Lee Wilkie, the Dundee United defender, joined with his manager, Craig Levein, in slamming the performance of the referee, Mike McCurry, at Ibrox on Saturday.

Wilkie, like Levein, was adamant that United’s disallowed goal should have stood to make it 2-1, and that United should also have had a penalty when Noel Hunt was challenged by David Weir.

The defender also confirmed that he had been head-butted by Daniel Cousin.

“I’m really struggling for words to describe how I feel,” Wilkie said. “I thought it was a stonewall penalty and then you’re talking about a red card for the player. Then to get a goal disallowed for nothing in my eyes is unbelievable. You can moan about decisions but these decisions change the game – a penalty and red card would have done.

“As soon as we scored that goal, the referee must have taken about five seconds to decide whether he wanted to give it or not. I don’t know if he was trying to find something wrong with it and he couldn’t find anything.

“I don’t really think the referee knew what the linesman had given. The deflection has beaten the keeper – not the fact that David Robertson was in his line of vision 30 yards away.

“It was getting laughable. When it gets like that you just want to give up and walk off. You wouldn’t do that, but you reach that stage where you’re so despondent.”

Wilkie said that, having been butted by Cousin, his anger towards McCurry only increased. Television pictures later confirmed that Cousin had been lucky to remain on the park.

“We got into a bit of a tangle, then he [Cousin] stuck the head on me,” the defender said. “Luckily, I’m about five inches bigger than him or I would have got it on the face. I went across to him, had a word and got booked for it.

“I said to the referee, ‘If you had the head stuck on you, you wouldn’t stand still and accept it’, simple as that. So he got a booking and I got a booking. It just summed up the day really.”

Asked if the referee had shown “bias”, Wilkie was more circumspect in his response.

“Sometimes when you’re coming to Ibrox and Parkhead you expect it to be like that,” he said. “But when big decisions like that go against you it hurts even more. It does seem to happen more at Parkhead and Ibrox but it might just be paranoia from other teams.

“I don’t know if you’d say they were doing that on purpose but that’s the way it looks today. Some players get in front of 40,000 and they don’t perform, they fold under the pressure, and it’s got to be the same with referees.

“It was a big game for them but a big game for us too. It goes back to the penalty. Even a draw would have been a good result for us. A win would have been unbelievable.”