Goodwin wants common sense. Celtic prefer what’s in the rulebook.

Jim Goodwin will never be my favourite manager, but he is not a bad guy and I don’t really have anything against him. So, when I offer a critique of his comments in the aftermath of yesterday’s game, I don’t want this to seem more personal or more hostile than it actually is.

I wrote a piece last night called Shit, Shinola And VAR, which I could simply have left as the final statement on people questioning yesterday’s decisions. But that was aimed at the real dummies, the people who either cannot understand the explanations or have absolutely no interest in doing so. Goodwin is different. He gets it.

He is reacting in frustration to something which happened to his team, which is perfectly understandable. But his argument is still pretty ridiculous for all that.

Goodwin says that when it comes to decisions like the one which allowed Celtic’s second goal, he would prefer officials to use “common sense.”

Which sounds nice. But give me the wording in the rule book every single time.

If the choice is between what is actually written in the laws of the game and somebody’s personal conception of common sense, I will take what’s in the manual.

I have tried using common sense when building things before. That is usually how you finish with a crucial component upside down and three screws left over because you decided you didn’t need the instructions.

What Goodwin really means, of course, is individual interpretation. And the whole reason VAR was introduced was because football had spent decades complaining about individual interpretation.

Individual interpretation would have chopped off Celtic’s title-winning second goal against the club from Tynecastle. There were people who would have argued that it was simply “common sense” that the Celtic player standing in an offside position when the original ball was played meant the goal could not stand.

Except that is not how the law works. The relevant question is whether the player who subsequently becomes involved is offside at the moment the ball which reaches him is played. Maeda wasn’t. That’s the rule. I do not want football games refereed according to somebody’s vague feeling about what looks right.

Goodwin also says that no club would want to concede a goal like that, which I am sure is correct. I don’t think any club particularly wants to concede goals of any description. If you polled managers on whether they would prefer the opposition to score or not score, I suspect the results would be fairly conclusive.

I have nothing against the guy, but this is part of a wider pattern in Scottish football. Goodwin is hardly the first person to suggest that the rules should somehow cease to matter because he doesn’t happen to like their implementation on a particular afternoon.

Ally McCoist has done it repeatedly in commentary. He has openly railed against rules he doesn’t think should exist. Fine. He is perfectly entitled to think they are bad rules. But they do exist. And every team is governed by them.

What is the alternative to following the rules?

It is not common sense. It is anarchy. It is wild variation between one referee’s interpretation and another’s. It is one decision being made one way on Saturday and an identical incident being treated completely differently on Sunday because two people have different definitions of what “common sense” requires. That is precisely why rules exist in the first place. So that everyone is held to the same standard.

There will inevitably be people saying, “Yes, but such-and-such a team would never have been given that decision.”

You know what? Let’s say that’s true. When that happens, I will stand beside you and say it is wrong. But the argument then will be that the rule is not being applied correctly, and the second you make that case you concede the whole point to those of us who are pointing out that this one was. So be careful what you wish for.

This is the same kind of nonsense we occasionally hear from journalists invoking concepts like “natural justice.” Where is natural justice in the laws of the game?

Show me the section. It does not exist.

You will notice that Martin O’Neill has been discussing Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain apparently having a European suspension carried over from his Arsenal days. Martin is disappointed that this has only just become apparent, but he is not demanding that UEFA ignore the regulation because applying it feels unfair.

We heard precisely the opposite argument when Derek McInnes faced disciplinary consequences relating to comments made while he was at Hearts. People argued that because the comments related to his previous employment, common sense or fairness somehow dictated that the consequences should not follow him.

Again: show me that in the rules.

Every now and then you will be watching golf, snooker or another individual sport and something apparently ridiculous happens.

A golfer accidentally moves a ball. A player touches something he should not touch. A snooker player leaning over the table clips a ball unintentionally.

Nobody watching thinks that was what the competitor intended to do.

Nobody imagines it was some clever tactical manoeuvre.

But the rule is clear. A penalty follows. We could all sit around saying, “Come on, use some common sense. He obviously didn’t mean it.”

We don’t though. And nor should we.

I’ve been betting online and put the wrong bet on; I lost one yesterday afternoon because I accidently put 1.5 under on instead of 1.5 over. My old man did the same; he took 3.5 goals on one line when every other line had 2.5 on it. Imagine trying to make the bookies see your point of view on that one. I have never bet under 1.5 in my life; why would I? Watching a game and wanted there to be less goals in it?

But nobody is going to void a bet for you on that basis.

Because thinks don’t work like that. Because the second you start creating exceptions on “common sense” grounds, everyone wants an exception whenever the rules produce an outcome they dislike.

The two decisions Goodwin is talking about from yesterday’s game have been explained.

The relevant rules existed before kick-off. They were not inserted into the book after Celtic scored. Nobody hastily wrote a new paragraph because Dundee United was threatening to get something from the match.

For once, it appears that the officials knew exactly what the relevant regulations said and applied them accordingly. I’m sorry if that inconveniences people. Losing that bet yesterday certainly inconvenienced me.

I’m sorry if the outcome doesn’t look right to someone or doesn’t satisfy their instinctive conception of fairness.

But tell me where fairness lies in overruling the written rules in favour of somebody else’s idea of common sense. Whose common sense? Goodwin’s? Mine? Ally McCoist’s? The referee’s? The guy sitting in row Z after six pints?

This is why we have rules and it is tiresome having to go through the same debate every time a decision goes in a direction certain people in Scottish football or the media do not like. And remarkably often, these great philosophical discussions about fairness, justice and the spirit of the game seem to erupt when a decision benefits Celtic or hurts the Ibrox club.

The Hibs penalty incident is another obvious example. By the rule as it was explained, the decision was clear. Yet a week later people are still arguing about whether it was just, whether it was fair and whether it somehow offended the spirit of football.

What remarkably few people are willing to argue was whether the law itself had actually been applied correctly.

Because once you concede that it was, the argument is over.

If you dislike the rule, campaign to change the rule.

That is perfectly legitimate. But you don’t get to rewrite it retrospectively because you disliked Sunday’s scoreline.

Some people are already saying this season has started the way the last one finished, with “controversial decisions” somehow benefiting Celtic. But they are only controversial because people are determined to make controversies out of them.

If somebody can show me where, according to the laws of the game, one of these decisions was actually wrong, then they deserve a hearing. If the argument is simply that the correct decision looked funny, felt unfair or offended somebody’s preferred outcome, then there isn’t much of an argument at all.

I understand managers being bitter immediately after games. I understand them disliking how particular incidents have unfolded.

But this is precisely why rules exist. We need an agreed framework. We need a common set of regulations. Otherwise, football becomes nothing more than a collection of individual opinions about what somebody thinks should have happened.

I have gone up and down the roller coaster with VAR.

When it was first introduced, I was one of those who believed it could become a great leveller. I thought it would make it much harder for officials to produce some of the egregious, inexplicable and occasionally disgraceful decisions we had watched in Scottish football for decades.

There have certainly been moments when I wondered whether I was wrong. VAR has been frustrating. The people operating it have sometimes been appalling. There have been terrible decisions.

But the officials are now operating under greater scrutiny, and since Willie Collum took over as head of refereeing there have been obvious attempts to improve standards, increase transparency and review decisions properly.

At this point, I am a VAR net-positive guy. I have now seen too many critical decisions corrected by the technology which almost certainly would have remained wrong without it. That doesn’t mean VAR officials in Scotland cannot still be dreadful. They absolutely can, and we will undoubtedly see dreadful decisions again.

But there is far greater scrutiny now. Officials increasingly have to justify decisions against written regulations and established interpretations, and I suspect that is difficult for some people in Scottish football to adjust to because they grew up in an era where the guy in the middle had enormous autonomy.

One referee. One interpretation. One decision.

Very little meaningful scrutiny afterwards.

VAR does not eliminate incompetence or bias. No system run by human beings ever will. What it does is create another layer of scrutiny and another requirement for decisions to be justified against the laws of the game.

And that should be the starting point for every controversy.

Show me the rule. Show me where the officials departed from it. Show me where the interpretation was wrong. Do that and we have an actual honest-to-god controversy, and maybe even a legitimate scandal, on our hands.

Otherwise, we are back to feelings, conspiracy theories, “natural justice” and somebody’s personal definition of what “common sense” looks like.

And I won’t accuse Jim Goodwin of any of the more hysterical stuff. I don’t think he’s engaging in paranoid conspiratorial claptrap. I think he’s frustrated that a perfectly legitimate goal went against his team. I understand that.

But he’s still talking rubbish.

And when the choice is between Jim Goodwin’s common sense and the actual laws of the game, I’ll take the rule book every time.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.