Aidan Smith: No Aberdeen-Rangers pressure, Don, with hullabaloo over 71-game stat - who would be a referee

Has there ever been a Scottish football referee who will be under more scrutiny with more sets of beady eyes squinting at him than Don Robertson when he takes charge of the Viaplay Cup final today?

A Hampden showpiece is plenty pressure for a whistler, that quaint and jaunty term for refs which doesn’t really apply here. A game between Rangers and Aberdeen ramps up that pressure some more. And then there’s the extraordinary events of the past week when a BBC sports presenter raises the issue of one of the teams – Rangers – having managed to avoid a penalty being awarded against them for 71 Premiership matches.

“It would hardly be a stretch to suggest there is bias,” wrote Sportsound’s Richard Gordon in a column in the Press & Journal. Now, these kind of dark mutterings used to be reserved for away supporters’ buses, trundling back from the Old Firm citadels – and especially Ibrox – after yet another defeat.

Manchester City Erling Haaland takes umbrage with a refereeing decision.

Then with the advent of social media the conspiracy theories about all manner of decisions and non-decisions could explode across X, formerly Twitter. Some of the posts are jokey but reading others you’d think the end of civilisation as we know it is nigh.

The arguing rages with back-up stats, slowed-down video and still images of near-identical incidents from separate games but with different outcomes. It lasts from one week to the next, one match-day to the next, before resuming on the final whistle with even greater conviction and the production of yet more “evidence”. Some of the contributors have the absolute certainty of Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper. For others, the discovery of “definitive” footage is like the sudden and dramatic emergence of the Zapruder film.

But that’s fans for you. Passionate, myopic, bonkers. An experienced voice from the national broadcaster entering the debate in the manner of Gordon spices it up like a sprinkling of chilli powder on the Bovril, even rousing the interest of the Daily Telegraph.

Regarding referees, we seem to have reached tipping point. That has probably been said before but, honestly, when have we seen all of a country’s domestic football suspended after – this was Turkey – a ref was savagely attacked by a club president, kicked on the head as he lay on the ground and told his attacker would “finish” him? One thing definitely said, and said often: who on earth would do this job?

Referee Don Robertson takes charge of the Viaplay Cup final/

Women, apparently. On Saturday Rebecca Welch becomes the first to officiate a top-flight English game. Now, the EPL has as its most influential player a man who will scream in the face of referees if he doesn’t get his way. As he’s indulging in his tantrum, his own face will turn purple, his eyes will pop, his tonsils will waggle in a threatening manner and, to cap it all, he’ll rip the bobble clean out of his hair. The manner in which his blond locks then cascade onto his shoulders rather takes the edge off his multi-millionaire entitlement and macho posturing, but make no mistake: Erling Haaland can get very angry indeed, so thankfully he’ll be nowhere near the pitch where Welch will make her historic bow.

Who on earth would do this job? It’s funny when football reverts to Champions League mode and out of the tunnels to collect the match balls come these suave, immaculately-groomed fellows who must smell nice and could pass for mature models while making the business of refereeing look glamorous and easy. Then a few days later it’s back to the stressed-out domestic game and the shouting and the finger-jabbing and the ganging up. The ref who so upset Haaland was short and bald and by the end of the verbal assault was probably smelling of fear.

Unsurprisingly right now there’s isn’t a stampede of willing candidates for shepherding 22 footballers through 90 minutes of play, interspersed with increasing amounts of diving, conniving, conning, time-wasting and hissy-fitting. A recruitment drive called “Be a referee!” has been heavily promoted during the group stages of Euro competition with Uefa hoping to enlist 40,000 newcomers each season.

Good luck with that and good luck to Welch for Fulham vs Burnley. Also to Sam Allison who three days later when he blows the whistle to start Sheffield United’s match with Luton Town will become the EPL’s first black referee for 15 years, which given the multicultural nature of that league is a helluva long interruption.

In a perfect world women referees calm football right down. Their mere presence causes players to stop and think – a novel concept, I know – and the shame and condemnation which would result from having crowded round the officials to berate them prevents it from happening.

But we don’t live in a perfect world and I’m not sure given the challenges of the role – and I haven’t yet mentioned VAR and the fact the technology as currently utilised is hindering rather than helping – exactly how many women will fancy it, and whether we’ll ever see any in Scotland.

Meanwhile it’s Aberdeen vs Rangers so over to you, Don Robertson. I can’t make up my mind about Richard Gordon’s comments, which have lifted discussion of the Ibrox’s club avoidance of penalties beyond social media’s rattle and hum. Beginning today, and for every domestic game until one of their players is deemed to have used a hand, however inadvertently, or tugged a shirt or blocked at a corner-kick, there will be extra pressure on the officials to finally, at long last, point to the spot.

But at the same time 71 matches without conceding is a quite astonishing stat, which only serves to reinforce Scottish football’s longest-running and loudest grumble.