SFA’s embarrassing apologies are now filling Rangers’ trophy room | OneFootball

Well, it’s official. Rangers will receive yet another apology from the VAR team, after their mistake helped Celtic win yet another trophy.

This apology will now be put in the Rangers Trophy Room, along with the countless others we have received over the years.

But, I’m guessing most don’t want another meaningless apology. What we need are concrete changes.

And one change we need to make is to make sure those responsible for this will never get to manage another Rangers Celtic match.

Here there is no conspiracies. As IN readers know, I like numbers and I also like to look at cold hard facts, and here the facts are crystal clear.

If those in charge of VAR cannot be arsed to look at a potential penalty, then there are no conspiracies. The match officials are just showing us, by their own actions, that they cannot be trusted to manage this type of game.

And with so many decisions going against us over the last several years, I think it is also now fair to start saying there is a structural bias in the way decisions keep going against Rangers and to also acknowledge these decisions do dramatically help Celtic, at critical moments in these matches.

OK, before anyone starts screaming conspiracy theory, again this is just a simple cold hard fact.

When either a match is clearly going Celtic’s way, or the match is no longer important in terms of either Celtic winning the league or a cup, I just cannot recall any controversial decisions ever being made, at least not in the last several years.

Almost all these meaningless matches go very smoothly. There are no offside goals for Celtic, there are no strange decisions made that result in a Rangers goal being ruled out, and the VAR staff don’t go back over 10 minutes of the prior game to see if there is a foul that can be used to offset some advantage Rangers may have gained.

As all Rangers supporters know, the “crazy” decisions only seem to arise in the matches where Celtic are having a very difficult time and the match is important, either in terms of winning the league, or winning a cup.

That is just a simple fact.

And just to remind everyone, in this game against Celtic, not only were we denied a clear penalty, but there were two other key decisions that gave Celtic an unfair advantage.

Now I am not a referee, but I thought the rule of the game was if a player other than the penalty taker of the goal keeper enters the box before the ball is struck the penalty kick has to be retaken.

This rule is important, because in two of Celtic’s penalties (these being PK 1 and PK 3), the Celtic goalkeeper entered the box before the ball had been struck, and in PK 3 he was even waving his arms as he was walking directly towards the goal in an obvious attempt to distract Butland. OK, as a quick refresher, for those who might not understand what I am talking about, do you remember in Europe, our opponents had to retake their missed penalty. This was because one of their own players had stepped into the box…. now we thought this rule was crazy at the time, but that is the rule of the game, and unfortunately in that match we could not save the penalty twice.

So, with John Beaton deciding it was OK for the Celtic goalkeeper to waltz into the box while waving his arms, it now seems there is one rule in football for when the penalty is scored against Rangers (in this case it is perfectly OK for any player to enter the penalty box, and the rule book needs to be ignored). BUT, when the penalty is saved by Rangers, then clearly any encroachment has to be considered important, and the penalty needs to be retaken, as per the rules of the game, and because I have not seen anything to argue against this, I suppose these two contradictory rules need to continue until the opponent has scored the goal? Or is that a conspiracy theory?

Anyway, the cold hard facts, which are obtained by just using our own eyes, show the rules of the game were being ignored when it benefited Celtic and they are being enforced when it hindered Rangers and if you feel you need to disagree with me, feel free to do so. In this Cup match, there was not just one bad decision, there were at least three bad decisions, and all three clearly benefited Celtic.

And with these undeniable facts, this means it is now justified to start questioning if some referees and some VAR officials have a bias against Rangers, and is it possible they might be actively trying to help Celtic win games. Again, this is not a conspiracy. It is again just a simple observation, a hypothesis, and one that can be easily made from all the facts that are right in front of us.

I cannot speak for everyone, but I no longer want to hear the SFA’s meaningless apologies, especially when there are some in the SFA who will be quietly gloating and laughing as they say it.

Instead, I think we need to demand that when the referees and the VAR officials show, by their own actions, that they are incapable of handling their duties, the SFA must create an independent tribunal and, if the decision is made by the tribunal, then they should be banned from officiating any future Celtic Rangers games.

When fifty million is at play for winning the league (well, it was last season, we’ve lost our UCL auto spot now), we need to demand better.

We also need to demand that we hear what the VAR officials are saying, in real time; and we need to have access to the discussions between the VAR room and the referee.

And if all these changes do not work, and we are still being let down by bad decisions, we need to demand the use of referees from other leagues.

In my view, we have given the referees, the VAR officials, and the SFA long enough.

These bad decisions affect more than the fans. These bad decisions affect the livelihood of the players. Players, who we should remember, have only 10 years to earn some serious money.

So, am I wrong? Or do we need to make some long-needed changes?