Willie Collum legalises kicks to the head after Rangers farce

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Ibrox Noise

·15 November 2025

Willie Collum legalises kicks to the head after Rangers farce

Willie Collum, naturally, defended Austin Trusty’s yellow card as determined by Nick Walsh then VAR. As Ibrox Noise told you he would.

The referees’ chief was in fairness to him showing some transparency and explaining each decision during the previous week’s controversies. He was doing so via Sky Sports Referee Watch show with presenter Gordon Duncan.

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But unfortunately for Collum by backing his refs, he’s delivered a major problem for the future, and it’s one many Rangers people have raised.

The fact is Collum, Walsh and VAR have now justified only offering a yellow card for a kick to the head.

The case in defence is:

“We can support the yellow card here in terms of the criteria and laws of the game. It’s important to say that there’s a subjective element to this decision and we respect if people think that’s a red card. But the on-field communication is very clear from the referee. You hear him immediately say ‘reckless, yellow’ and then he’s in a long conversation with the Rangers captain, but he’s also communicating with the VAR and he talks about the level of force, which is one of the criteria that we need to use.”

This is already a shambles. Collum is defending the decision based on ‘clear communication’. That the communication is outright wrong doesn’t appear to be relevant.

He goes on:

“He also talks about the studs and for him there was no use of the studs here. The referee comes to the decision that this was a reckless action and the VAR looks at the images and they don’t tell him anything other than that. It has to be for us, because we don’t think this is a challenge for the ball. The goalkeeper is in possession of the ball, so this falls under violent conduct. The VAR must consider excessive force, brutality and another key word, is the contact more than negligible. There’s not enough force, there’s not enough brutality and the contact is negligible, so that’s why the yellow card was reached.”

Here’s another failure. Going on about studs and brutality. Trying to nitpick terms to justify a mistake.

We get why he’s doing this, justifying something to back his men, but they have made a mistake and he’s got their backs.

The biggest problem? Willie Collum and Nick Walsh have now legalised a kick to the head. It’s as simple as that.

Naturally, the next time a player’s boot makes contact with an opponent, it will be red. And Collum will defend that decision completely as well.

They made a big error here, a real oversight, and instead of holding their hands up and admitting a boot in the head (whether malicious or not) is a red card, try to use semantics to justify it being yellow.

Now, we can be fair as well, Collum did the same thing to defend Derek Cornelius’ reckless late tackle as well. The follow through could easily have been red, and probably should have.

This is the height of incompetence. Defending mistakes, out of loyalty and comradery, rather than admitting errors instead and holding each other to account.

This is the problem with Scottish refereeing now, that any referee can make any error and Collum will defend that error as the right call.

If you didn’t trust refs before, it’s worse now.