Rusty refs must be cut some slack, says Boyd

IF ever an anecdote underlined the pressures felt by referees in Scottish football it was a sad story shared during lockdown by Willie Collum. The match official spoke about agonising over his failure to send off Dundee United’s Paul McGinn for a forearm smash on St Mirren’s Cammy Smith in a Scottish Cup tie in Paisley in February 2019. At hospital later that night when tests confirmed his father was dying — he passed away days later — Collum (right) found himself searching the internet for a clip of the incident and worrying what people would be saying about him. The tale, told to Kris Boyd and Robert Snodgrass on their Lockdown Tactics podcast in June, showed a rarely-seen human side to referees.

And Boyd hopes people will cut the Scottish match officials some slack when they inevitably make mistakes when they come out of cold storage on the opening weekend of the season. ‘I did a podcast with Willie Collum over the break and it was quite powerful,’ nodded Boyd. ‘Did it give me a new-found respect? Yes and not just for Willie. Referees always seem to be the pantomime villain in football. ‘This season more than ever the spotlight will be on them and we need to be careful as it’s going to take them a few weeks to get back up to speed. ‘They are human and they are going to make mistakes — and they might make more of them earlier in the season, purely because they will be rusty. ‘I see that Bobby Madden is doing Aberdeen v Rangers on Saturday. He has not refereed a competitive game for four months. I think he did Hamilton against Motherwell in pre-season and that’s the only game he has had. ‘But he’s going to be pitched into a big game on Saturday at Pittodrie. I just feel we need to give referees some leeway. We are going to have to be lenient with them and not overly criticise them.’ Boyd also hit out at the tendency to make referees scapegoats for a manager or a team’s wider failings. ‘In this country we are quick to blame people for our own failures,’ he said. ‘Nine out of ten times the referee gets the brunt when a team loses. ‘The team has maybe lost 3-0 but the referee only made one mistake and that one mistake has not led to the team being beaten 3-0. ‘Or the classic one is when a referee gets a decision wrong, the team loses and the manager gets the bullet and blames the referee for getting him the sack. ‘But nobody sacks a manager off the back of one decision. It’s the last 10-15 results that have got him the sack, but it suits the agenda to blame the referee. It becomes a circus.’