Daizen Maeda scored with five minutes remaining against Hearts, the assistant referee’s flag went up for offside, and Celtic’s title celebration briefly hung on a call that was being checked in the VAR room. Kevin Clancy drew the lines and decided there had been no offside in the build-up, keeping Maeda’s goal on the board in a match that ended with Celtic winning the title.
The key sequence turned on what happened before the finish, not after it. Sky Sports showed an angle that appeared to put Maeda beyond the last defender when Marcelo Saracchi played the ball down the left flank, but the ball had actually been slipped to Callum Osmand first, and Osmand was onside when he received it. He then pulled it back to Maeda in the centre of the box, where the forward finished the move. Osmand later scored himself to round off Celtic’s 3-1 victory, sealing the championship with the last kick of the ball.
That second goal left little room for argument about the result, even if the first one dominated the reaction. After the match, Steve Conroy and Des Roache praised Don Robertson and the officials on The Ref’s View podcast X account, saying: “Congratulations to Celtic on winning the title. Commiserations to Hearts on a very valiant effort.” They added: “Very good performance from Don and his team today, under massive pressure. They got the big calls right and kept control. Absolutely despicable scenes at the end of the game.”
Their defence of the decision was aimed at the debate that followed the broadcast angle shared online, which made the celtic goal offside case look stronger than it was. The referees also addressed the argument over interference, saying: “He is not interfering with play as the ball was not passed to him.” When the call was challenged more forcefully, they replied: “That, sadly, shows your ignorance of the Laws of The Game. Basic.”
What mattered in the end was not the freeze-frame, but the full move. The assistant referee flagged what he thought he saw, VAR checked the build-up, and Celtic kept the goal that pushed them over the line before Osmand finished the job. By the time the dust settled, the title was theirs and the argument had shifted from whether the goal should have stood to why the misleading image spread so quickly before the build-up was clarified.
