That “Viaplay Cup final” headline was from February 2023 — Nick Walsh’s first Old Firm final, which Celtic won 2-1 at Hampden. It’s old news dressed up as new. But it’s as good a prompt as any to do something more useful than relitigating one incident: lay out the entirety of Walsh’s Old Firm record, game by game, and see what it actually shows once you stop cherry-picking the worst afternoon and look at all nine.
As of Sunday’s League Cup quarter-final, Nick Walsh has now refereed nine competitive fixtures between Celtic and Rangers. The scoreline record: six wins for Celtic, one draw, and two wins for Rangers. Put that baldly, without any of the surrounding context, and it looks like exactly the kind of lopsided pattern that fuels a grievance. But scorelines aren’t decisions, and a referee doesn’t control who wins — he controls a much smaller set of individual calls inside each of those games, and it’s those calls, not the final tallies, that either support or undermine the case that something is systematically off. So it’s worth going through all nine, not just the ones that made headlines.
Walsh’s first Old Firm derby, played behind closed doors during the Covid season, is also the one that gets forgotten in the current conversation — because it’s the one where the big call went against Celtic. John Kennedy’s Celtic side, already out of the title race and playing out the string, were beaten comfortably, but the moment that stood out was Walsh showing Callum McGregor a second yellow card for a challenge on Glen Kamara. By the standards typically applied in derby matches, it was a harsh sending-off, and Kennedy said so afterwards. It cost Celtic a player in a game that got away from them. If you’re building a theory that Walsh reflexively protects Celtic’s best players in the biggest moments, this result is the first thing you have to explain away, because it’s the opposite of that.
Celtic’s heaviest derby win over Rangers in five years, at the peak of Ange Postecoglou’s first title-winning side. This one barely involved Walsh at all in a controversial sense — the gulf between the teams on the day was wide enough that there was little for a referee to adjudicate. Worth including for completeness, but it tells you almost nothing about officiating bias one way or the other. Sometimes a heavy scoreline really is just a heavy scoreline.
The “Viaplay Cup final” itself. Alfredo Morelos put Rangers 1-0 up before Kyogo Furuhashi scored twice either side of half-time to win it for Celtic. What’s notable here, and inconvenient for a straightforward bias narrative, is that Walsh was specifically praised by the media at the time for a well-refereed final — he didn’t produce his first card until the 50th minute, and the ten total bookings (six Rangers, four Celtic) came mostly from a late, scrappy period as Rangers pushed for an equaliser. If you’re a Rangers fan reaching for this game as evidence, there isn’t much to reach for. It’s one of Walsh’s quieter, less contentious performances in the fixture.
This is where the first genuine, still-cited grievance shows up. Rangers were denied what many pundits and their own fans believed was a clear first-half penalty for a handball by Alistair Johnston. Willie Collum backed the non-award as correct after review. Rangers were furious enough to demand the VAR audio be released — a request that, notably, tells you something about how far the trust had already eroded by that point, only a few months after a smoothly-handled cup final. To compound it, Leon Balogun was sent off for a last-man foul on Daizen Maeda, a decision that was uncontroversial in itself but which, combined with the missed penalty, left Rangers feeling like the game had tilted against them from two directions at once. Philippe Clement’s frustration with officials, well documented elsewhere in his time at Ibrox, has a credible starting point here.
The Adam Idah final. Rangers goalkeeper Jack Butland had parried a shot from Paulo Bernardo back into Idah’s path for the only goal — a moment more about goalkeeping misfortune than officiating. But the refereeing subplot here cuts in an interesting direction: Walsh initially let an Abdallah Sima header stand despite what replays showed was a clear two-handed shove on Rangers goalkeeper Joe Hart, before VAR intervened and the goal was correctly disallowed. That’s actually the system working as intended — a wrong call on the pitch caught and corrected by video review — but it’s also a data point that complicates the “Walsh never catches things that hurt Celtic” version of events, because here the on-field error favoured Celtic and it was the review process, not Rangers’ protests, that fixed it. Twelve yellow cards were shown across a bad-tempered afternoon, evenly enough that neither side has built a lasting case out of the cards specifically.
About as forgettable as an Old Firm derby gets. The title was already wrapped up by Brendan Rodgers’ side by this point, both teams had one eye elsewhere, and Idah’s goal secured a point without a single refereeing flashpoint worth mentioning. Genuinely nothing here for either side’s case file.
This is the one everyone actually means when they talk about Nick Walsh, and it deserves the scrutiny it’s had. Thelo Aasgaard was sent off for a reckless — if arguably more careless than malicious — challenge, reducing Rangers to ten men in the first half. Shortly after, Auston Trusty caught Jack Butland around the head with his boot while the goalkeeper held the ball, and received only a yellow card, a decision Willie Collum’s review defended on the grounds that there was no use of the studs and insufficient force for a red. Neil Lennon, Ally McCoist, James McFadden and Andy Halliday were among the pundits and former players who thought Trusty was fortunate. Walsh also awarded Rangers a penalty for handball against Anthony Ralston in the same match — a decision some Celtic supporters considered harsh, which is worth including precisely because the loudest current grievance sits inside a match where Walsh also gave Rangers a big call. Martin O’Neill’s Celtic won it in extra time. Whatever you make of the Trusty decision on its own merits — and there’s a strong case it should have been red — this remains the single match doing almost all the work in the wider “Walsh is against us” argument, because most of the other eight simply don’t support it as clearly.
Alistair Johnston avoided a red card for a first-half challenge on Mikey Moore that Rangers were adamant should have seen him dismissed. As with the Trusty incident, Collum’s VAR review backed the on-field call, releasing audio that argued against the red card claims. It’s the second time inside a calendar year that a Collum-led review has sided with Walsh on a contested non-red-card decision in a game Celtic went on to win comfortably, and it’s easy to see why that specific pairing — Walsh in the middle, Collum backing him on review — is where a lot of the Rangers frustration with the SFA’s accountability structure concentrates. Whether that reflects a genuine blind spot in how force and intent get assessed, or whether it’s simply confirmation bias doing the counting for people already primed to notice it, is exactly the question that a wider, independent audit of Walsh’s tackle-and-force decisions across all his fixtures — not just Old Firm ones — would actually be able to answer. Nobody in the public domain has published that audit.
Sunday’s game, the one that started this conversation. Rangers were the better side throughout and won comfortably through Dan Neil’s brace and a Kevin Kelsy goal, sending Celtic out of the competition. Walsh’s contribution to the day’s talking points was modest by comparison with game 7 or game 8: a yellow card for Celtic’s Benjamin Nygren that Premier Sports co-commentator Charlie Mulgrew openly questioned as too soft an outcome for what looked like a fair, if crunching, 50-50 challenge; a second early yellow for Celtic full-back Colby Donovan that left him nervous for the rest of the game; a tight VAR offside check on Kelsy’s goal that ultimately stood; and a late flare-up between James Penrice and Hasseim Hassan that produced cautions for both. None of it rises to the level of games 7 or 8, and if anything the balance of soft cards that day tilted toward Celtic players being booked rather than let off. It’s a reminder that the incident which prompted this whole conversation — the idea that Sunday was “another Nick Walsh shafting” — doesn’t actually survive contact with what happened on the pitch that day.
Laid out in full, the record resists a simple story in either direction. It is true that Celtic have won six of the nine, and it’s true that the two decisions Rangers fans are angriest about — Trusty in November 2025, Johnston in 2026 — both came in games Celtic won and both were subsequently defended by Willie Collum’s review process rather than overturned. That’s a real, specific, and defensible grievance, and it’s the strongest part of the case: two separate contested non-red-card calls, in two separate Celtic wins, both backed on review by the same official who runs Scottish refereeing. If you’re looking for a repeatable pattern rather than a single bad night, that’s where it actually lives.
But it’s also true that in game 1, the sending-off went against Celtic and helped hand Rangers a 4-1 win. It’s true that in game 4, the disputed handball non-penalty went against Rangers but so did an uncontroversial red card, evening out that particular afternoon somewhat. It’s true that in game 5, VAR corrected an on-field error that would otherwise have favoured Celtic. And it’s true that in game 9 — the game that actually prompted this whole conversation — the softer cards, if anything, went the other way. A theory of systematic bias has to be able to account for all of that, not just the two games that fit it best, and right now the honest answer is that most of the nine games don’t provide much support for it either way. Two clear data points out of nine, however aggravating those two are, is a thinner evidentiary base than the discourse around Walsh sometimes implies.
The strongest, most defensible version of the Rangers case isn’t “Nick Walsh has run a nine-game campaign against us.” It’s narrower than that, and it’s actually more serious for being narrower: in the two biggest, most finely balanced calls of his Old Firm career — both involving physical contact that a meaningful number of independent pundits judged as red-card offences — Walsh came down on the side that benefited Celtic, and the SFA’s own review mechanism, run by a man with his own contested history in exactly this fixture, endorsed both calls rather than using the review process to hold the on-field decision to real account. That’s not proof of corruption. It might be proof of nothing more than an official who is, on the specific and narrow question of force and intent in physical challenges, more conservative than the pundits watching at home — a criticism that could probably be levelled at several Scottish referees, not just Walsh. But it is a real, specific, checkable claim, and it’s the one worth Rangers continuing to press through the SFA’s own channels, rather than the broader “he’s always been against us” framing that the other seven games in his Old Firm record don’t actually back up
If Rangers want this to be more than a grievance that gets refought every time Walsh is appointed to a derby, the useful next step isn’t another statement about an “unacceptable level of refereeing” — it’s a request for the independent review panel to publish a like-for-like comparison of every contested contact-to-the-head or reckless-challenge incident Walsh has adjudicated across all competitions, not just Old Firm fixtures, scored against the same criteria used to defend Trusty and Johnston. If the same leniency shows up across the board, regardless of which team is involved, that’s evidence of a referee with a consistent — if perhaps too lenient — standard for what constitutes red-card force, which is a coaching and consistency problem rather than a bias one. If the leniency clusters specifically around Celtic players in derby matches, that’s a different and much more serious finding. Right now, nobody outside the SFA has that full dataset, which means both the loudest version of the grievance and the loudest defence of Walsh are, in the end, arguments from incomplete evidence. The nine-game Old Firm record on its own — six wins, a draw, two defeats, two genuinely contestable calls in Celtic’s favour, and one that went hard the other way in game one — doesn’t prove a vendetta. It proves there are two specific decisions worth someone independent actually investigating properly, which is a smaller and much more winnable case than the one currently being shouted about.
