Scottish FA referee John Beaton has described Rangers’ streak of not conceding a penalty in the league as an ‘anomaly’ ahead of the season starting for Celtic and the rest of the Scottish Premiership today.
The Ibrox side have unbelievably gone 55 top-flight games without conceding a spot-kick, the kind of statistical event that only fuels criticism and calls of bias from the supporters of other teams.
Beaton thinks it’s an ‘impossible’ question to answer but has stated that referees are looking for ways to better communicate their decisions to the masses, insisting they have nothing to hide.
The referee said [The Scotsman]: “You are asking for an impossible question to be answered. Stats are stats and you can present stats on how x, y and z have happened. All we can do is show you things on an incident-by-incident basis. And if you show us something and say, ‘how is that not a penalty kick’ then we can talk about that incident.
“But when a club goes a period of time without conceding a penalty then we need to look at incidents individually. It’s impossible to comment on a longer-term statistical thing. It’s an anomaly and stats will back up a story any way you want them to back up a story. All I can tell you is talk through decisions and say, ‘here’s what we did here.’
“We have absolutely nothing to hide. Anything we can do to explain how we are arriving at decisions and anything we can do to show people what we do on a Saturday and what happens in the VAR centre, we absolutely welcome that. The more transparency the better. The more questions we get the more answers we can provide and to, we hope, get to a better place.”
The truth is that any comments from any referees or other SFA employees will hold little credibility until we actually start to see improvement and changes on the pitch.
The refereeing group have had a lot of time with VAR now and they are running out of excuses when it comes to obvious errors and ‘anomalies’. Simply, we need to see a better implementation of the technology this season or the reasonable question will be asked: “Why are clubs paying for this?”
Transparency and the explaining of decisions would be very welcome. While they may be trialling this in private, it’s time for a more modern and progressive way of communicating with football fans in this country, too. But the most important thing is getting the decisions right in the first place.
In other news, Pleasing Cameron Carter-Vickers update ahead of Celtic season opener vs Ross County.
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