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Been watching a lot of old matches recently, and it reminded me how good Ferguson was. Easily the best Scottish midfielder of his generation and IMO a true Rangers great/legend. I know there are also a lot of negative things aimed towards him from Rangers fans however his Rangers career is up their with the best Rangers players, thoughts?.

Clearly such option would never have been on the table.

What we do know is that liquidity is essential. Companies across the UK were /are stretching every credit facility in an unprecedented way. The govt is bailing out to some degree businesses and individuals. Our liquidity which is non-existent is going to depend on operational cost reduction, loans, player sales and fans buying ST. It really isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t matter what blue tinted spectacles we put on it this is a real danger moment for us - and we still have Ashley court case to deal with.

You think you heard it all before? Think again ... 2 Auchinleck had NINE games in hand when the virus hit As outlandish as the table looks, the mathematics in Talbot's favour is fairly straightforward. Tommy Sloan's side have cut great swathes through the junior ranks in recent years and the fact they still had nine games in hand on Kilwinning gives them the title on the account of their average points per game ratio of 2.56, which comfortably outstrips Kilwinning's 2.12. In the last season before a major re-organisation of the Scottish game is set to place with the formation of the West of Scotland league within the Scottish senior football pyramid, Blantyre Vics and Darvel shared the Championship title. Vics actually had a marginally superior points per game advantage from their matches to date (46 from 18 = 2.55) to Darvel (53 from 21 = 2.523), but the league decided that a joint award was the only fair way to decide. ?⚽️ McBOOKIE SJFA WEST CHAMPIONSHIP | We are delighted to confirm that @BVFC1890 & @darvelfc have been declared as Joint winners of McBookie SJFA West Championship 2019-20. ??????? #SJFAWest pic.twitter.com/rYM66IIF8L — West Region SJFA (@SjfaWest) April 21, 2020 Elswewhere, Shettleston Juniors are the champions of West Region League 1. Johnstone Burgh get the honours in League 2. No fewer than 67 clubs from the junior ranks have an expressed an interest to play in the West of Scotland leagues from season 2020-21 onwards. https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/sport/football/5517193/auchinleck-talbot-west-premiership-champions-third/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=scottishsunfootballfacebook&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1587501531

I meant to ask you how your new job with Hollicom is going, Bill. ?

If the roles were reversed and the circumstances the same. Personally, I´d allow them to make the noise up until the title is awarded, then as a club put out a statement saying that although we´d take the CL entry, we wouldn´t consider it a full title and the number going into a prospective 2020/21 would still be 8IAR.

I can honestly say I wouldn’t.

Barca have said they would give the proceeds from this to corona-virus charities, not for their own coffers.

Employees can only be furloughed if they agree to it. In most cases, people agree to it because the alternative may be redundancy. However that's obviously not the case with players. It needs to be public pressure for them to look to help, rather than them sitting back and collecting cash being paid for by supporters who are on furlough or reduced hours.

Cracking footballer. Media lapdog. To be fair, he surpassed his older brother in footballing terms (mainly because he put his career first) but they are both a waste of column inches.

Over 700 deaths today and as long as we have people dying then there should be no sporting events were you have mass gathering of people I think we're about to see the grasping side of football soon were administrators will want to play behind closed doors just to get the sponsors money and keep their television deals they used to call it the people's game well you cant ha e a people's game with no fans . If need be I would scrap all football until January then reassess the situation.

I can't believe Celtc fans seriously think the SPFL is pro-Rangers. ?

eh ? That lot seriously have an alternative reality. I actually had a Hibs supporting friend, normally logical and a smart guy, said to me "Do you think that the ICT CEO had been got at ? Inexplicable vote". I had to reply to him... "I know what you're getting at (ex-Rangers and/or rumours RFC were offering him a job) but no. How is it an inexplicable vote when his team are sitting in the play-off spots in the Championship and could have been promoted to the top division had they been successful. That opportunity has now been denied them". How is that inexplicable ? He clearly voted for what made most sense for ICT. Self-interest ? Absolutely. Inexplicable ? certainly not.

The table in the junior belies what is actually the case - it is only when you read the narrative you get the full story. 9 games in hand and Talbot fairly significantly ahead in every single metric in the West Premiership. It is still bonkers to award the league on that basis though. I imagine the vast majority of Junior fans would be in agreement Talbot would have won the league anyway, but that isn't exactly the point.

That isn't using the Ayrshire calculator though if comparing Rangers to Talbot. If Rangers win all their games they need Celtic to drop points elsewhere. Talbot could win their league with plenty of games to spare. Kilwinning COULD end up on 68 points if they win their remaining 5 games. That would leave them 27 points ahead of Talbot. However, if Talbot won their remaining games they would finish the season on 83 points - a full 15 points, or 5 games, ahead of Kilwinning. Your comparison is flawed compo, significantly. Either way, this still shows (despite me being a Talbot fan) how much of a farce it is to award team's league titles in this manner. Look at Raith Rovers getting promoted at the expense of Falkirk...1 point separated them and Raith still had to go to Falkirk yet. It is utter lunacy.

That is a very good question and I suspect you are right. There's a growing bandwagon to curtail social distancing measures and I'm unclear whether it's the usual sheep syndrome or just a reflection of the lack of stamina for anything in current society. I'm fairly clear about one thing though - if we lift restrictions to soon and too quickly, the repercussions will be a damn sight worse than persevering until infection rates are much lover than they are today. People need to show some bottle and get through this, not f*ck it up at the half way stage.

Thanks TB, I had only read the headline

We haven't seen an global economic complete shutdown lasting for multiple weeks before. We also haven't seen stimulus packages of the quantum or needs as this one. That is their point, they can't use previous trends because this is unchartered territory. I contend that it isn't common and hasn't really happened before either - even in the Great Depression, economies were still working. This one, globally, has ground to a halt. I am perhaps an optimist but I am with Bill in that I suspect that once things open up again I think that industries and jobless numbers will drastically reduce. My fear, though, would be a 2nd or 3rd wave - not so much as it could result in another lockdown but that the markets will react very unfavorably to that instance - I personally don't think a 2nd or 3rd wave, and how they are handled, has been priced into the markets yet. The lockdown is causing the economic carnage but it certainy isn't causing the wider health issue - unless you consider economics to be the only issue..... If governments don't get the "r" below 1 (average rate of contamination) then you have an expanding virus. Timing will be everything with this - herd immunity is not only a foregone conclusion but also essential to build immunity and build people to be asymptomatic. However, you and I both know that the markets don't work on common sense all the time. If, for example, the UK says in 6 months time that there is an increase in CV cases again you can guarantee that the markets will go into a frenzy, not matter whether it is short term or not. No matter whether a 2nd wave is a large, or small, issue. It is all very well to say stop the lockdown and get back to work, but that runs the risk of infections rapidly increasing again and even greater pressure on the healthcare systems around the world. As I said, timing is everything. Back on topic, yes Rangers must now tighten the belts - what will be interesting to see is what happens across the city - as I said earlier, everything is relative in Scotland, how we do is relative to Celtic - but their wage bill is significantly greater than ours and is largely dependent upon making the CL. Will they ultimately have to sell assets to a) cover wages b) get some wages off the books to lower costs and c) ultimately balance the books. This could hurt them financially far more than it hurts us, which brings them closer to us financially, which then MIGHT allow us a chance to challenge, even without the need to have a "war chest".

Most footballers and their agents will be fully aware that the whole of Europe is affected, so pissing off a current employer probably won't bode well when looking for a new one. "You're skint so I'm leaving! Oh, everyone else is skint too.".

I have just read the comments on the BBC SPFL league reconstruction article. It's mainly infested by yahoos claiming this is all happening because the SPFL and SFA are staffed by Rangers people who want to see them lose out on 9 in a Row. ?

@Craig will come up with one. I’ll start him off. The keeper’s McCloy. Eric Caldow. Sammy Cox. With Cox in the side you don’t need many more. Has Kevin Thomson got a granny from Auchinleck?

Grangemouth apparently. He’s in the east XI.

1 ,tommy Lawrence 2,Eric Caldow 3,Tommy Gemmill 4Steve Nicol 5, Ross McCrorie 6,Eric Murray 7 James Forrest 8, Ian Fleming 9 Kris Boyd 10,Alan Forrest 11Tom Walsh Manager Bill Shankly

I wouldn't have believed that I live in a country that's capable of that level of absolute nonsense. Sporting integrity is dead and buried. R.I.P.

As you say Ian best player of his generation and a player who'd be in your team every week. Been to a few Q&As with players who played in the same Rangers team as him and they all say how good a player he was. For DA to not only build a team around him, shows how good a player he was. Would take 11 Barry Ferguson's in the team now that's for sure.

It’s wasted on them. They don’t care.

Mate, I would try to put something together for discussion but I am a) absolutely swamped at work and b) all of this really would be guesswork because there are so many variables. I have read that matchday profit is negligible at Rangers so right now we shouldn't be overly hurting (wages should be getting funded from ST's - though that also depends on whether CC companies are releasing funds as, I think it was BD that said, they only release them from the CCCS per game - and with games not getting played we may be seeing that income drying up). Some may not want to hear this but our current financial state is one thing.... everything is relative i.e. we will be successful or not, dependent on where we are in relation to Celtic. I suspect that Dave King & T3B (again, personal business circumstance and finances pending) have come so far that they wouldn't let the club fail. May need additional funding but I suspect (nothing more than a hunch) that they would be prepared to do so. But Celtic wages are significantly higher than ours, CL qualification wages. With the pandemic drying up income it is known that they have asked, and been rejected, Adidas for an up front payment for their new sponsorship. Adidas have asked for state aid from Germany.... so things clearly aren't all rosy at Celtic Park. It is also rumoured that much if not all, of the Tierney money is segregated for, ahem, anticipated legal cases against them. If the transfer market dries up or significantly drops that will hurt us for sure - but given their need to sell, annually, if they don't make the CL then one has to expect that it will hurt them more. Which is a good thing. Yes, we have been running at losses even with decent sized European income - but that EL income has also helped fund purchasing Kent for 6.5 million (as an example)… we may have to curtail such purchases for a period - but that also depends on the club, King & T3B funding, sponsorships, commercial retail issues with Ashley, potential share issues (will they be postponed as people look to their financial liquidity) ? And all of that is before we even look at the personal financial situation of 43,000 ST holders and their ability to continue to buy ST's.... or, as an extension of that, the alleged 15,000 ST waiting list The situation is far too liquid, far too variable, to quickly make a stab at what to expect. Sorry

Agreed. But talking about his football ability and career he was outstanding, especially in matches against Separate Entity FC and in Europe.

Let's be quite open about this, there is not a remote chance of a 50,000 strong Ibrox crowd watching a Rangers match this calendar year. Until such time as a vaccine can be found, mass-produced, distributed and found to be working, can we take the chance as a country of allowing such mass congregation of spectators to watch a sporting event. The best estimate of this happening is 12-18 months. So there might be football back on tv before then, but not with full house crowds. So as a football club, and a business, that gets most of its annual income from such crowds, then the sooner we cut our costs accordingly, the better the chance we have of survival. There is not one player, coach, manager or administrator that is worth our club going bust for. Our non-staff overheads are also enormous at our club, for ongoing maintenance, insurances, etc, and with nothing coming in, these have to be managed. I have yet to hear that by furloughing a player, that gives them any wriggle room in their contract to leave for free. Obviously if it turns out that this would allow the player to leave for free (i.e. breach of contract), then this wouldn't work, but as far as I am concerned, we should be putting every single non-playing, non-income generating, member of staff on furlough and not topping up their wages, or if we can afford to , top them up to a reasonable level that would allow them to live. As for players, slash all wages until such times as they can undertake their work again. A lot of our players aren't even in the country, but we are continuing to pay them in full (dont give me any tosh about deferrals, that merely adds a debt to be repaid down the line), despite them not being able to go to work or to earn their wages. Furlough them all, take the longer term view and safeguard our future. If it turns out that somehow a vaccine is found sooner, and we dont have this gap in our income for as long as I am predicting, then we an make it up to them and repay the wages they have lost, or at least some of them. But the safety and long-term future of the club has to be our Director's first and only concern at this time. Players will come and players will go, the club has to be kept safe to ensure it is still there for us to enjoy in the decades to come.

I should be so lucky.

There may be a government guideline which insists on social distancing.

Funnily enough we have plenty of precedents, albeit the cause (in this case a 'disease) is different. It is scary and what bothers me is that the government continue to insist that they're listening to their medical advisers. That's crazy. They can only give one side of the issue to the government but history tells us that far more deaths occur in depressions and in poorer economies than this disease can ever cause. I could give you those numbers but they are very frightening so I'll refrain from that on here. One additional thing w are beginning to see also is a sharp decline in the value of certain stocks. This lockdown has shown how vulnerable certain businesses are and as a result their intrinsic value will be lowered to reflect that. This means that pension funds and other investments will be widely affected too. The long term effects of this lockdown are way greater than the threat of the disease. Rangers must tap into its supporters better. I don't know how much room there is to manoeuvre on Rangers TV so that we can show all away domestic games on that platform. We need to look at all avenues of income.

I preferred the old idea that you got a testimonial for ten years of service. There would be precious few testimonials on that basis these days .... but surely that's the point.