More "Honest Mistakes" I don't think so !!!

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Joe O'Rourke
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More "Honest Mistakes" I don't think so !!!

Postby Joe O'Rourke » Mon Dec 01, 2014 1:50 pm

There are many things wrong with Scottish Football, including lack of sponsorship, loss of interest with supporters, poor facilities at many grounds, but maybe one of the worst is the standard of refereeing.

For many years the Celtic supporters have felt cheated by some decisions given against our team, and in particular when playing against the team once known as Rangers, and there is plenty of evidence to back up that theory.

There are also certain referees who seem to court controversy when officiating at Celtic matches, indeed a couple of referees have had to resign in recent years through their actions with regards to Celtic FC.

But let’s look at the matches played at Tynecastle in the last two weekends. Last week the match was handled by a referee with vast experience Craig Thomson, so any decisions made by him would not have been done through being nervous.

Although i never watched the whole match i did see the highlights on television. There were a number of contentious decisions, but the most obvious ones were the ones concerning tackles made by the very experienced Kenny Miller and Kris Boyd.

I have to say to my untrained referee eyes i thought both tackles merited red cards, but obviously both players only received yellow cards, in fact Mr Thomson was quite quick to issue the yellow cards, of course there can be no follow up with video evidence if a yellow card has been issued. But Mr McCoist obviously recognised what had happened by substituting Miller before he committed any more bad tackles.

There is also an argument that Ian Black should also have received a second yellow card for the tackle which resulted in Hearts getting awarded a penalty, although i thought the tackle wasn’t the worst committed that day.

There are also further ramifications of a red card, like missing the next match, so there was a possibility that Sevco would have played against Kilmarnock in the Scottish Cup yesterday without the services of Smith, Miller, Boyd, and Black, we’ll never know how that could have turned out.

As for yesterday at Tynecastle, we had Willie Collum as the referee; i don’t think there has been a match involving Celtic and refereed by Collum which did not have at least one controversial incident.

There were at least three incidents yesterday which deserve comment. The first was the red card shown to Hearts captain Morgaro Gomis, apart from Robbie Neilson, i think everyone agreed that Collum called it right, Neilson claimed the tackles the previous week by Miller and Boys were worse, and he is spot on; they were worse and should have resulted in red cards as well.

The second incident was the penalty awarded to Celtic when John Guidetti slipped, Collum got that one wrong, it was a slip and no contact was made by the Hearts defender, so it was not a penalty, in fact to make matters worse Johansen and McKay received yellow cards because of the wrong decision.

The third incident was the disallowed goal by Kris Commons, again Collum got it wrong, Alexander let the ball slip from his grasp and Commons rightly scored, there was no foul on the goalkeeper so the goal should have stood.

Writing about referees and Celtic could involve a lifetime of work, we all remember the “Honest Mistakes”, and in nearly sixty years of watching Celtic i don’t remember a time when it wasn’t an issue. We don’t want preferential treatment, we just want honest decisions, and we recognise that from time to time referees will make mistakes, but as long as they are “Honest Mistakes” we won’t have a problem.

The question is this; did both Thomson and Collum just have an off day and make genuine mistakes? Or did one or both of them make decisions that they knew were wrong but suited whatever agenda they had? I know what i think, what about you?

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