Willie Collum cannot just waffle his way through what happened to Celtic in Paisley.

Last night, one of those lamentable fakes was being passed around Celtic social media, purporting to be a statement from the SFA apologising to Celtic for mistakes made in the game at the weekend.

It was very obviously not real, not least because it apologised for an incident involving a goal which had been chopped off without actually stipulating which of the two disallowed Celtic goals it was talking about.

There is a whole community of dickheads out there whose entire thing seems to be creating fake statements and posting them online in the hope that they go viral.

I genuinely do not understand the point.

Is it fame? Because unless you put your name to it, you are not famous. Is it just to annoy people? Because that makes you a sad bastard, doesn’t it?

There really is no explanation for why people do this which does not make them sound like deeply tragic individuals and I just wanted to get that out of the way before getting to the actual point of this piece.

And the point is what happens next in the case of those two decisions.

Because we are not going to have to wait forever.

Willie Collum is going to have to address what happened at Paisley, and when he does, he is going to have to explain two decisions which have generated a lot of perfectly legitimate questions.

Mark Clattenburg has already weighed in, as though his status as a former elite referee somehow settles the matter, and essentially told people to trust the officials.

No. We do not have to do that. Nobody has to suspend their own judgement because a former referee tells them everything is probably fine.

Officials in Scotland make mistakes. VAR in Scotland has limitations. And the system we operate is demonstrably not good enough to justify blind faith.

That is the real issue.

Martin O’Neill’s comment about crooked lines was not simply some emotional reaction to one isolated incident. It reflected a wider frustration with VAR decisions which often look baffling to supporters and which are then explained, if they are explained at all, in language which feels designed more to close the subject than illuminate it.

Collum is going to have to do better than that.

He is going to have to explain the Camilo Duran decision in particular because footage doing the rounds online appears to raise a very obvious question about the frame used to determine the offside. If the images supporters are circulating are accurate (and of course they are; they are taken from Sky’s own footage), Duran appears to be onside at the moment Yang plays the ball.

The frame shown for the offside determination appears to come after the ball has already started moving and offside is judged at the moment the ball is played.

Not a fraction later. Not when VAR officials feel the lines should be. At the moment the ball is played. So, if the wrong frame was used, that is not a marginal judgement call. That is a technical failure in the decision-making process.

And Collum has to explain it.

The second disallowed goal raises a different question.

The VAR system was unable to provide the normal automated or calibrated offside lines, and referee Ryan Lee was instead sent to the monitor to make a visual judgement on Shumaira Mheuka’s position. That is extraordinary in itself.

The whole point of VAR is supposed to be that it gives officials access to evidence superior to what they had in real time. If the technology fails and the evidence is not conclusive, then why are we overturning the original on-field decision?

That is the question which has to be answered in that case.

Now, it may be that Collum produces an explanation which satisfies everybody. It may be that there is footage we have not seen. It may be that the officials followed the protocol exactly as written. Fine. Then show us. Explain it.

Walk people through it properly.

Because “trust the officials” is not an answer. It is a demand for obedience. And Scottish football has not earned that level of trust. Not remotely.

The VAR Review programme has effectively become the SFA’s public voice on these incidents. That means it matters. But it also has limitations. Collum is not generally subjected to the kind of live, adversarial questioning which would force him to defend every detail of a controversial decision in real time.

He gets to explain decisions in a controlled format. That makes transparency even more important. If the SFA concludes that either of these calls was wrong, then saying so is only the beginning.

We are getting nothing back from it. We won the game. We have the three points. Even if we had dropped points, there would be no mechanism for replaying the match or restoring what might have been lost.

That is not how football works. So in circumstances like these, all you can reasonably ask for is honesty about what happened, a clear explanation of how it happened, and evidence that lessons are actually being learned.

That last part matters most. Because if the Duran decision turns out to have been based on the wrong frame, that is an egregious error. If the Mheuka decision turns out to have been overturned despite inconclusive evidence after the technology failed, that raises another serious procedural question.

And if mistakes of that seriousness are made, there have to be consequences.

I am not talking about public humiliation.

I am not talking about referees being marched through the streets with placards around their necks. I am talking about professional accountability. Officials are making decisions in matches involving multi-million-pound businesses. Bad decisions can affect league positions. They can affect European qualification. They can affect prize money.

They can affect careers. They can get managers sacked. They can alter the trajectory of entire seasons. That is not melodrama. That is simply the financial and sporting reality of professional football.

So, it is not enough to say, “Well, nobody died and Celtic won anyway.”

That misses the point completely.

The danger does not disappear because this particular mistake, if it was a mistake, did not change the result. If anything, this is exactly the right time to deal with it. We won. There is no sour grapes argument. There is no accusation that we are simply looking for an excuse. There is no need to pretend that this cost Celtic anything tangible. It did not.

But the next one might. That is why the process matters.

If there are no meaningful consequences for serious officiating mistakes, then there is no meaningful accountability. And if there is no accountability, what exactly is the incentive for standards to improve? Referees and VAR officials should not exist in some consequence-free bubble when nobody else in professional football does.

Players lose their places. Managers lose their jobs. Executives get removed, or at least they should. Coaches get scrutinised. Clubs lose money. Supporters pay the price.

Why should officials be the only people in that ecosystem for whom a major error simply becomes an unfortunate talking point before everybody moves on?

There should be a proper internal performance process. There almost certainly is one. But if the SFA wants supporters to trust that process, then there has to be greater transparency around it. If an official gets a major call badly wrong, tell us the call was wrong. Tell us why. Tell us what part of the process failed. Then tell us what has been done to reduce the chances of it happening again.

If that means an official is removed from VAR duty for a period, say so. If it means retraining, say so. If it means a formal performance mark against them, say so. We do not need every internal HR detail. But “lessons have been learned” without explaining what those lessons are is just corporate wallpaper.

And Scottish football has had enough wallpaper.

This is really what we are asking for at the end of the day. Accountability. Not conspiracy theories. Not fake SFA statements written by bored idiots online. Not demands that we simply trust the people in charge. Accountability.

If the officials got these calls right, explain why they were right. If they got them wrong, admit it. If the technology failed, tell us exactly how. If the process failed, fix it.

And if individuals made serious errors, there should be professional consequences for those errors. That is not vindictive. That is how standards improve.

Willie Collum has spent a lot of time talking about transparency since taking charge of refereeing. Good. This is where that promise gets tested.

Because when he addresses Paisley, Celtic supporters do not need waffle. They do not need soothing language. They do not need to be told to trust the process. They need the process explained. And if the process failed, they need to know what happens next.

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