21 Feb 2019 15:06:07
Nice to see Craig Levein backing the call for refs who don't support Rangers (I know he said OF but we all know they are mainly Rangers) .
Hopefully, more clubs get on board as this the first step, along with making refs confess the club they support and making sure they don't ref a game involving their club.
21 Feb 2019 15:49:50
Raw I don’t get this getting them to say what team they support they can say any team willy nilly.
21 Feb 2019 16:50:23
The trouble is Refs are usually interested in football. And most people from Scotland interested in football, support one of the two. So that probably doesn't leave many unless you wanted the same couple of refs for every Celtic or Rangers game. This is where the idea of foreign Refs comes in. That, and the fact that the standard, like players, is generally low due to a small population. But would we be getting the best Italian, German etc Refs or would they be occupied with their own FAs?
21 Feb 2019 17:03:28
Are we going to ask them what school they went to next? Jeez give this " cheating conspiracy stop the 10 campaign" blabbering a rest it's getting embarrassing!
21 Feb 2019 17:25:00
I'm with ypu on that Malky, but just discussing the prospect of possible declarations like in England or Germany. In an ideal world it would be a safeguard, I'm not sure Scotland would have the pool necessary to implement it though. No cheating in my eyes, just a poor standard.
21 Feb 2019 17:46:03
IMO it should just be about comparability a programme that they say they have in place already but we all know it's not working if a referee gets a decision badly wrong demote him to the bottom league and let him work his way back up and bring a referee from a lower league up like a relegation promotion system one goes up one goes down.
21 Feb 2019 18:45:37
The sheer number of top flight officials who are Rangers fans indicates that there is a "prima facie" case to answer for cheating in the SFA. Unless offcourse you think that Rangers' fans make better referees than those of any other team?
Even if we ignore that fact, we cannot ignore the phenomenon known as "ingroup bias", which is the reason refs should have to declare their allegiances and not be allowed to referee a match involving their own team.
For those who don't know, psychologists have proven that members of a particular group exhibit bias towards other members of their group and this happens both consiously and sub-consiously. Therefore, how can it be right for a Rangers fan to referee a game involving Rangers, especially if it is against Celtic?
Moving on, if we go down the same route as England and stop refs being officials at games involving their own team, then we also need to have a rule that states you will have permanent expulsion if you are later found to support a different team than the one you declared as this would prove you set out to cheat.