The SFA continues to deny reality, and our media is happy to let them.

Last night, on the podcast, we had a discussion about the referee’s performance at the weekend, but I went a little further than everyone else. I wasn’t just talking about the referee, I was talking about the whole structure around refereeing. The standard applied to Celtic is different, and not only in officiating. The way our incidents are covered by the media is different too.

We have a media culture that thrives on controversy, everyone knows that. But what kind of controversy? Only the kind where Celtic receive a positive decision seems to get wall-to-wall attention stretching on for weeks.

The media could have made a massive song and dance out of the incident at Ibrox last week, the Livingston stonewall penalty, but they chose not to do it. They could have driven a full week of coverage around the injustice of the penalty given against Celtic this weekend. There is no way they were going to do that.

They could have turned the incident where our Belgian boy wonder took a boot to the face into a rolling national controversy. Instead, they chose silence. The Arne Engels incident was worse by almost every measure than the Jack Butland and Auston Trusty flashpoint, yet nobody wants to discuss it.

That’s not just a double standard. It’s the double double standard that infuriates people.

It’s the one we live with now. Every one of these incidents could stand alone as a straight 50-50 call, a debatable moment that deserves discussion, but the debate never comes when Celtic suffer the wrong end of it.

The same pattern played out in the cup semi-final. People would think that match featured only one controversial moment when in reality it produced several incidents just as questionable as the Trusty flashpoint. The penalty decision itself was a joke. Almost everyone ignored the clear foul when Mickey Moore clattered into a Celtic player in the box. The Cornelius red card possibility also vanished from the narrative as the media rushed to fixate on Trusty.

Any decision that falls Celtic’s way and even brushes the edges of controversy gets ripped apart like evidence in a murder trial. The media scrutinise it from every angle and stretch the criticism across days of coverage.

Meanwhile, even blatant incidents elsewhere receive nothing remotely comparable. The penalty against Livingston at Ibrox only became a story because Livingston complained. There wasn’t a whole industry of so-called experts dissecting it. It didn’t become a week-long obsession.

On the day there was a brief ripple of reaction. When Livingston released their statement, there was another small swell. Around those tiny islands of coverage sat an ocean of silence.

The penalty decision at Easter Road is, at the absolute minimum, debatable. I’ve seen people say it is never a penalty. I’ve seen others say they think it is.

Personally, I believe the handball rule desperately needs reform. If the ball touches your hand or your arm in the box, it should be a penalty full stop, regardless of intent, body shape or anything else. That would be fair, structured, and it would remove ambiguity entirely, and ambiguity is the core problem here.

Inside that ambiguity all sorts of things can fester.

Incompetence, obviously. Corruption too, though we all know that is something Scottish football refuses to confront seriously.

I repeat what I said on the podcast. My issue with the Easter Road decision is not simply that I believe it was wrong. It is knowing, deep down, that the same decision would never be given against the Ibrox club.

How do we know? Because we have watched it play out again and again. The same happened with the semi-final penalty situation. That decision never gets given against them.

That’s the problem with the handball rule as it stands.

There is enough doubt to give any corrupt motive an alibi, but not enough clarity to expose one. Some incidents are still blatantly obvious and yet go unpunished, which makes the whole thing even harder to swallow.

It amazes me that we don’t take any of this seriously in Scottish football. Bias-driven corruption is only one possible explanation, but it is one of several threats that should at least be acknowledged.

As someone who enjoys a bet, I can tell you this is a huge danger area. You can now gamble on almost anything in a match. Bookings. Penalties. Red cards. Yet week after week we watch decisions in Scottish football defy logic, and at times stretch beyond logic into outright disbelief. How can professionals who claim to understand the laws of the game fail so repeatedly and so spectacularly?

Every single week decisions leave supporters staring at the screen asking what the hell they’ve just watched. Some of that comes down to gross incompetence.

Some of it, though, points to something darker.

The failure to scrutinise decisions equally, fairly and without fear forms a huge part of the problem. Scottish football also stands alone in Europe by refusing to require referees to declare allegiances, and that only deepens legitimate suspicion.

Many of us have demanded that transparency for years and endured every insult under the sun simply for asking for a basic safeguard.

The so-called explanations offered for controversial incidents often float completely detached from reality. Look again at the Livingston example. Everyone on BBC Radio Scotland’s panel instantly recognised the incident as a penalty that should have been given.

The referee and the VAR team refused to award it, while the SFA rushed out a defence within minutes after the decision came under scrutiny on air. That explanation clashed so badly with the footage the presenters had just watched that they openly admitted it only muddied the waters.

So how does an SFA defence end up backing the decision while offering a justification that doesn’t even apply to the incident? That is pure circling of the wagons. They defend the officials before bothering to understand what actually happened.

Who from the SFA intervened with BBC Radio Scotland to provide that defence? It certainly wasn’t Willie Collum, because Collum later came out and confirmed what everyone already knew: it should have been a penalty. So not only were the officials on the day wrong, the SFA representative who publicly defended them was wrong too.

And how is it that pundits sitting in a studio understood the rules better than the SFA official? How did they understand them better than the VAR officials and the referee who reviewed the incident on the pitch?

That entire episode is fundamentally wrong. It stinks. There is something deeply suspect about all of it. Yet that is the kind of thing you simply are not allowed to say. The media asking none of these questions is a scandal of its own. They highlighted the incident, and the explanation but never dug too deep into why that defence was opened.

We all know if Celtic had benefited from the decision, that’s all we would have heard about for weeks.

We have to start demanding better across the board, not just from referees but from the media that covers them.

This game also need to ditch some troubling myths. The biggest one is the idea that Scottish officials are different from those elsewhere.

That they are better. That they are somehow morally purer.

This fantasy has survived far too long and it is dangerous.