I can only imagine the disruption that has been caused to the private lives of Alan Muir and Frank Connor since the Premier Sports Cup final ended last Sunday night.

We live in a world where organised gangs of supporters rampage through the streets of Glasgow city centre terrorising women and small children naive enough to think they can go Christmas shopping without fear of physical harm because of a football match being played miles away. Match officials are, in today’s world, recognised as being legitimate targets if they are suspected of deliberate wrongdoing, such as failing to award what their employers at the SFA officially acknowledge as being a legitimate penalty for Rangers against Celtic.

And, as such, the game has a duty of care where those errant officials are concerned. The statement released by Willie Collum, the SFA’s head of referees, was, to my way of thinking, too accusatory and condemnatory. Fair enough, the VAR operatives got it badly wrong at Hampden.

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Ref John Beaton awarded a free-kick for the foul in extra time but the VAR officials did not intervene despite replays showing Vaclav Cerny’s foot on the line of the penalty area. But the savaging the virtual refs have received in print on top of the punishment they have been given in the form of being stood down for this weekend’s football schedule could be inflammatory.

And the circumstances surrounding Celtic’s cup win have already created an extremely difficult situation. There is no cooling off period between the last Old Firm game and the next – the potentially pivotal league match at Ibrox in 10 days’ time.

Tension isn’t just running high. It started out being at a high level and now it’s threatening to spin out of control. And matters were not helped by the request to journalists from Rangers’ manager Philippe Clement in his post-match press conference.

He urged the press to “dig deep” into the reasons for the non-award of the penalty for Liam Scales’ tug on Cerny. Dig deep into what precisely?

Celtic and Rangers fans believe their clubs to be at the mercy of institutional bias. They delve into games like the one played against each other last Sunday in forensic detail of a kind that Police Scotland would envy.

Fans genuinely think that flashpoints like the penalty decision are the consequence of match officials allowing allegiance to one club or the other resulting in them deliberately breaking the rules. The term “human error” is an alien concept and transparency on the part of the governing body is synonymous with treachery in the minds of their accusers.

Collum coming clean and conceding a serious mistake had been made over a decision that was hard to get wrong is an irrelevance in the eyes of the wronged party. And he should be more temperate in his use of language.

After all, he received a death threat after awarding a penalty to Rangers against Celtic in the days when he was on the referees’ shop floor, as opposed to their head office. As well as later being the subject of an official request from Rangers that he be banned from ever officiating at any of their matches.

Just 24 hours after the final, I could have told you the name of the Celtic supporters club where one of the VAR officials is allegedly a member. Social media was in overdrive and I was able to take my own temperature check by speaking to fans on the radio, a source of mirth and menace.

Levity was delivered by one supporter in the form of a demand for the final to be replayed because a family party at his house following the game was ruined by the outcome at the national stadium. An insight into the way others think came in the form of a call from a Rangers fan resident in Barcelona. If I lived amid the splendour of the Catalonia capital, I’m not sure if I’d have remembered to switch on the television for the Premier Sports Cup final – but that’s another matter.

The caller’s reading of the situation was there is a disconnect between fans and the hierarchy over corporate governance at Ibrox. And this would be rectified if the new chairman Fraser Thornton and chief executive Patrick Stewart achieved the right outcome over the vexed question of the penalty not given at Hampden.

The caller declined to define what the right outcome looked like, other than to say the show would be taken off air if he did specify his requirement, which sounded ominous. Rangers written response to Collum’s statement was measured and reasonable.

Ally McCoist was right to remind everyone that such matters are not to be treated lightly and his criticism of Celtic’s CEO Michael Nicholson for trying to do so at an AGM a year ago echoed what I wrote here at the time. I said jokes about Rangers and penalties were best left to the pub, not the boardroom.

If clubs can’t accept an apology, where do we go from here? Rangers have done so with good grace and anyone who thought the final was going to be replayed is a partridge short of a pear tree.

We need to accept that VAR was born because the naked eye was no longer thought to be sufficient where referees were concerned. VAR is supposedly sophisticated technology, however, contains a human element – two people looked at a screen and came up with the wrong answer.

The allegation that they did so to pervert the course of justice is what we have to discourage in the interests of maintaining public order, which is under premeditated threat on the evidence of last Sunday’s shameful scenes on the streets of our biggest city. There can be no guarantee an error will not occur when Celtic go to Ibrox on January 2.

If some supporters want to believe the game is rigged then that’s too bad. Football has to rise above unsubstantiated suspicion and ill-informed accusations.

If I thought officials were willing to compromise their integrity and jeopardise their careers by fixing the outcome of games to suit themselves I don’t think I’d waste my money going to watch football. But I don’t expect to see any empty seats at Ibrox for Rangers’ first competitive day at work in the new year.

In the meantime, nowhere among Collum’s chapter-and-verse account of the penalty mishap was there, out of
courtesy, an apology to Rangers. That wouldn’t have gone amiss, if only to draw a line under the matter and let all of us get on with the rest of our lives.