Pawlett

By Graham Barnstaple
December 19 2011

Once again we had a weekend in the SPL where our refs have been in the spotlight as they create work for the SFA Compliance officer.

Never a week goes by at the moment without a number of decisions being made by our refs which brings into action the new Compliance Officer to make a call on.

There are two games where he MUST make a call, given what has gone on in previous weeks.

At Aberdeen Peter Pawlett won a penalty with what looked like a dive, in very similar vein as Sone Aluko a couple of weeks ago. The Rangers man was given a two match ban, and watching the pictures from Pittodrie I can’t see how Pawlett can escape a similar punishment.

Pawlett may also find himself on the other side of the decision making if his club decide to appeal his sending off in the same game. This looked like a late tackle which was without doubt a free kick but probably deserved a yellow.

At Fir Park, TV pictures have shown Jim Goodwin throwing a punch into the stomach of Steven Jennings. Once again if this is not looked into we have real problems with this whole system.

Then in the same game we saw Saints awarded a penalty only to be ruled out due to an offside flag, when in fact it looked as though Tessalar was clearly onside. Another howler from one of our top refs.

Another dodgy offside flag denied Inverness at Ibrox with a Richie Foran header being disallowed when he looked as though he may have been level with the last man.

This was one of a series of poor decisions at Ibrox with ref Madden waving away two strong penalty decisions for the visitors. There was also some controversy around the ICT goal, with Jelavic lying injured the game carried on allowing the highlanders to score against 10 men.

I know we will see players punished when these decisions have been reviewed, but we never appear to hear of any sanction against the refs who are consistently making bad decisions.

I believe they are punished but it is never made as public as the bans/fines handed out to players and clubs. They appear to be protected by a wall of silence.

The problem seems to be we don’t have many decent refs at the moment and the SFA are trying to get by with what they have and making sure they are protected and looked after.