Celtic suffered another VAR shocker last night. We can’t brush this off.

Regular readers may have noticed with some surprise that last night I did not bother to mention the goal Celtic scored which was chopped off. I did that very deliberately, because it deserved a piece of its own and I did not want to refer to it merely as a passing incident.

I said in the piece last night that Hassan was superb, and I thought that he was. I mentioned the fact that he got the assist and almost got a goal from Kasper’s lay-off, but we all know that wasn’t the only thing he did over the course of the game.

Last night we were treated to a proper show of incompetence, if that is the word we are using, from that particular assistant referee.

There was a point when one of our players got clear and hit his shot at the keeper, only for the flag to go up. Sutton said that the decision had been close. Well, from where I was watching, it wasn’t close. There was nothing close about it. When the ball is played, our player looks clearly onside. That was a shocker. Knocking off the goal was a shocker.

So, I don’t know whether that guy simply couldn’t see it, whether he was having a terrible night or what was going through his head, but he made contentious decisions several times in the game. Those two were not even especially difficult calls.

They were the sort of decisions any official should want to get right, and he seemed determined to make a mess of them.

The decision which ultimately denied Hassan his goal was a disgrace, pure and simple. The assistant ruled that Sebastian Tounekti’s cross had gone out of play before Kasper Høgh headed it back across the box for Hassan to finish.

VAR checked it but could not overturn the on-field decision because the ball had gone out of the available camera frame at the decisive moment.

That explanation is nowhere near good enough.

Again, it shows the limitations of VAR. Again, it shows that we need some form of technology which is better than the current system. The idea that because the ball was out of the camera frame there was no way to establish conclusively whether the whole ball had crossed the line is technically the reason the decision stood, but that only exposes the weakness of the system itself.

No one watching the replays could look at that incident and come away feeling reassured about the standard of officiating or the technology being used to support it. Sky’s own pundits were split on whether the available pictures were sufficient to overturn the call, while Chris Sutton described the decision as baffling.

It was more than that. The explanation insults our intelligence. I am appalled that this is just going to be passed over. That decision was disgusting.

And this comes only days after the St Mirren game, when Celtic again had goals caught up in VAR controversy. In that match, Camilo Duran had one ruled out after an unclear offside frame, while Shim Mheuka later had a goal disallowed when the usual automated offside lines were unavailable and the referee had to make the decision manually.

So, the explanations are not literally identical, but the theme is. Once again, we are being told that the technology either could not show the decisive moment properly or could not provide the normal assistance needed to settle it.

That is shocking. Both of those games were tight. Both of those games could have resulted in us dropping points, and Martin O’Neill was quite right after last night’s game to point out that we should have finished the job ourselves. We should not be relying on officials making good calls to get us out of trouble.

But when the officiating and the technology keep giving us reasons not to trust that the big call will be made correctly, that’s not something we can afford to ignore.

And then we look across at Ibrox.

For the second game in a row, a major contentious decision went in their favour. Dujon Sterling was booked in the second half against St Mirren, and the incident immediately sparked arguments over whether the punishment should have been more severe.

The BBC report on the Ibrox game said that he might have gotten a red “on another day.” I’ll go you one better; he’d definitely have got a red in another shirt.

What it brought back to mind for me was the Auston Trusty sending-off against Hearts earlier this year. Trusty was initially shown a yellow before VAR intervened and the card was upgraded to red for denying an obvious goalscoring opportunity, even though O’Neill argued that the attacker was moving away from goal and Celtic had a covering defender. Former referee Dermot Gallagher also called the dismissal harsh.

That is the comparison which sticks in my head when I watch similar situations being treated differently. And what is becoming clear when you watch the way decisions have fallen over the last couple of games, against us and in favour of the Ibrox club, is that this is going to be a very different season.

The way last season ended, with all the controversy and all the allegations that Celtic had somehow been handed the league title, was always going to create a poisonous atmosphere around officiating this year. My fear was that officials would become hyper-conscious of those accusations and that Celtic could end up paying the price for them.

This raises obvious concerns going into the weekend. We have seen calls go against us in recent days, and we have seen calls at Ibrox which have caused their own controversy. If the next week and a half continues in that vein, it could be a very long one.

Look, we won the game last night, just as we won at the weekend. But as I always say, that is exactly the time to complain.

The problem is that we have a guy in the dugout right now who does not naturally want to complain about officials. You can already see the direction of travel here, though, and he has to be prepared to challenge it before we suffer a serious reversal from a decision he can no longer ignore.

The assistant referee last night had a poor game. He was involved in two major calls which Celtic supporters were entitled to question, and that’s the generous way of talking about them. I’m not going to be generous. Either he needs his eyes checked or we might have to conclude he’s suffering another affliction.

The SFA and the broadcasters can hide behind the technical explanation that VAR lacked conclusive footage, but that explanation does not make the underlying problem disappear. If your system repeatedly cannot give you the information required to settle major incidents, then the system is failing.

We should have been seeking clarity after the weekend’s game.

We should definitely be seeking it after this one. And the fact that we won both games makes our case stronger, not weaker.

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