The Rangers VAR audio fails the smell test and Nick Walsh is ignoring what tech’s meant to be about – Keith Jackson

No one expected perfection.

When Scottish football first rolled out its poundstretcher version of VAR only the most naive or gullible would have imagined that the game in this country was about to enter into some sort of refereeing panacea. The truth is, it was never going to be that easy. But even the old dog chewed cynics among us would have predicted Scottish football could make it quite this hard.

Of course, some of us did warn that it would all end in tears and amid claims of controversy and, most probably conspiracy too. But it turns out we greatly underestimated Willie Collum and his merry band of misadventurers. They’re actually making a bigger VAR-ce of it than even we could ever have anticipated. And now here we are, with St Mirren calling for the technology to be booted out of the top flight for good while Dundee United have issued a red card to the review system which is supposed to keep the whole process honest and transparent.

Worse still, as if those developments were not quite catastrophic enough, amid the gathering pile on, Collum has been forced to publicly chastise one of his most trusted and highly rated officials and, to all intents and purposes, accuse him of wilfully misusing the whole process in order to justify his own horribly flawed decision making.

When Collum called out Nick Walsh on Friday afternoon and released the audio behind Mohamed Diomande’s recent red card at Tannadice, the man in charge of Scotland’s referees was effectively throwing one of his top operators under a bus.

Not through choice it must be said. On the contrary, Collum does his best to protect his people from the blast. And yet he could do nothing else but cut Walsh loose without dragging himself and the rest of Clydesdale