So, it is Willie Collum who will be the Man in Black for the crucial April Derby at Ibrox.
Collum has refereed 16 SPFL top flight matches this season, the most alongside Madden and Walsh. This is his 5th Celtic match and 4th match adjudicating The Rangers. He was appointed to their 5-0 home win over Hearts in February, and so his Ibrox hiatus seems well and truly over.
Collum’s Stats
In terms of Celtic matches, here is Collum’s data:
As with most of the refs, he awards free kicks against Celtic more often than the opposition despite the huge possession disparity. Some of this is due to team style. Celtic are an aggressively pressing side.
He is average in terms of rate of awarding fouls to the opposition.
In general, he’ll award more fouls per challenge than the average ref, in Celtic games.
His performances in The Rangers matches:
He is around average in awarding fouls for and against the Blues.
Contrary to Celtic matches, he is below average in terms of fouls awarded per challenge – slightly more “let the game flow”.
Collum and Honest Mistakes
I hope you have been following the Honest Mistakes series, click the link to the latest on the virtual VAR that is the Yorkshire Whistler and his dissection of the big calls in the SPFL.
What Honest Mistakes has Collum been tangled up in this season?
Worryingly all eight have involved Celtic and none so far in The Rangers games.
However, the Yorkshire Whistler deemed six out of his eight big calls to be correct (75% success)! That’s pretty impressive given 34% of referred decisions have been wrong overall.
Here is a summary of the big calls reviewed:
He has had a big call review on all four matches he has refereed for Celtic.
The St Mirren game was his worst performance. He incorrectly disallowed a St Mirren goal. Also, there was much media chatter about a Christie foul that generated no card, and should have been a Yellow, therefore not affecting the game state at the time.
The Aberdeen game in February got interesting after half time as the Dons fought back from 2-0 down to level before falling to Jota’s winner. More encouragingly he got all those calls correct.
Summary
My personal opinion is that Collum is a typical Scottish referee in that a flawed recruitment and development process produces sub standard referees. Collum in particular has virtually no feel for a game, and indeed seems to derive no enjoyment from refereeing one. He seems to utterly lack empathy with the players and the situation.
That being said, based on his performances this season, aside from the tendency to penalise Celtic with fouls disproportionately, he looks potentially a solid bet for a balanced performance.
Those words may haunt as, historically, Collum’s errors have left no team unhappy! But that is the nature of incompetence – it is random! And there is none more random than Willie.
To finish and to be fair to him, he has a better strike rate at getting the big calls right than most of his colleagues in this season’s matches.