Chief executive Ian Maxwell shut down a stinging slapdown of the quality of referees as he explained SFA’s next steps in the wake of the Premier Sports Cup Final controversy.
It has been a nightmare week for the governing body in the wake of the showpiece showdown after VAR duo Alan Muir and Frank Connor failed to award an injury-time penalty to Rangers after Vaclav Cerny was hauled down by Liam Scales in the box. Celtic would go on to win the trophy in a dramatic penalty shoot-out and Head of Refereeing Willie Collum didn’t hold back following the flashpoint branding the mistake “unacceptable” in the wake of the fallout.
After days of controversy, things went from bad to worse after the weekend of Scottish Premiership action kicked off with Kilmarnock’s trip to Motherwell on Friday night. Well star Dan Casey was shown a red card by Chris Graham and despite VAR asking the man in the middle to review his original decision -with boss Stuart Kettlewell criticising the standard of referring in Scotland following the bizarre sending off.
Maxwell appeared to on BBC Sportsound to field the talking points, and was put on the spot by Tom English. The pundit said: “The bigger piece in this is the referee’s are making mistakes, the VAR is making mistakes because they are not good enough. They are not consistent enough…”
The Hampden chief cut in: “That’s unfair, Tom. They make mistakes.” English went on: “Of course they do, but should they be making these mistakes?”
Maxwell fired back: ‘No, but they are people. You can do all the training you want, they will have had more coaching than they have ever had. You can’t replicate what happens in the VAR room. I would compare it to the pressure of a penalty shoot-out. You do, but the bit you can’t replicate is walking up in front of a full stadium to take a penalty kick.”
He was then pressed on what he plans to do to make things better after the Rangers penalty howler, Maxwell added: “That is obviously a discussion that is ongoing with Willie about coaching. When something like that goes wrong you have to analyse and you have to review.
“He spends more time with the top officials that anybody. They are on Zoom calls every week analysing decisions that were right and decisions that were wrong to try and get that level of consistency.
“That is the thing that it comes back to – the consistency point. The reality is that mistakes will happen, what we need to eliminate is the real toe curlers. The ones that most of football fans – 99 per cent watching the TV go ‘how can that be’ – those kill us.”