The Scottish FA has confirmed the match-day officials for Celtic’s Scottish Premiership opener against Kilmarnock this Sunday afternoon at Celtic Park.
It’s always a very special day at Paradise when the supporters return after the summer break, the Premiership flag is raised and we then set about the defence of our title on our home turf.
Willie Collum is now head of the Scottish referees and we’ll see if he is an upgrade on Crawford Allan, who chucked it last season, presumably before he was pushed.
On Sunday 4 August at Celtic Park for the Celtic v Kilmarnock match in the Scottish Premiership, Don Robertson will be the referee and his assistants will be David Roome and Craig Ferguson. Greg Aitken will be working on VAR duties on Sunday, which is nice for him as he’ll be free to watch his own team play the day before at Tynecastle. Aitken will be assisted on VAR duties at Celtic Park by Jonathan Bell.
Unusually there is no mention on the official Scottish FA website regarding who will be the fourth official. Perhaps this is information that they are no longer able to share in advance to allow for later appointments to made closer to the match day?
Collum starts his new job with a clean slate and should be judged on whether or not he can deliver a higher standard of decision making and fairness throughout the season. The two incidents that Celtic were on the wrong side of at Tynecastle back in March were disgraceful to say the least.
How many times have we seen similar instances to the Yang raised boot since his sending off that went unpunished. There were several of them in Euro2024 for instance. And the penalty flagged up by John Beaton on VAR and then awarded by Don Robertson were such bad decisions that both should have been demoted.
All we ask for is for the match officials to do their jobs, fairly and without bias, nothing else. If Collum agrees and delivers that then he’ll have no complaints from us.
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