Wrong call on penalty robbed us of point at Morton, insists Raith Rovers boss Ian Murray

That spot-kick – branded by Murray as one of the worst officiating decisions he’s ever seen – was awarded three minutes into stoppage time by referee Greg Aitken for what he judged to be a foul by Raith defender Kieran Ngwenya on Quitongo, denying the Fifers a chance to put a bit more distance between themselves and the Scottish Championship’s bottom three.

As things stand, with 12 points from ten games ahead of a trip to Arbroath on Wednesday night, they’re only a point better off than third-bottom Cove Rangers, beaten 1-0 at home by the Kirkcaldy side’s hosts this coming Saturday, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, at the weekend.

“To concede a penalty so late in the game, literally the last kick of the ball, is very frustrating,” Murray told Raith TV afterwards.

“At the time, I didn’t think it was a penalty kick, far from it, and I watched it back straight after and it’s definitely not.

“The referee in that situation has to be 100% sure. He was quite far back in play as well and very quick at awarding it.

“The player’s dived – that’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter how we dress that up. We can call it gamesmanship, we can call it trying to win points for your team.

“How he can give that penalty and be 100% sure I’ll never know, and if he sees it back, and I hope he does watch it back because it’s only fair that he comes out and says it’s a mistake. Mistakes we can handle, as long as you admit them.

“I’d be the first to admit when we concede penalties – Inverness at home, stonewall penalty kick; today it should have been a free-kick for us for simulation.

“I spoke to the referee on the park. I didn’t say anything untoward, I didn’t use bad language. I just told him it wasn’t a penalty-kick and that was before I’d seen it back. I also explained that he had to be 100% clear. His response was ‘go and ask your defender’.

“It’s frustrating for me and the players because it now affects our weekend, it affects our whole working week that we had last week and it affects our mentality going into the next game because we’ve lost points that we shouldn’t have lost today.

“We can look at how the penalty was conceded and the build-up, absolutely. We can look at our quality in the final third that wasn’t quite there today, but in terms of our defensive performance, it was there and the boys worked so hard for 90-plus minutes and didn’t deserve to get undone by a decision like that.

“You get in trouble now for speaking and you saw Jim Goodwin a couple of weeks ago getting a long ban, but that decision was up there with the worst I’ve seen.”

“We made two poor decisions in the build-up to the penalty-kick because the Morton player was offside when the ball went forward so we didn’t actually have to do anything. We could have let it run and the game would effectively have been over.

“We’ve got to appreciate and respect that the decisions we made leading up to it weren’t great but also the referee has to respect that he’s made a wrong decision.”

Murray was happy with much of his side’s performance overall in Inverclyde but critical of their lack of a cutting edge up front, saying: “In terms of their work-rate and commitment and the way they went toe to toe with a very physical side, there were no negatives, though I’m frustrated with the scoreline.

“Performance-wise, we could have been better going forward, but that’s always the hardest part of football.

“It wasn’t our day. We’ve hit the post, we’ve hit the bar, we’ve lost a player after five minutes and we’ve had a 93rd-minute penalty given against us. Sometimes you have to go away and take it on the chin and just say ‘this is not our day’. I’m sure we’ll have plenty more days when it is our day.”