Rangers fans are this morning divided over Michael Beale’s decision to give Partick Thistle a ‘free’ goal, and Ibrox Noise is disappointed with those being critical and especially bringing out the ‘what if it was against them’ clause.

We’re going to go into this in some depth so if you’re one of those raging with him, and bringing in the ‘cup final’ fallacy, we’ll try to make the rationale for you.

Can we first of all say there is no debate here – there is no ‘was he right or not’ in this – he was, without any hint of this being the wrong thing to do, and those who bring in ‘would he do it v them’ or ‘no one would do it for us’ or ‘what if we’d lost this match’ have truly lost sight of sportsmanship and what it is to be a decent sportsperson. Which makes us sad.

First things first – measuring this against any other fictional scenario as some fans are doing is invalid. Bringing in conditions and clauses is just vacuous and bitter, it’s small-minded, and is a stain on what the legacy of being a dignified Ranger is meant to be. We’re supposed to be more gracious than that.

We even had to ban an elderly fan who came flying into the site’s private messaging system to abuse us for our stance on this. Asked us if we were even Rangers fans, when he should be asking that of himself.

The reality is 100% if Partick had scored the same goal Tillman had (we know, bringing in a fictional scenario ourselves now eh), our fans would be seething livid and would be deeply praising Ian McCall’s sportsmanship the other way around. Tillman was wrong. He was naïve and 100% wrong.

He took advantage of a situation and scored a goal when the right thing was to let them return the play. The initial foul DOES NOT MATTER. Sportsmanship and the right thing to do does – it always has in football, and we’ve seen our fans boo opponents who don’t put the ball out of play for our injured player, due to that lack of sportsmanship. If you still fume and rage at this one then there’s no hope for you and you might as well leave this article mouthing ‘who wrote this p*sh’ to yourself.

The real issue, indeed, was Tillman actually putting Beale in the situation that he had a call to make – Tillman has rather been let off the hook here, and he is only a young boy so that’s not the end of the world.

But Beale? 100% in the correct. It’s basic sportsmanship, and if your face is now going red with outrage and you’re still invoking the fallacies from the start of this article, and telling us we’re idiots, there’s no reasoning with it or you.

We could well have not won that match – but you know what? The free goal would have been an excuse, because we not only missed a penalty, but we were horrendous. Had we gone out the cup, it would have been ourselves to blame because we were so poor.

As it happened, we didn’t – once again Beale won, as Beale does. He got the whole match wrong AND sportingly gave Partick a free goal, AND we missed a penalty, and STILL won.

So, it all worked out.

But sportsmanship?

100% bang on, and we hope Tillman learns something from this.

EDIT: we’ve had a lot of comments quoting Beale’s post-match absolvement of Tillman saying ‘he didn’t see’ what happened. With all due respect to those who have mentioned it, Rangers were static and waiting for the ball to be returned, while Thistle’s backline was the same. The player who had the ball robbed was clearly about to boot it forward, so for Tillman to think everything was normal remains the naivette on his part we discussed. We’re certainly not blaming Tillman, but he was far from streetwise on this occasion, even without knowledge.