Craig Gordon admits he was blanked by Italian ref Andrea Colombo when he tried to protest the penalty awarded against Hearts in their 2-0 defeat to Copenhagen.
The Jambos suffered a third Europa Conference League defeat on the bounce and now need to beat Petrocub at Tynecastle next Thursday, while hoping other results don’t go against them in order to book a play-off spot. Their fate was sealed in Denmark when Amin Chiahka collided with Gordon after the kicking the ball against him in the box.
Colombo initially saw no wrong doing, but after being called over the pitchside monitor by VAR, he decided Gordon had committed a crime and penalised the veteran Hearts skipper, much to Neil Critchley’s side’s amazement. Kevin Diks converted to give the hosts a deserved victory, but Gordon was left incensed at the decision. However, attempts to persuade the whistler he’d got it wrong fell on deaf ears.
“The referee didn’t really speak much. You don’t tend to get much of a conversation,” said Gordon. “They tell you to go away and not speak, so he wasn’t wanting to have a chat with me. I told him that I’d touched the ball, that we’d both touched the ball, and what was I supposed to do?
“I was standing still when the contact was made, he [Chiakha] comes through the back of the defender to get a slight touch on the ball, kicks it onto me, then follows through onto me. If that happens anywhere else on the pitch, you probably get a foul.
“I didn’t get the foul and, for some reason, somebody looking at a TV screen has managed to interpret that in a totally different way when the ref had a good grasp of the situation in the first place.”
The Scotland No1 tried again after full-time, but was told to pipe down or find himself in the book. He told the Edinburgh Evening News: “Yes, I did. I tried to say the same things. He’d kicked the ball into my hands, I’d touched the ball. How could he possibly look at that on a screen and think that was a penalty? He just told me to go away, that I’d get a yellow card if I continued to protest.”