McPake: Ref took a guess on offside goal
James McPake claims officials “guessed” with a decision which cost his Dens men the chance to keep their cup hopes alive.
The Dundee manager was cautioned by Craig Napier after angrily disputing the referee’s call to back-up assistant Jonathan Bell and rule out a Danny Mullen goal for offside shortly after the interval.
“I’ve seen it from three different angles and I’ve not changed my mind,” said McPake.
“He has guessed it in my opinion. Credit to him if he’s got it right. What a call if he has.
“But how he can see that from the three angles I’ve seen. They initially gave the free kick for a foul on the goalkeeper and quickly changed their mind to offside.
“I’m told it’s a different signal with the flag when someone is offside to when it’s a foul.”
McPake fears he will have to rein in his passion after being yellow-carded for his reaction.
“Maybe my booking was right. You show any sort of emotion and the linesman was quick to tell the referee to come and caution the coach.
“I’m not sure if that’s right but that’s part of football now and I need to learn that and maybe not show emotion which would make football worse.
“It’s not why we lost the football game because St Johnstone scored and we couldn’t.
“But in my opinion we scored a perfectly good goal.”
McPake absolved skipper Charlie Adam of blame for missing a secondhalf penalty which would have kept levelled the tie.
“It was a good save from Zander, Charlie was unlucky,” he said.
“At a time when you’re on top it is really crucial you get a goal and in my opinion we got a perfectly good goal which was chopped off .
“There are people in there late on in their careers wanting a cup run, there are young coaches on our bench and on Callum Davidson’s bench so it shouldn’t be down to people guessing.
“It sounds like sour grapes when I say the better team lost it but I am here to give my honest views about what I saw out there and I will stand by that.”