Iain Brines will be in charge of Sunday’s Celtic v Rangers game.
It’ll be the first time that Brines has been put in charge of the fixture.
Brines has been in charge of two Celtc matches this season: the 1-0 win at St Mirren in November and last months 1-0 home win against Aberdeen in the SPL.
His appointment is a major snub for Willie Collum who had an abysmal performance when Rangers won 3-1 at Celtic in October.
Since that match there have been three Celtic-Rangers games with Collum ignored for all of them. Craig Thomson was in charge of the January match at Ibrox and Calum Murray appointed for the Scottish Cup ties.
On Saturday Collum will be in charge of the Inverness Caley Thistle v St Johnstone match.
Steve Conroy is the only other current referee with experience of handling a Celtc-Rangers match but was effectively demoted at the start of the season.
Conroy has only recently returned to SPL matches and has yet to be given a Celtic or Rangers match this season.
Biram Kayal picks up one match ban
Follow Video Celts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
[bet_365 type=’generic’ size=’468′ af_code=’365_050711′]
well in my eyes this guy is one of the most biased refs ever to take a celtic game and always seems to me to give everything and anything against us. to say i am unhappy with his appointment on sunday would be a severe understatement.
An interesting trend that you’ve picked up on Stephen.
Conroy, Murray, Collum and now Brines have all been given their first derby appointment at Celtic Park.
I suspect that Conroy and Collum might not get a second chance.
Another new ref gets the CP game. Why does CP seem to be a testing ground for rookie refs in the derby fixture?
To say Brines is a clown would be stating the obvious – he’s an SFA referee after all.
Hard to find a referee that I WOULD be happy to see in charge of this game to be honest, but I know if not for Collum’s performances this season Brines would be LAST on my list of choices.
The SFA will say Brines has been appointed because they are running out of refs. Collum, Thomson and Murray have all been used recently and Brines is the most experienced of the rest. It makes for a more difficult game for us, Rangers will take confidence because with him as ref, they are unbeaten in 19 games (14 wins and 5 draws) over four years and we’ve struggled to grind out single goal wins in most of our recent games with him. We’ll have to be at our best to win this one.