George O’Neill
BBC Sport Scotland
Brendan Rodgers praised Celtic’s attacking play as they overcame a wasteful Hibernian to move nine points clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership, but criticised his team’s performance out of possession.
Arne Engel’s first-half tap-in, before Joe Newell’s own goal and Kyogo’s delightful dink after the break, made it seven successive league wins for the champions.
However, the visitors spurned several clear-cut chances in a first half where they found some joy against Celtic’s high defensive line.
“Some of our attacking play was excellent,” Rodgers said.
“Our downside for today was our pressing – it was nowhere near what I would want and expect it to be – and that gave them chances.”
Last night, someone sent me an extraordinary piece of footage, and I have to admit that I was surprised watching it—so surprised because I completely missed it during the game and in the repeat viewings afterwards. It shows Cameron Carter-Vickers being held by an Ibrox player during the moment that leads to their second goal.
Our centre-back could conceivably have gotten to that ball before it went into the net. He’s being restrained. That’s an infringement, which means it’s a free kick, which means it’s not a goal.
Look, I personally don’t care. I missed the incident at the time, and I’m not going to get steamed up about it now in the aftermath.
What I do care about is that when you see it, it’s fairly blatant, and yet nobody in the mainstream media wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to ask why VAR didn’t intervene, why the referee didn’t see it, or why the goal wasn’t overturned. They have their little narrative that it was the Ibrox club that was hard done by here, and they’re sticking to it.
It is incredibly hard to take these people seriously when they’re in this sort of foot-stamping mood. It’s even harder to take them seriously when you look at their long history of not wanting to discuss officiating at all, and especially not the performances of individual referees.
