Congratulations to Jim Jefferies for standing up and being man enough to retract his comments about Saturday’s decisions.
It takes a big man to say sorry, there are very few in football who do that, but Jefferies has apologised for his outburst.
The decisions on Saturday were marginal, they weren’t clear cut and human error is unavoidable. The human error on Saturday was from Jefferies, not the officials.
At neither of Celtic’s opening goals was there any offside.
In the heat of the match and after seeing his side hit the post it’s easy to see why Jefferies got upset at Celtic’s first goal but in his heart of hearts, ouch, he should have known that the decision was borderline and held back from further comment until he had reviewed the incident for himself.
After viewing the incident again today the Hearts boss said: “At the angle I was at, he looked offside. We don’t have monitors down at the dugout and everyone in our dugout thought he was offside.
“It was then relayed to me that some pictures showed he was offside but I have seen other footage and it shows he was marginally onside, and I accept that.
“I can’t take back what I said, I can only apologise and I spoke to Hugh Dallas (head of referee development at the SFA) and asked him to apologise to Francis Andrews on my behalf, as I don’t have his number.
“But I never criticised the performance of Willie Collum, I just said that I would be reporting him for the way he spoke to me.”
Jefferies will still be asked to explain his outburst to the SFA, it would be good if the SFA were to come out in future and admit to mistakes from their own officials.