The Celtic fans could foresee the John Beaton problem. Why didn’t the club?

Considering the scale of the mess at Celtic right now, you might think this is a pivot away from it so that we do not have to talk about our own failures anymore. It is not.

I want to talk about John Beaton and some of the decisions at the weekend precisely because they provide another example of what Celtic is getting wrong.

Everyone is talking about the challenge which should arguably have seen Fernandez, already on a yellow card, sent off.

But Beaton did not “miss” it. He saw it. We all saw it.

He simply decided that it did not merit another booking. But had the challenge been serious enough to warrant a straight red card, VAR could have intervened. It’s because it was a potential second yellow, that this option was not available.

That is precisely why the referee’s judgement mattered so much. And this is the point Celtic should have understood before the game even kicked off.

We knew who the referee was.

We knew the controversies which have surrounded his games involving Celtic before.

We knew VAR could not correct every decision.

And yet, once again, Celtic went into an important match without doing anything publicly to put the officiating under scrutiny beforehand.

This site warned about that.

Derek McInnes certainly understood the importance of it.

Before the Celtic Park game, he had already been talking publicly about refereeing decisions and about his club having raised concerns with the SFA over challenges on his players, including one involving Naderi at Ibrox the previous weekend.

Whatever anyone thinks of that tactic, it was well thought through. McInnes understood that referees operate inside an environment of pressure, scrutiny and expectation. He made sure that the officials knew his club would be watching.

Celtic did nothing. And that is what frustrates me.

This was not some surprise which suddenly appeared on matchday.

Weeks ago, when Celtic were winning games, we argued on this site that the club should have been making robust statements about officiating controversies which were happening in those games. That was precisely the time to do it.

Nobody could have accused Celtic of sour grapes. Nobody could have said we were simply deflecting from a defeat.

The club could have established, calmly and publicly, that certain decisions were being noticed and that Celtic expected consistency.

Instead, silence.

Let me make something absolutely clear; Celtic did not lose at the weekend because of John Beaton. We lost because we were dreadful. We were negative. We created too little. We played badly in every area of the pitch.

Everything we have been discussing about the coaching, the tactics and the structure of this team remains true.

Would Celtic have had a better chance of winning against ten men? Obviously.

But if one refereeing decision can have such an enormous impact on the outcome, then part of the responsibility lies with us for allowing the match to become that marginal in the first place. Beyond the football itself, there is the strategic failure.

Celtic had every opportunity to be ahead of this issue. We knew the referee. We knew the context. We knew the recent controversies. We knew the Ibrox club had already begun applying pressure. We still allowed them to set the terms of the conversation.

That is the part which matters to me.

Because when you wonder why people doubt Celtic’s ability to think strategically in recruitment, football operations, communications and management, this is another small example of the same problem.

Something obvious was sitting directly in front of us, and we either did not see it or chose not to act on it.

There was a time when a Celtic manager would not have allowed an important game against the Ibrox club to arrive without putting some public pressure on the officials first. Not by demanding favourable decisions. Not by inventing conspiracies.

Simply by making it clear that Celtic was paying attention.

That did not happen, and it is another reason I wonder where Martin O’Neill’s head is right now. It goes without saying that I have some sympathy for him. From everything we hear, Celtic Park is not a particularly happy workplace at the moment. There is anger, mistrust and lingering resentment over what happened during the summer.

Anyone working under those conditions is going to miss things. Concentration suffers. Motivation suffers, and mistakes are made.

But it is still remarkable to me that McInnes was the manager who understood the importance of setting the refereeing narrative before these games.

Beaton is a known quantity in Scottish football. Supporters know what sort of controversy can accompany his appointments.

That does not mean every decision he makes is wrong.

It does mean Celtic should understand that relying on VAR to protect us from every contentious call is ridiculous, because VAR simply cannot intervene in many of the moments which shape a football match. Second yellow cards are one example.

But there are dozens of others.

A referee can stop a game after a 50-50 challenge. He can allow another one to continue. He can decide where the threshold for a booking sits. He can award or deny free-kicks in dangerous areas. He can allow one team’s rhythm to develop while repeatedly interrupting the other. None of those decisions necessarily triggers VAR.

Yet collectively they can influence the entire feel of a match.

That is why smart football clubs try to influence the environment around referees before major games. McInnes and his club did. Celtic did not.

And once again, the frustrating thing is not that something unpredictable happened to us. It is that something entirely predictable happened after we had already identified the risk and then failed to get ahead of it.

That has become an exhausting theme of this season.

The problem is not simply that Celtic keeps getting things wrong. It is that we keep getting things wrong which we had every opportunity to fix when it became obvious they were going to create an issue.

John Beaton did not cost Celtic the game.

Celtic did that perfectly well for itself.

But our failure to recognise and manage an obvious refereeing risk before the game is another example of a club which has stopped thinking two moves ahead.

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