The Media Battle Before the On Pitch Battle

Fans of Rangers and Celtic will be well aware there is an Old Firm due on the 3rd of January. The two sides take to the Parkhead pitch on SPFL duty for the second time this season and the game will need no introduction.

If you didn’t know from the fixtures calendar, you would be able to take an educated guess, based on current Scottish Football media trends. Despite being one of many contentious decisions on the weekend past, only one seems to be dragging on coverage wise.

St Mirren were denied what looked like a stone wall penalty in their game vs Kilmarnock. The St Mirren player was at the edge of the Killie box and the defender completely wipes him out without getting the ball. Barely a whisper in the press on this one but you may think that’s understandable as an Old Firm controversy is obviously going to bring in the numbers.

In the Celtic vs Livingston game, Celtic had conceded twice in the first ten minutes. They had clawed goals back and with the end of the first half approaching, they were winning 3-2, when they were awarded a highly dubious penalty.

Daizen Maeda shoves the Livingston defender forward (2 hands on his back) and the result is the ball hitting the Livingston player’s arm. Now by the letter of the handball rule, this should be a penalty, however the ref and VAR seem to have completely ignored the foul by Maeda and just awarded the penalty anyway.

You might think this seems a tad strange given Rangers had a goal chalked off for a foul the opposite end of the pitch just last season. A quick look at the referee team will clear that up for you with all the usual suspects involved.

Matthew MacDermid never seems to be far from controversy when Celtic are playing, he was the man in the middle. Running the line was ex CSC boss Frank Connor and on VAR was good old Nick Walsh who, despite claims to the contrary, also seems to have a heavy bias towards Celtic.

You would think the media would be all over this sort of thing. I’m not saying it’s corruption, but it very much allows people to think such a thing. It would be fair to say it is at least newsworthy but instead we hear next to nothing. Instead, we have days of anger about a Motherwell player not getting a penalty for diving.

We see the same pattern nearly every Old Firm game. An absolutely nothing decision is blown out of all proportion and given days of airing so we can listen to the usual Celtic aligned pundits crack the old Penalty to Rangers jokes.

All of this isn’t intended to actually change anything, any decision is already made, match finished etc. It’s all designed, purely, to heap the pressure on Don Robertson and his team ahead of the crucial Old Firm game. You may wonder what the point is, but we’ve seen time and again, dodgy decisions going against Rangers in these games.

Simply put, the point is to heap on so much pressure that the ref will ignore things for an easy life. Think “More out than in” in last seasons League Cup Final. Think not noticing multiple Celtic players offside in another cup final. Think a Celtic player kicking a Rangers player in the face being deemed a yellow card offence but being a red the other way round.

We’ve seen a referee’s strike, we've seen statements at AGM's, we’ve seen referees needing police protection, all driven by one side and they reap the benefits of this pressure. The three examples above are the most vital and recent but we’ve seen it over a much longer period of time as well.

Look at the average fouls to yellow cards and there is one massive outlier, despite the aforementioned Maeda working his way round the pitch kicking players with regularity. Look at all the fuss because we went seventy something games without conceding a penalty, despite Rangers not having a penalty at Celtic Park in two and a half decades.

It’s nothing but a confected narrative to try and gain an edge in the game. Rangers tried to challenge this after the last Old Firm outing but need to be ready to deal with more of the same this time. Until Celtic are taken to task by the SPFL for these coercion tactics, the fight will continue, unbalanced, on the pitch.