John Fleming has defended Willie Collum saying that he has had a good season.
The Lanarkshire based referee is over at Euro 2016 and will be the fourth official at the Turkey v Croatia match as he awaits his first appointment.
Collum has been regularly slaughtered by managers and fans this season with the Euro 2016 appointment making him even more aloof and determined to be the star of the show attracting controversy for no apparent reason.
Rather than acknowledge a poor season, referee’s chief Fleming has gone into overload backing Collum ahead of a Euro 16 appointment that could put him in the international spotlight.
“Willie has had a good season,” Fleming told The Herald. “And he is very consistent. I can’t think of any referee in the country who hasn’t gone through a period where they haven’t quite hit the levels they have set for themselves. Craig Thomson, Steven McLean, Kevin Clancy, Bobby Madden, so on and so forth, they all maybe do drop from one period of time, no different to the way a footballer does.
“It is my job to monitor it all but to have a system in place where there are mentors who speak to the referees and go through the games with them. All I would say is all referees go through dips but the good referees learn from them and become stronger.”
Unfortunately Collum’s consistency has been of the wrong type- poor with baffling decisions the order of the day leaving managers frustrated and in the dark.
After losing to Falkirk in December Pep Warburton lost all respect for Collum claiming: “I don’t want to come across as a sore loser but there are some shocking decisions there.
“The penalty changed the game, giving our opponent something to hang onto. The one question from me is, why isn’t Danny Wilson sent off? If it’s a penalty and a goal scoring opportunity then why wasn’t he sent off?
“Everyone inside the stadium saw the incident happened two or three yards outside the box. If you are going to make that decision less than three minutes into a game of that importance then you must get it right, be absolutely positive about what you do.
“I don’t think, very politely, it was anywhere near a penalty. I haven’t had the luxury of seeing our penalty again but at the time I didn’t believe it was a penalty incident either.”
Collum hasn’t had a single Sevco match since that game at Falkirk, a week later after another penalty ridden match between Aberdeen and Inverness Caley Thistle.
After the 2-2 draw Derek McInnes said: “Their penalty was very soft, Paul Quinn didn’t make any movement towards their player. Ross Draper stuck his hip into him.
“At the time I wasn’t sure about our penalty either. Devine’s arm is definitely up but whether it struck the ball or not, it’s not clear.
“We also should have had a penalty from the last kick of the ball when Carl Tremarco clearly handled to stop it going to Rooney. That was the clearest penalty of the lot.”
After losing at Hamilton in August in a match that produced 10 yellow cards and one red Robbie Neilson explained that Hearts had trained for playing with ten men.
In the post split Premiership fixtures Collum was only given two top six fixtures and missed out on the Scottish Cup Final to Steven McLean.