Willie Collum announced as Scottish Cup final referee between Hearts and Celtic

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Celtic have been given further bad news to add to yesterday’s misery, after Willie Collum was today announced as the Scottish Cup final referee.

Collum has never been a fan-favourite at Parkhead. It mainly stems back to an incident back in 2010 when he awarded Rangers a penalty at Celtic Park that he clearly didn’t see.

Since then, he’s gone from blunder to blunder in Hoops matches. Only last December, he awarded Aberdeen two soft penalties at Pittodrie in a match Celtic won 4-3. 

He also sent off Kristoffer Ajer earlier this year at St Johnstone.

Celtic have already had Collum referee a match between themselves and Hibernian in the Scottish Cup this season. That was one of the referee’s quiet days, with no big decisions needing made.

Interestingly, he was the referee when Celtic were mauled 4-0 by Hearts in that infamous match last season. Collum allowed the likes of Kyle Lafferty and Steven Naismith to get away with over-the-top aggression in that game. Remember Naismith laughing in Hayes’ face after injuring him? Yup, that was Collum.

“If you’re good enough, the referee doesn’t matter”

Everyone remembers the great Jock Stein quote. When the great man said it, he likely had situations like this in mind.

We like to draw the line at conspiracy theories, but Collum is just a seriously poor referee. He makes far too many poor decisions on a near-weekly basis. Even Rangers were fined for accusing him of bias against them. Granted, that makes you laugh, but it shows how poor his decision-making can be.

With a bit of luck, Celtic control this game with relative ease. We have managed to only lose one of our last 16 games with Collum as the referee. So we’ve proven in the past that Collum isn’t a problem when we play well enough.

Ironically, Celtic have also won all six games under Collum this season too. If you’re into omens, then we do have a couple in our favour with this appointment.

But the fact is he just isn’t one of Scotland’s top officials. Here’s hoping he just has a quiet game – the last thing we need is refereeing controversy heading into the summer.