Rangers fans have launched a campaign and petition to have an investigation carried out into perceived cheating by Scottish referees. Ibrox Noise has been asked on more than one occasion to share this petition and Rangers fans launch petition for change.
Ibrox Noise does not endorse this petition. This may have us being accused of being Tims, as we often are when we disagree with something that somebody else wants, but our perception, which is backed up by many, is that Celtic did not cheat.
Celtic did not cheat and the referees did not cheat, so we do not back that up.
Pressure and influence in Scottish football
What we do believe is that Celtic are far, far better at intimidating and criticising referees and putting pressure on them.
This is something that Rangers were good at in the 90s. Back in the days of Walter Smith, Rangers were much better at getting their way in the press and in the boardrooms by putting pressure on the officials at the top.
Celtic have been by far the best at this over the last decade and a half, and it has benefited them on the pitch.
The referees have not been cheating. There are no brown envelopes and there is no dodginess going on.
However, they have clearly been influenced by Celtic’s pressure. That is to say that if Celtic make a suggestion in the press about a dodgy decision that may have gone against them, the referees will then try to even that up because they feel pressured.
They feel pressured by the current Scottish champions, who have been there for a considerable period of time.
This is not cheating. This is manipulation, and it is not the same thing.
Referees remain deeply inconsistent
The referees, for their own part, are extremely incompetent. They are poor, and we have known this in Scotland for a long time.
Rangers benefited from it during 55. Most of the decisions went our way.
It was the one season where Rangers were actually pretty good at getting their own way in the press. Steven Gerrard was very good at pressing against the referees and making points about bad decisions.
This is the sort of thing that Rangers have lacked overall over the last 15 years, but Gerrard was an exception to this rule.
Consequently, we do not endorse the petition because there is also another massive mitigating factor which Rangers fans, and indeed we suppose our fans, are overlooking.
Hearts collapsed at the wrong time
Celtic did not win this title. They were gifted it, and they were not gifted it necessarily by referees, but by Hearts.
Sadly, Hearts ran out of puff. They ran out of steam and just started losing and drawing matches where they really needed to win them.
The point is that you cannot be champions if you are losing matches. You cannot be champions if you are drawing matches.
The squad which had done so well all season just ran out of oxygen.
How that is Celtic cheating, we are not exactly sure. They might have got a few calls in their favour, for sure, but they got quite a few against them as well.
What they did do was manage to scrape enough wins together to catch up to Hearts’ failings.
That is how Celtic got gifted this league. They scraped back and did what champions unfortunately do, which is win at all costs, at any cost.
This is something that Rangers failed miserably at when the heat was truly on.
Rangers failed when it mattered
The issue of referees would never have been an issue at all had Rangers got an actual manager in charge this season who could win matches when they counted.
Rangers would have been figuring far more in all of this, and complaints about referees and decisions would not have been there.
So no, we do not endorse the referee stuff. We know that they are incompetent. We know that they are poor and they know it too.
But we are pretty sure that while we are not going to claim that none of them have any biases, they do try their best.
They are not fantastic at it, but they try their best.
At the end of the day, they will get things wrong, which will infuriate certain people at certain times.
So at the end of the day, no, Ibrox Noise and many of our group do not endorse petitions of these natures simply because it is exactly the same as the same thing that Celtic fans themselves used to do in the 90s.
Paranoid tims they were called back then because they believed the referees were against them. But as Rangers fans launch petition it’s clear:
Everyone does.