Celtic ended a strong week by seeing off the stubbornness of Motherwell on Sunday at Fir Park.
In the end, it was a comfortable and deserved 3-0 win for Celtic against a Motherwell side that have tested them right to the death before.
This fixture in recent years has seen many late goals, but this time, a much-changed Celtic team did their job and returned to the top of the Premiership table.
Aberdeen picked up yet another win on Saturday to move top, but it didn’t last long, with the duo now level on points and six clear of third-placed Rangers.
Right towards the end, with the game done and dusted, Liam Gordon decided to lunge in on Celtic goalscorer Adam Idah, with VAR looking at the incident and issuing a straight red card.
But whilst 99% of people thought the player in question had no complaints, especially given how Idah proceeded to hobble towards the end, Motherwell manager Stuart Kettlewell had other ideas.
Stuart Kettlewell says Liam Gordon’s red card for Motherwell against Celtic ‘unbelievably harsh’
First and foremost, there was no reason for Gordon to be so aggressive when the game was just seeing itself out and nothing was on it.
But Gordon’s lunge needed looking at and VAR rightfully changed the outcome to a straight red.
The player in question walked off and didn’t moan much, but Kettlewell felt otherwise, as he told Sky Sports after the match.
Kettlewell claimed that the red card was ‘unbelievably harsh’ and sometimes ‘still images’ make things worse than they are.
He added that he spoke to the referee after the match, how there was ‘no animosity whatsoever’ and how the official ‘spoke about the hinge in his ankle’.
“That’s the referee, I spoke to the referee just on the pitch, there was no animosity whatsoever, simply what he saw in the tackle, he watches it that many times,” said Kettlewell.
“The still images that we keep talking about that make things a heck of a lot worse than they actually are. I think we can all see that Liam Gordon is at the very end of his stretch. I think Adam Idah is coming in at pace. The referee spoke about the hinge in his ankle when the contact was made. I personally think it’s really, really harsh. I do. I think it’s harsh.
“I can understand how it can look on a still image. There wasn’t a lot of force in the tackle. He was trying to get a toe-ender just to steal the ball, for one of a better phrase, and he slightly mistimes it. But it’s one of those now in modern football. We all want to jump on it and we all want to say it’s a red card. I think it’s unbelievably harsh.”
What Chris Sutton said about Gordon’s tackle on Adam Idah
It needs to be noted that David Dickinson initially dished out a yellow card, but was then told by VAR to look back at the challenge on a replay.
After a few looks, including slow-mo replays, the call was overturned, a straight red-issued and the player walked off with a look of regret on his face.
Chris Sutton was on commentary and he made it clear that the tackle was a ‘shocker’ and Gordon ‘couldn’t have any complaints’, as he told Sky Sports.
“There is no intent to get the ball, the intent is to harm his opponent,” said Sutton. “That’s a shocker – I think he can’t have any complaints.”
Receive a digest of our best Celtic content each week direct to your mailbox
