THE REFEREE that the Rangers love to hate has been announced as the man in charge of the League Cup Final at Hampden on Sunday 8 December.
Willie Collum has not refereed a Glasgow Derby since September 2018 when an Olivier Ntcham strike gave Celtic the three points and left Steven Gerrard crying about a foul that he felt should have been awarded at the other side of the park.
At the end of the year Collum sent off one of Gerrard’s players in an away win at St Mirren and all hell broke loose, with various statements and insinuations about Collum’s background being somehow an issue. They don’t really do irony over in Govania.
Quite disgracefully, Collum did not get another Rangers game until the final match of the season, when they lost to Steve Clarke’s Kilmarnock – the ‘Bye, Bye Rangers’ game.
So it’s something of a surprise that Collum has been appointed for next month’s League Cup final. He is of course no friend of Celtic’s, the incident that sticks out is probably the penalty he awarded to the old Rangers when he was looking the other way. He left claimed that he’d ‘heard’ the contact.
Willie Collum appointed referee for League Cup final between Rangers and Celtic. Sunday, December 8. 3pm kick-off.
— Raman Bhardwaj (@STVRaman) November 28, 2019
The Evening Times has written this today…”The Betfred Cup final, contested between Celtic and Rangers, is the first time that the two rivals have met in the final of a national cup competition since 2011.”
Let’s correct that for them.
The Betfred Cup final, contested between Celtic and the Rangers, is the first time that the two rivals have met in the final of a national cup competition since 2011 ever.
The two Referee Assistants will be David Roome and Alan Mulvanny while Kevin Clancy will be the fourth official.
Incidentally the first ever meeting between these two clubs happened in this competition at the semi-final stage in February 2015. Back then while the Celtic Board said nothing, Celtic supporters crowd funded a newspaper advertisement and placed it in Sunday Herald newspaper a week before the match, so that everyone was aware the background story of Celtic’s opponents that day.
And remember the Celtic Board did sweet FA then or now.
