The SFA should not have to defend every decision in Celtic’s favour.

Another week, and another refereeing decision which has the foot soldiers of the Ibrox fan forums and others up in arms.

Once again, though, the thing I find most unbelievable is not the argument itself, because the argument is nonsense. It is the fact that the SFA now seems to feel that it has to clarify another decision almost immediately after it happens, rather than wait for the media firestorm which it absolutely knows is coming.

A few seasons ago, I used to joke that you could set your watch by the Ibrox penalty because of how inevitable it felt during a game. Some people are now saying the most predictable thing in Scottish football is the Ibrox home cup draw after eleven in a row, with odds of 2,048 to one.

But I think the most predictable thing in Scottish football right now is this: a decision goes in Celtic’s favour, outrage follows, and the SFA has to come out almost immediately and explain why the decision was correct.

On one hand, I find that incredibly annoying. I do not like the idea that every decision Celtic gets has to be defended in public as though it is somehow inherently suspicious.

On the other hand, this may simply be a reflection of the reality we now live in, where a poisonous anti-Celtic and sometimes anti-SFA media narrative is always waiting to push the idea that we benefit from some unfair advantage.

If the SFA now feels almost obligated to protect the integrity of the game by clarifying these incidents as they happen, perhaps that is simply the way it has to be.

Over on the Ibrox fan forums, of course, they interpret the instant clarification as the SFA “getting the excuses out early.”

I mean, they could not be further from the truth if they were looking through a telescope from a thousand miles away.

As usual, they see something, misinterpret what they are seeing and then turn that misunderstanding into more fuel for the conspiracy theories.

What this actually represents is a governing body which knows perfectly well that every decision involving Celtic is going to be picked apart for days or weeks unless the explanation is immediate. You tell me which other club in Scotland so routinely has decisions in its favour explained away almost before the players are off the pitch.

It should not be like this. We should not be the only club where every decision in our favour generates endless media scrutiny over whether it was actually right.

This one was right. Even some of the hacks who desperately wanted a controversy have had to admit that it was technically correct.

And yet the same media ecosystem can still go hunting for somebody willing to contradict that conclusion. Today, former referee Bobby Madden is one of those voices, a guy distrusted by every Celtic fan of his generation as one of the most pro-Ibrox officials some of us have ever seen.

So, understand what is happening here.

Even when the SFA offers an immediate clarification setting out why a rule has been correctly interpreted and why the Laws of the Game have been followed, the media response is often to grudgingly accept that explanation with one hand while searching for somebody who will undermine it with the other. That is preposterous.

And listen to some of the voices now telling us that this decision differs from another decision in another game. But the first question is obvious: were the incidents actually the same under the law?

Because if they were not, then comparing them tells us nothing. Two separate incidents are not automatically identical simply because the ball touched an arm in both cases.

The factual context matters. The position of the arm matters. Whether the arm made the body unnaturally bigger matters. Whether the contact was accidental matters. Whether the player who handled the ball then scored himself matters.

Those distinctions exist because the law itself makes distinctions.

And yet Scottish football discourse constantly strips all of that context away and reduces incidents to something as stupidly simple as: there was a handball there and there was a handball here, therefore the outcomes must be identical.

No. That is not how rules work.

Imagine you watch two pieces of footage involving two separate shootings. In both, one person pulls a gun and another person gets shot. At the most superficial level, the events look similar. A plain text comparison would render them that the way.

But if in one case the other person drew a weapon first and was acting aggressively, the legal context changes completely. You cannot take two events, remove every relevant fact except the most obvious visual similarity and then insist that they must produce the same legal outcome. That would be absurd.

The same principle applies here.

If one player deliberately uses his arm to control or redirect the ball, while another simply suffers an accidental deflection from a position which is not punishable under the law, those are not the same incident. If one player has an arm extended in a way which makes his body unnaturally bigger and another has an arm in a position which the law specifically recognises as natural or justified by his movement, those are not the same incident either.

Treating them as identical is not just a gross oversimplification, it is an embarrassing one. But that is more and more what we have to tolerate here.

If you genuinely have two incidents which are materially the same – same relevant facts, same legal considerations, same sequence – and they are refereed to two different standards, then yes, one of those decisions is clearly wrong.

That is a legitimate issue. But then comes the next question: which one?

This is where some people tie themselves into knots.

If you were furious that an earlier goal was disallowed and argued that the handball was not punishable, then citing that same decision as proof that Celtic’s goal should now also have been disallowed makes no sense.

Your argument would be that the earlier decision was wrong. You cannot simultaneously use a decision you think was wrong as the standard by which the next decision must be judged.

Equally, if you believe the earlier decision was correct and the present one is wrong, then demonstrate that the incidents are materially identical and show where the law was applied differently. That is the argument. Not simply, “I saw a handball once and the goal was disallowed, so this one should be too.”

That is not analysis. That is pattern-matching without understanding. The current Celtic decision has now been explained within the context of the rules. If somebody can show me that the earlier incident was governed by the same facts and the same legal considerations and still produced the opposite outcome, then fine.

We have a consistency problem.

But if you cannot do that, then I am struggling to see what the controversy is supposed to be, except that some people appear to have a problem with Celtic getting decisions at all. And that, ultimately, is why the SFA now seems to be doing this in real time.

It knows what comes next.

It knows that when a major decision benefits Celtic, the incident will not simply be discussed for twenty minutes after the match and then disappear. It will be clipped, slowed down, compared with completely different incidents, put beside screenshots from games six months ago and fed through the Scottish football outrage machine until somebody has manufactured a conspiracy out of it.

So, Willie Collum’s department gets there first. Here is the decision. Here is the relevant law. Here is why it was applied. Here is why the comparison everybody is already making does not, in the SFA’s view, stand up.

And I admit that part of me hates that Celtic-related decisions apparently require this kind of instant legal defence.

I would much rather live in a football culture where a correct decision could simply be accepted as a correct decision without the governing body feeling compelled to issue something resembling an emergency explanation before the studio lights have cooled.

But perhaps we are beyond that now. Perhaps this is what transparency has to look like in Scottish football because the alternative is allowing misinformation to establish itself before the truth has even got its boots on. The atmosphere of hysterical narratives involving Celtic’s sinister control has gotten so out of hand that every alleged instance has to be hammered down right away, or we’d have weeks of discussion about it.

There is something a lot of people in this game have to get through their skulls; a decision you dislike is not necessarily a wrong decision. A decision which benefits Celtic is not automatically controversial. And a previous referee getting something wrong does not create a precedent requiring the next referee to get it wrong too.

Consistency does not mean repeating mistakes. Consistency means applying the same rules correctly. If somebody can demonstrate that the law was misapplied against Celtic, against Ibrox, against Falkirk or against anybody else, then let’s have that argument. Those are exactly the discussions VAR and the review process should encourage.

But if the law has been correctly applied and the entire complaint amounts to “I don’t like what happened because Celtic benefited,” then there is nothing left to debate.

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