We played devil’s advocate last night with a debate on our FB page when we asked if Rangers were in the right over the Kevin Clancy letter given Rangers fans have long attacked Celtic for their paranoia about refereeing.
The response was largely in favour of the club’s actions, but there were quite a few disappointed at us ‘stooping’ to the level of our opponents in writing letters and pressuring authorities.
What we will say for sure is the standard of refereeing in this country can be apoplectically bad at times, and Clancy is certainly guilty of that.
We do wonder if our complaints would have been as vigorous had we won that match though, and more to the point, why we hadn’t complained about Clancy’s performances in previous matches which hadn’t cost us points.
This is not to attack the club for sticking up for itself – let’s face it, Rangers don’t stand up for themselves anywhere near enough, and this was an act of aggression to protest against the conduct of the man in the middle on Friday.
His laugh and joke with Scott Brown seems to have stirred the hive, to say the least.
But we must also be careful that we don’t become as bad as those we hate and that we pick the right fights to face.
Clancy is an awful ref, but it worked both ways – he appeared to deny Aberdeen a win too, by denying a penalty or two, and there were decisions which benefited either side, whether they were wrong or not.
Are Rangers speaking for Scotland when we complain about Clancy, or ourselves?
If it’s for ourselves, then it’s questionable why we’ve only gone this route now given we’ve suffered years of bad refereeing.
Then again, we openly mock Celtic fans over their paranoia (or is it?) that Rangers get so many penalties, by emphasising any penalty we get as being a meme against the east.
There’s silliness on both sides with this, and we’d hate to see football reduced to strongly-worded letters complaining about bad refereeing.
The sooner VAR is in the SPL the better, but until then, bad refereeing is here to stay, whether it’s Clancy, John Beaton or anyone else.
Glancy’s inconsistencies worked both ways, however the fact that his assistants failed to draw his attention to some incidents is a major concern.
As for VAR; from what I’ve seen in other leagues it does seem to cause more problems than it solves.
I guess I’m in the why bother camp but then again you see Celtic do it regularly and it usually results in decisions going their way in subsequent games. Clancy did deny Aberdeen a penalty but surely that just illustrates the point that he is an awful referee. 9 yellow cards with hardly a bad tackle in the whole game and the main agitator of anything bad walks off the pitch having a laugh and a joke with him.
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