On Sunday afternoon, Ange Postecoglou and his Celtic squad lifted the first piece of silverware of the campaign in a 2-1 victory over Hibernian at Hampden Park.
You would usually imagine that the talk should be on the Hoops brilliant fight back and performance, which saw frontman Kyogo Furuhashi score two spectacular goals to bring home the trophy.
However, a lot of the talk has somehow been on the refereeing decisions throughout the game – including a potential penalty shout for Hibs towards the end of the game.
Co-commentators Michael Stewart and Stephen Craigan, in particular, seemed adamant that the Edinburgh side should have had a spot-kick.
However, former English Premier League referee Dermot Gallagher disagrees with those statements, insisting it was simply a coming together between two players and nothing more when analysing the incident on Sky Sports’ Ref Watch’.
“I think not. It’s a coming together and no more than that,” he said as quoted by the Daily Record.
“The defender is strong. You see the forward coming up very, very quickly. I don’t think he’s convinced it’s a penalty either.
“We’ve already seen Trent Alexander-Arnold put his hands on the back (earlier in the programme). It’s what impact it has.”
In the last few weeks, we have started to see a trend of decisions being questioned when this Celtic side win by the odd goal.
Often, these decisions aren’t even wrong, as is evident with yesterdays supposed ‘penalty shout’.
Ultimately, the best team won on Sunday afternoon, taking the trophy back to Parkhead, and that is something which Hibernian can’t have many complaints about.
Edinburgh University did some modelling and projections with regard to the penalty incident and the findings were revealing.
They assert that had the penalty been given it was with a 92.76% probability that Boyle would have skewed the resultant kick high and wide due to the severity of the Omnicron virus stalking the streets.
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