Why was Willie Collum appointed for the Hamilton v Celtic match
It hasn’t gone un-noticed that Willie Collum was involved in back-to-back Celtic matches over the last week.
Thankfully at Easter Road his involvement was kept to a minimum with Anthony Stokes not being booked for a similar offence that earned Niall McGinn a yellow card at Hamilton.
Both assistant referees showed a sharp grasp of the offside law and Craig Thomson refereed the game in an efficient rather than a Collum-like fussy manner
Collum’s appointment for the Hamilton match is mysterious.
For the original match scheduled for December 18 Mike Tumilty was to be the man in charge with Stevie O’Reilly as fourth official.
If Tumilty had got injured during the match then O’Reilly would have taken charge of the match.
Surely if Tumilty was unavailable for the re-arranged match O’Reilly should have been put in charge with a replacement fourth official brought in.
Despite reports suggesting otherwise Tumilty didn’t call off at the last minute forcing the SFA to rush in to calling up Collum for an unexpected midweek bonus of £800 for a night’s work.
The week’s match officials were announced by the SFA on Monday, a full 48 hours before the Hamilton match, with Collum given two Celtic appointments in a week.
There were plenty of officials available to select from for the Hamilton-Celtic match with just eight scheduled midweek matches throughout Scotland including the Rangers-Kilmarnock tie from the previous weeks appoitments.
For reasons best known to themselves the SFA decided to appoint Collum to replace Tumilty at New Douglas Park.
As well as involving him in back-to-back Celtic matches it was the third time in his last seven SPL matches that Collum has been put in charge of a Celtic game.
So far this season Collum has been in charge of 12 SPL matches- 4 of which have involved Celtic.
Hopefully it’ll be a long long time before he’s given another Celtic match as the SFA send him to the lower divisions and into junior football to learn about the game and how to referee matches.
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