Celtic Handed Fresh Penrice Verdict As Ex-Referee Insists Rangers Star Should Have Seen Red
Just when it looked like the officiating conversation from Sunday’s Old Firm derby had settled on the missed Makhanya penalty, another flashpoint from the same afternoon at Ibrox has resurfaced this week, this time centred on Rangers left-back James Penrice and a moment of late-game confrontation that a former Scottish referee believes should have ended his afternoon early. It’s another example of just how much contentious material one single derby can generate, and it’s added a fresh layer to what’s already been an eventful few days of post-match debate surrounding Rangers’ 3-0 win.
The incident itself unfolded in the 78th minute, with the game already well beyond doubt at 3-0 to the home side. It began innocuously enough, the kind of aggressive, competitive challenge that punctuates virtually every Old Firm derby without drawing much scrutiny on its own. Dujon Sterling and Celtic’s Haissem Hassan tangled for the ball deep in the Rangers box, with Sterling’s challenge bringing the Egypt international down as he slid in for possession. That much barely raised an eyebrow in the moment. What followed is where things escalated sharply. As Hassan lay on the ground following the challenge, Penrice charged in and kicked the ball directly into his face from close range. Reports describing the moment characterise it as looking largely accidental in terms of intent, but the contact itself was unmistakable, and it triggered an immediate and heated confrontation involving players from both sides, with even Rangers goalkeeper Ivor Pandur getting dragged into the ensuing scuffle before things were calmed down.
Referee Nick Walsh’s response, once order was restored, was to book both Penrice and Hassan for their part in the flare-up, judging the conduct serious enough to warrant a caution each but stopping short of showing either player a red card. Sterling, whose original challenge on Hassan had set the whole sequence in motion, escaped any disciplinary action at all. On the pitch, in real time, that was where the matter ended, a fairly standard resolution to what had briefly threatened to boil over into something messier, with the game restarting and Rangers seeing out the remainder of a comfortable win without further major incident.
It’s in the days since, though, that the incident has drawn a second wave of scrutiny, and this time it’s Penrice’s yellow card specifically, rather than Walsh’s overall performance, that’s come under the microscope. Speaking on The Ref’s View podcast, former Scottish Football Association referee Steve Conroy weighed in with a considerably harsher assessment than the one Walsh reached in the moment. Conroy’s argument, delivered in typically blunt terms to the Daily Record, was that Penrice’s action met the threshold for a straight red card under the laws of the game, regardless of how the collision might have looked in terms of intent, and that Walsh’s leniency in only booking the defender was, in his view, the wrong call entirely.
Conroy didn’t hold back in how he framed his verdict either, making clear that had he been the one refereeing the incident, Penrice would have been sent off without hesitation, and there’d have been no leeway or benefit of the doubt extended for what he considered a blatant act deserving of the game’s most serious sanction. It’s the kind of unambiguous, no-nuance verdict that tends to generate exactly this sort of follow-up media coverage, a former official putting his name and reputation behind a clear position rather than offering the sort of hedged, both-sides analysis that leaves plenty of wiggle room for disagreement. Conroy’s argument centres on the basic mechanics of the offence: a player, in an off-the-ball or secondary-contact situation, deliberately or carelessly striking an opponent in the face with the ball from close range is exactly the kind of act that laws around violent conduct or serious foul play are designed to capture, regardless of whether the broader football conversation wants to file it under “handbags” or classic Old Firm needle rather than genuine misconduct.
There’s a useful piece of broader context Conroy brought to his analysis too, one that speaks to how these individual flashpoint decisions tend to get judged not purely on the letter of the laws but against a backdrop of how refereeing has approached similarly feisty, combative moments in Old Firm fixtures over the years. He made the point that Scottish football has had a run of what he considers overly sanitised, insipid Rangers versus Celtic fixtures in recent seasons, lacking the old needle and physical edge that used to define the rivalry, and that there’s a risk of referees being too lenient with genuinely combative moments simply because the fixture as a whole has cooled in terms of overt aggression compared to previous eras. But he was equally clear that leniency shouldn’t extend to letting an incident like Penrice’s escape with only a yellow card purely because it fits a pattern of feistier, more physically engaged football returning to the fixture under new management on both sides. He even drew a comparison to how a similar act by a legendary former Celtic captain would, in his view, have warranted precisely the same red-card sanction, underlining that his standard is meant to be applied consistently regardless of which team’s player is involved.
Zooming out from Penrice’s individual moment, Walsh’s overall display on derby day has actually held up reasonably well under wider scrutiny, according to other analysis carried out since the final whistle. A separate assessment from a former Grade One official concluded that Walsh got the majority of his major calls right across the afternoon, despite the two significant VAR interventions and the on-field confrontation involving Penrice and Hassan. That same review flagged the disallowed Fernandez header, ruled out for a marginal Raskin offside in the buildup, as correctly adjudicated on review, and separately identified a different Celtic player, defender Colby Donovan, as fortunate to escape a red card of his own elsewhere in the match. Taken together, that broader picture suggests Sunday’s derby, while unusually feisty and littered with contentious moments even by Old Firm standards, wasn’t necessarily a case of one-sided or fundamentally incompetent officiating so much as a genuinely eventful, high-stakes fixture that threw up an unusually high number of fifty-fifty calls for Walsh and his VAR team to navigate inside ninety minutes.
That said, the Penrice incident specifically does seem to sit closer to the clearer end of the spectrum than some of the other flashpoints from the same game, at least in the eyes of the pundits and former officials who’ve reviewed it since. Unlike the more genuinely marginal VAR calls around offside positioning, which reasonable observers can disagree on even after multiple replay angles, the sight of a player kicking a ball into an opponent’s face at close range, whatever the underlying intent, tends to generate a more binary reaction: either you think that’s a sending-off offence in isolation, full stop, or you think context and apparent lack of malicious intent should soften the sanction down to a caution. Conroy has planted his flag firmly in the former camp, and the framing of Celtic “receiving a fresh verdict” on the incident suggests this conversation isn’t fully settled from the Celtic side of the divide either, even several days on from the final whistle.
For Rangers, the practical consequences of all this retrospective debate are, in truth, fairly limited. Retrospective disciplinary action for incidents that were seen and dealt with by the match officials in real time, even imperfectly according to some outside observers, is rare in Scottish football outside of clear cases where the officials missed an incident entirely rather than simply making a decision some pundits disagree with afterwards. Walsh did see the Penrice incident, did adjudicate on it in the moment, and issued what he judged to be an appropriate sanction at the time. That tends to close the door on any formal retrospective review, regardless of how strongly a former referee might argue afterwards that the call should have gone the other way. Conroy’s intervention, however pointed, is best understood as part of the ongoing media conversation and scrutiny that follows every contentious Old Firm flashpoint these days rather than something likely to trigger any actual sanction against Penrice after the fact.
Still, for a player who delivered what’s been described as a combative, disruptive performance in helping Rangers neutralise Celtic’s threat down the flanks, this latest bit of scrutiny adds an asterisk of sorts to what was otherwise a strong individual display in a landmark derby win. Whether it changes anything about how Penrice approaches similarly physical confrontations in the return fixture at Celtic Park next weekend remains to be seen, but McInnes’s side will hope any lingering conversation around the incident fades quickly, allowing the focus to shift fully back to preparing for what’s already shaping up to be another highly charged occasion between these two sides just seven days on from Sunday’s Ibrox rout
