tyniegate and the strange case of the celtic supporting referee

If we're to believe the pundits then it's the end of the game as we know it should club officials ever have the temerity to start questioning the integrity of match officials.

What can Hearts possibly hope to gain by complaining about Hugh Dallas, or even linesman Andy Davis, the linesman? They couldn't possibly want Dallas demoted could they?

Well why not? It's worked before.

Back in August 1987 Hearts played Celtic at Parkhead in a league match which was notable for two controversial incidents: the first was the non-award of a penalty to the visitors when John Colquhoun was fouled in the box; the second was an off the ball clash between Mark McGhee and Dave McPherson which should probably have been a foul to Hearts but which ended up with McGhee bounding free to score the only goal of the game.

So incensed was the Tynecastle Chairman Wallace Mercer with the referee's handling of the match that he took it up at an official level with the SFA. As Tom Campbell points out, 'clearly the Hearts players and representatives felt they had been treated badly by a referee they suspected of having Celtic sympathies.'

In the current climate it looks as if, far from the SFA granting Hearts a hearing, they look more likely to slap a charge on them of bringing the game into disrepute. In 1987 the game's governing body took a more sympathetic view, however, and pretty soon the ref involved - a grade 1 official at the time - was being scrutinised by his supervisors and after a few bad reports he found himself downgraded to linesman. Yet only a cynic - or a transcendental paranoia case - would suggest that what happened to Kevin Francis O'Donnell, the Celtic supporting referee, as a result of his handling of this one game couldn't possibly happen to Hugh Dallas.

Even rangers have been known to get a result when they've cried foul. It's almost impossible to believe they'd have the chutzpah to whinge about a match official, but they did in 1969 following an Old Firm match at Ibrox in August of that year, a League Cup tie which Rangers lost 1:0. After that match, Rangers, just like Hearts, complained in a letter to the SFA about the performance of the ref, Jim Callaghan, who failed to send off a Celtic player on the say-so of his linesman.

On the face of it, it is remarkably resonant of the events at Tynecastle, except for one tiny detail. Back then, the SFA didn't prepare to fling the book at Rangers, as they're seemingly about to do to Hearts, but rather carpeted Callaghan and suspended him from refereeing for nine weeks, despite the fact that he was one of their top officials who had refereed the Cup Final only a few months before.

Isn't it also funny how another important decision in favour of Rangers is actually of some benefit to Celtic, seeing as how we're part of the loathsome 'Old Firm'? In his magnum opus 'Penthouse and Pavement', a celebration of the mediocrity of Scottish football, the odious Sun hack Bill Leckie explains the phenomenon of match officials favouring big clubs (yes he accepts this happens as an incontestable fact but in no way would consider himself a paranoiac like us) like this: 'It stands to reason that if there are thirty (referees) on the grade one books, then maybe twenty will have a leaning towards one of the Old Firm - and will have the same inbuilt attitudes as everyone else in the same boat. That's not criticism; that is a fact of human nature.'

Maybe he'd care to conjecture in a future column how many of the twenty referees on the grade one books 'lean' towards Celtic. Perhaps he'd care to make the ludicrous assertion that it might be ten?