Philippe Clement has backed up Ibrox Noise last week after confirming the rules of the game were badly implemented in Lisbon when John Souttar was wrongly penalised for a handball in the penalty area.

As Ibrox Noise explained last week, the rules of the game show that if a player heads the ball unintentionally onto his own arm in his own box, it isn’t a penalty, and in this case, not only was that the situation, but Souttar’s arm wasn’t even in an unnatural position, but was instead leveraged up by the defender’s shoulder.

Rangers fans at the time on Ibrox Noise channels agreed with the decision, comically enough, by claiming it hit his arm, showing the same failure with the rules the officials showed, and Clement has now publicly agreed that was an error.

He said:

“The first goal, it was a pity that I didn’t see that before the press conference but if you hit a ball with your head against your arm it’s not a penalty.”

Simple as.

Ibrox Noise was exasperated by this award, but did fear it being given simply because officials often don’t understand their own guidelines half the time.

The officials looked at VAR and decided it was worth the referee reviewing, and he agreed with them (of course he would) and gave the penalty.

Ibrox Noise posted a comment at the time that ‘how on earth was that a penalty’ with 90% of the replies saying ‘because it hit his arm’ and backing up the call. Indeed, this started getting aggressive against the post so we withdrew that comment.

Sadly, we knew this was a misunderstanding of the rule, and it’s the same one the officials made.

We’re not keen on the manager whining about officials, and in truth, he does it a lot, but on this occasion it was a pretty blatant misunderstanding by the officials and the fans of what happened.

Yeah, it wasn’t a penalty. So a non-penalty and an OG. Fortunate draw from Benfica to say the least.