Celtic’s 3-0 win over Livingston takes Brendan Rodgers’ side back to the top of the Scottish Premiership ahead of the Ibrox Glasgow Derby next week.
Goals from Paulo Bernardo and Matt O’Riley added to Jamie Brandon’s own goal in a second-half performance that was much improved from the first 45 minutes.
The first half saw Celtic huff and puff and whilst they had the lion’s share of possession, they never really threatened the Livingston too much.
However, whatever John Kennedy said to them in the dressing room at half-time seemed to have worked because Celtic looked like a different side and quickly set about David Martindale‘s men to send three stands full of Hoops supporters home happy.
But it was a first-half flashpoint that grabbed most of the attention during the half-time analysis where Kyogo Furuhashi was denied a clear penalty that had Chris Sutton and Robert Snodgrass duelling with Kris Boyd on Sky Sports.
Sutton and Snodgrass felt that Mikey Devlin’s challenge on the Celtic striker was a stonewall penalty whilst Boyd took his usual default position whenever and claimed that Kyogo was already on his way down before any contact was made.
But Celtic Assistant Manager, John Kennedy, took a different view and shared what Kyogo felt about the challenge that VAR deemed not enough to award the Hoops a spot-kick.
Kyogo ‘adamant’ there was contact
The Sky Sports replays showed that there was clear contact on the Celtic striker’s knee and whilst Boyd felt that it wasn’t enough to point to the spot, Kennedy said Kyogo felt differently about it.
Kennedy said [Sky Sports], “I haven’t seen it back properly I only saw it briefly at the time. Again, once I see it I’ll know better but at the time, Kyogo was adamant there was a bit of contact there.
“He got his body in front, but again, I don’t want to make that a talking point.
“It was just a good performance in a 3-0 win.”
The decision VAR decided wasn’t a penalty was met with much derision by the Celtic supporters. Week in, week out we have to put up with these inconsistencies and after the week we have had to endure over Brendan Rodgers’ SFA hearing, this is the last thing the national association needed.
The spotlight remains firmly on referees. Especially after the SFA saw fit to put Don Robertson in charge of the Livingston game this week.
Thankfully, the refereeing technology has no bearing on the result as it did at Tynecastle, but questions do still remain on how inconsistently the rules are applied whenever a decision like this pops up.