Strangely The Greatest Penalty Scandal of all time went largely uncommented on-at the time, until Sunday no-one had been promoted to dig into Alan Muir, the VAR official at Hampden for the League Cup Final.
All that changed after Celtic lifted the trophy, despite being way short of their best against the form team in the country Brendan Rodgers’ side showed the mentality of winners to claim their 20th domestic trophy out of the last 25 available.
Prompted by Bobby Madden, the man who refereed Celtic’s last meaningful defeat in the Glasgow Derby, the 2022 Scottish Cup semi-final there has been an incredible focus from legacy media on the incident involving Liam Scales and Vaclav Cerny.
The discussion has been completely one sided, no legacy outlet has mentioned John Beaton blowing foul on the tackle from Scales before the shirt pull. That contradicts the message being sent out.
On that subject, new CEO Paddy Stewart let the media messengers know that the SFA were contacted yesterday on the ‘penalty issue’.
A favoured tactic, just messaging without a Statement where fingerprints can be identified, the source is known.
Just as Madden was taking his paranoia onto Instagram Phil Clement was telling a media conference of nodding dogs to start digging.
If they want to dig they’ll know that there is one link between Beaton, Muir and Fourth Official Steven McLean. And it’s not that they are Celtic supporters, quite the reverse.
FYI The review Panel marked the incident in the video below as an error and there was criticism aimed at the VAR for missing the obvious foul on the lead up and focussing only on the handball to chop the goal. The same VAR Operator was rewarded with the Cup Final.
Alan Muir was… https://t.co/pLlhlLKXfN
— Behind The Whistles (@behindtwpod) December 16, 2024
FOUR penalties were missed in last year’s two finals as well.
Let’s be honest and say It’s not good enough. Every team is suffering. Fans always said VAR wouldn’t solve anything because the same incompetent officials are making the same decisions and errors, even with cameras. pic.twitter.com/gN0x26YlFo
— ᴘʙ 🍀 (@p_bov1) December 16, 2024
Last season there were four penalty issues in cup finals that only Internet Bampots picked up on, strangely enough. Or maybe not.
Trailing 1-0 Aberdeen had two strong penalty shouts ignored by Don Robertson and his collage on VAR, the most obvious being when Duk had his legs cleared out by Jack Butland inside the six yard box with his back to goal. Not a peep from Madden.
Fast forward to the Scottish Cup Final and two penalty claims involving Kyogo Furuhashi, Nick Walsh refereed the match with Beaton on VAR.
At both incidents the ball went out of play, Beaton had time to review them but chose not to. In one of them Ben Davies raised his hand to control the ball, in the other Davies and Leon Balogun combined to push and chop Kyogo as he ran onto a low cross.
Not a peep out of the VAR that had picked out Tomoki Iwata’s handball at Tynecastle.
If any of the messengers want to dig into Muir’s background they could start with Stephen O’Donnell’s push on Daizen Maeda at Fir Park earlier this season.
If they fancy a deeper dig the words Alan Muir, Josh Meekings, Caley Thistle, Leigh Griffiths, handball and Scottish Cup semi-final should help.
For reasons unknown Muir has joined Andrew Dallas and Greg Aitken as a full time VAR on the payroll of the SFA.
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