Over the season a Sheffield Wednesday supporting referee from South Yorkshire with no skin in the Scottish football game, has been providing expert assessment of big calls in Scottish Premier League matches. This exercise has focussed on matches involving the top two in the SPFL – Celtic and The Rangers.
With a Champions League bounty virtually guaranteed for the League Champion there was a lot at stake this season. Refereeing was bound to be under scrutiny as a result. In addition, a decision had been made during the season to introduce Video Assistant Referees (VAR) into Scottish football part way through the following 22/23 campaign.
This exercise would act as a virtual VAR, in effect for the 21/22 season.
The framework I outlined here for assessing honest mistakes is by no means flawless:
Many times, selective BBC or SPFL highlights packages omit key events and without video evidence this endeavour won’t work – you cannot judge from most still photos
Video evidence is often quite limited in terms of the quality of the angles shown
The “rule” used to judge the impact of sending’s off is very blunt instrument and makes no allowance for time of event
I don’t watch other than Celtic matches therefore rely on traditional and fan media for awareness of potential big calls – this tends to be, errr, all-inclusive when it comes to Celtic and The Rangers, however!
That being said, the aim was to produce something that was as objective as it could be, to cut through the usual extreme, binary fan-led (and SMSM led) “analysis” of key incidents.
The Final Reckoning
In the end, the Yorkshire Whistler analysed 107 major calls over the 38-week season.

34 were deemed to be the incorrect call – 32% error rate. Clearly this is a benchmark but that strikes me as a very low success rate.
The issue of why Scottish refereeing may be of such a poor standard is a wider discussion for another article.
Let us breakdown the calls by referee and impact.
Referee Performance

The Games Refereed includes all Celtic and The Rangers games they officiated.
Referred Calls is the number of Yorkshire Whistler reviews conducted.
Discounting those who only refereed one or two matches, the clear outliers are Madden, Clancy and Beaton in terms of a high volume of wrong calls. Madden and Clancy would have had 50% of their VAR checks overturned and Beaton 36%. Madden had easily the highest volume of 8 wrong calls.
Perhaps allowing a man with a history of money issues to referee top flight football is not a good idea? Just a thought. The wider issue of oversight and governance is extant.
Walsh had the most referrals but a relatively small 12% were incorrect (2 out of 17).
What was the impact of the wrong calls?

At the end of the season, Celtic had been deprived an estimated 3.59 xPts whilst The Rangers benefited by 1.47 xPts.
Clancy managed to be negative for both sides overall.
McLean did not referee any Celtic matches, but did The Rangers a good turn with one big call (allowing an offside goal versus Motherwell).
Robertson had the most unfortunate profile, costing Celtic 1.06 xPts and gifting The Rangers 0.86.
I must emphasise these are small samples.
Wrong Call Outcomes
Of the wrong calls, the impact can be summarised thus:

Wrong Call / Good Outcome
Celtic gained an xPts of 2.22 from those. Three had over 0.3 xPts benefit for Celtic.
0.65 - The most impactful was Furuhashi’s goal against Hearts that Madden adjudged onside and the Yorkshire Whistler ruled offside.
0.35 - Beaton failing to send off Bitton against Hearts on 26th January (Beaton)
0.35 - Bitton escaping a red card again at home to Dundee Utd on 29th January (Anderson)
The other four had minimal xPts impact.
TRFC gained 3.14 xPts from favourable calls. All of them were impactful apart from a late offside Kamara goal allowed versus Motherwell. The big xPts gains came from:
0.54 xPts - Ross County being denied a penalty at home on 22nd August (Munro)
0.7 - McLean allowing an offside goal against Motherwell on 19th September (McLean)
0.86 - Aribo not being sent off at home to Hearts 0n 16th October (Robertson)
0.47 - Hedges not gaining a penalty for a McGregor challenge for Aberdeen on 18th January (Clancy)
0.47 - TRFC gaining a mystery penalty away at Dundee on 20th March (Madden)
Of the seven incidents above, only one created days of press coverage on a par with the Suez Crisis and a surfacing by the Head of Refereeing.
Wrong Call / Bad Outcome
Celtic had 9 calls go against where there was a negative xPts outcome.
Eight of them had at least a 0.3 xPts impact.
0.9 xPts – 31st July Celtic goal disallowed from Abada disallowed at Hearts for offside (Madden)
0.35 – Marshall of Dundee not sent off on 8th August (Anderson)
0.35 – Fuchs of Dundee Utd not sent off on 26th September (Clancy)
0.6 – Incorrect award of penalty for Abada challenge on Bates against Aberdeen on 28th November (Clancy)
0.86 – Butcher not sent off for Dundee Utd on 5th December for foul on Turnbull (Robertson)
0.67 – Hearts awarded a penalty on 26th January when no foul (Beaton)
0.32 – Giakoumakis brought down for a penalty not given on 20th February vs Dundee (Duncan)
0.55 – Hungbo handball in box missed vs Ross County on 19th March (Robertson)
The Rangers had only 3 calls that went against them that were incorrect.
0.35 – Griffiths not sent off for Dundee on 4th December (Muir)
0.67 – Penalty awarded to Aberdeen on 18th January for Morelos hand ball (Clancy)
0.55 – Sakala not awarded penalty against Dundee Utd on 20th February (Madden)
Of all those, the penalty awarded to Aberdeen nearly caused the introduction of martial law and cessation of all football in Scotland.
Summary
Unlike in season 2009/10 when refereeing in Scotland went very strange indeed once Walter Smith announced Rangers were being run by Lloyds Bank, this season sees little evidence of a conspiracy which may disappoint some.
For reasons to be explored at length, Scotland is poorly served by referees, but lack of full-time officials is an obvious starting place for a professional sport.
Mistakes are therefore made and the error rate from referrals seems very high. In England, correct decisions went up from 85% to 97% thanks to VAR according to the Premier League. In 2400 matches, 109 decisions were overturned (4%). The Yorkshire Whistler would have overturned 32% in Scotland.
The Rangers in particular got relatively few big calls against them. When it does occur, death by press coverage ensues.
Celtic win some and lose some. The ones that go against them seem to be impactful, however.
Again, these are small samples sizes.
I need to persuade the Yorkshire Whistler not to hang up his VAR hat and go again!