Former Scottish referee Steve Conroy believes the SFA will be forced to take action against Vaclav Cerny after his controversial water-spraying incident at Celtic Park during Sunday’s Glasgow Derby.
Speaking on The Ref’s View podcast, Conroy stated that disciplinary action is inevitable, even if the refereeing team did not deal with the incident at the time.
The former official explained that match officials would have been focused on the pitch and ensuring the goal was legitimate rather than monitoring player celebrations in the technical areas.
Despite this, Conroy insists the SFA must act, though he is unsure what the punishment will be.
He said: “You wonder what would be the sanction – something will happen to him, obviously,” as quoted by RecordSport.
“He will get some sort of sanction, but that wasn’t the refereeing teams calls.
“I doubt very much that Don was looking over there, anyway. When the goal is scored the first instinct is that all the team is going to be checking that everything is alright on the pitch.
“Once that is okay, then you can deal with the dugouts. So, it was nothing to do with us (there referees), absolutely nothing.
“But the SFA will have to do something, whatever that is. Do you ban him for a game? Do you censure him? I have no idea. It was pathetic, it was infantile.”
Cerny’s antics have already sparked police and SFA investigations, with growing calls for disciplinary action.
Celtic have launched their own review of the incident, and it remains to be seen what punishment—if any—the Czech winger will face.
He has spoken out after the incident, making the excuse that the stands were close and his bottle happened to be open, all while saying he couldn’t speak too much about it.
For those who think it’s wrong that the winger is punished, I ask one thing: what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot and a fan sprayed water on Cerny? Most likely, they would be ejected from the stadium, with their season ticket revoked.
