses in Scotland’s VAR system.

Their argument is that such a decision should never have been made by our cheap and ineffectual version of VAR in the first place. That should concern all of us. When asked to explain the mechanics of the decision instead of why it was made, Collum was let off the hook—thanks, in no small part, to a Scottish media that, by and large, is a joke.

Another controversial incident was the penalty we should have had against Kilmarnock.

Everyone knew it was a penalty, yet the referee didn’t give it, and VAR didn’t intervene. It’s ridiculous, but Collum got away with it by claiming lessons had been learned and that referees had been reminded of the rules. That’s nonsense. If these officials don’t know the rules, then perhaps they’re in the wrong job since being a match official requires, at the very least, a grasp of the rules.

That decision wasn’t even close—it’s a stonewall penalty, not up for debate. Yet somehow, there seems to be endless grey area around penalty decisions in this country. And to think we all believed it only applied to handball decisions, and their ever-changing nature, eah?

How wrong we were, because in this case, it was a straightforward call. If the on-field officials missed it, VAR certainly should have caught it.

What we’re being asked to believe, then, isn’t that this was just one person’s mistake, but that none of the officials —there to enforce the rules—knew them. And only later were they “reminded” of what the rules actually are.

Forgive me if I find that hard to swallow.

The last contentious decision involved the Ibrox club and Tom Lawrence. This is the hardest for Collum to explain away. It’s clear that the official hoped Lawrence wouldn’t do what he did, which would him to give a foul, and probably a booking. Yet when it happened, he took no action. That needs an explanation, and it needs to be justified.

But we have no explanation, not from the officials anyway.

And this is where the real problem lies: in the absence of a proper explanation, members of the press stepped in to make excuses on the officials’ behalf. This is a media that is supposed to maintain distance, a media meant to scrutinize what officials say rather than trumpet it. It must be nice for the referees that out of everyone in Scottish football—players, coaches, managers, and administrators—the media rushes to their defence so consistently.

Consistently, that is, when the matter needing to be “clarified” is a decision that goes against us or one that falls in favour of Ibrox. You can set your watch to this stuff.

Take the Daily Record. They couldn’t wait to find an “impartial observer” to explain the referee’s decisions, and when they couldn’t get one of those they settled for Craig Moore. We’re supposed to treat Moore as someone fair minded. Really? Are we really supposed to accept that? “Oh, Craig Moore has offered an explanation? Well, that’s fine, then.”

And what alleged “explanation” has he offered us here? Why, that these situations, where it sounds like a ref is begging a player not to commit a foul and then basically letting him off when he does, “happen all the time.”

But does this happen all the time?

If it does, we should see more evidence of it. Now that these incidents will be recorded and available to everyone—managers, coaches, players, and fans—every single week, we should expect to see one like it fairly soon, and then fairly often. And yet, somehow, I have a sneaking suspicion that hell will freeze over before we see another incident quite like that.

This is part of the problem when you have a media that shirks its responsibility to scrutinize and instead repeats the party line from Hampden or, worse, does spin control on behalf of Ibrox. They are part of the problem, as shown by how this situation has been handled.

Collum went on the radio and was allowed to get away with those comments, and then a host of others regarding impartiality and how officials in Scotland don’t need to declare their allegiances, claiming it would “question their integrity.” It says a lot about the sorry state of our media that no one contradicted that obvious rubbish.

It’s clear that things won’t change while we have a press corps that refuses to fulfil its most basic function. This is why officiating in Scotland never gets better—because these people are under no pressure to improve. And that’s something that desperately needs to change.