SFA top brass admit that VAR will “never” be perfect – as referees chief Willie Collum prepares to confess his officials made a huge cup final howler at Hampden.
Chief executive Ian Maxwell and president Mike Mulraney appeared to accept that Rangers should have been awarded a potentially game-changing penalty in extra time of Sunday’s epic Old Firm showpiece for the Premier Sports Cup. And Collum is expected to admit that his men inside Clydesdale House should have told ref John Beaton to point to the spot when Liam Scales dragged Vaclav Cerny to the ground on the edge of Celtic’s box with the rivals locked at 3-3.
Alan Muir and Frank O’Connor – the men in charge of the remote controls – have already been axed from Collum’s top flight rota for this weekend’s fixtures and their boss is expected to confirm, as part of his latest VAR review, they are paying the price for Sunday’s blunder.
Rangers new chief executive Patrick Stewart has already fired off a letter to the SFA demanding an explanation but Mulraney and Maxwell have put it down to human error and admit that factor can never be eradicated – while insisting this latest flash point won’t spark another war with the Ibrox club.
Maxwell said: “There is always the sensationalised bit about clubs going to war with the SFA. What does that actually mean? If a club are unhappy with any refereeing decision they phone Willie and have a conversation with him about the whats and the whys. Sometimes they are right to be unhappy, sometimes they are not. Then it’s done. There is no war, there is no lasting debate about it.”
When asked if the VAR process will ever be perfected, Mulraney responded: “No, it never will be. Never, never, never. Things happen, you deal with it like adults then you move on. It’s the same in anything.”
Speaking at the launch of a new fund raising campaign aimed at ploughing £50m into grass roots football over the next five years Maxwell added: “Decisions will be wrong, that’s a given. We’ll eradicate them as much as we possibly can. VAR has done that in a vast majority of cases. There are always going to be one or two that will fall out with that, because there’s people involved and in anything that involves a person in any walk of life, there will be decisions made that don’t go the way we want them to go or are incorrect. That’s just part of human nature.
“We are talking about one decision at the moment. This is the first time that anybody has asked Mike or I about VAR decisions this season. This time last year it was every week. So there has definitely been improvement. The transparency has improved, the referees’ performances on the pitch are improving. There will always be decisions that go against you. We are still raging about the penalty that we should have got against Hungary. But we didn’t go to war with UEFA.
“There will never be a point where there isn’t a contentious decision because people disagree on decisions.
“That’s the beauty of the sport. You get 20 football fans in a room. You’ll get 25 different views on whether a decision or a foul was right or wrong. But we’re never going to change that.
“I don’t mean to downplay any of the decisions, I am not saying what happened at the weekend was right or wrong, but there are fundamental moments in matches and referees and match officials have a part to play in that.
“I am not downplaying that or belittling it in any shape or form, I get the significance of it. But it happens and that is the reality of it.”
And Mulraney admits he’s still not quite over the decision to chop off Scott McTominay’s goal in Seville which could have secured a Scotland win in Spain.
He said: “That still hurts. It is imprinted in my mind. It hurts. How did we not get that goal? We would have beaten Spain in Spain.
“What I would say is that this is white noise. In three years from now nothing that we are talking about will matter. It is what enthralls us and engages today as a society. But in three years time that pitch out there is still there. We have to overcome these road bumps. Is VAR ever going to perfect? No, but it is better than what we had before.”