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Naw should have saved that

Those free-kicks from Rice were stunning.

Results went in Leeds favour tonight. Still five games to go though so many many twists and turns to come. Two blatant offsides given wrongly against Leeds to deny them goals and breathing space. Strange that there is no VAR in the English Championship

Never saw it as I was watching our American Brothers aka Leeds Utd Still wouldnt write Real off

I knew it was a mistake to indulge him

This week it was 9 guys in front of him, last week for Dundee's 2nd the ball took a bad bounce. There is always an excuse.

Am no having that mate. Even Butland was annoyed with himself after the first goal. It skipped through his hands fs 😂

I was sent this horrorshow, and thought that y'all n eeded to see it, too. Why should I be the only one to suffer?

Oh, and that's not me saying so, it's Philipp Lahm. I wonder if there are lessons here......... Italian teams cannot cope with modern football’s intensity. They need a reboot | Serie A | The Guardian Italian teams cannot cope with modern football’s intensity. They need a reboot Philipp Lahm Fifteen years on from a Serie A side winning the Champions League, Atlético Madrid are the blueprint for return to the top Tue 8 Apr 2025 08.00 BST I am also a child of Italian football. My school was called AC Milan. The 4-0 win against Barcelona in the 1994 Champions League final was the benchmark in my training for how a team attack and defend together. What distances do we keep? Who is responsible for winning the ball? When are cross-field passes forbidden? No other game was shown more often by our Swedish chief instructor Björn Andersson; he must have seen it a hundred times. My other experience of Italy: I suffered heavy defeats during my career. In my youth, playing against Italian teams was a nightmare. At tournaments in Sicily, Viareggio or Sardinia, we got nothing for free and always took a beating. Later, we lost the semi-finals of the 2006 World Cup and the 2012 Euro with the national team. In my first European final with Bayern, in 2010, we were beaten 2-0 by Inter. Led by the defensive maestro José Mourinho, Inter scored two goals after long balls. We, only at the beginning of a development, were tactically immature and overwhelmed as a collective. So I know what makes Italian football strong. I should say: what made it strong. Because this Champions League title was the most recent. Once the world’s best league, Serie A could soon (as it was from 1969 to 1984) have been watching for 15 years as others win the big trophy. This season, Inter are Italy’s last team – and against Bayern in the quarter-finals, whose first leg takes place on Tuesday, they are not the favourites. You could see in 2010 that something was ending. Inter needed a huge amount of luck to survive the semi-final against a superior Barcelona. In the first leg, a volcano in Iceland helped, its eruption hampering the journey from Spain. In the second leg, Inter barricaded themselves in the box in a bizarre way. That rarely goes well. Mourinho probably sensed it, left as a triple winner and moved to Madrid. In the past, everyone wanted to go to Italy. Milan was the football capital of the world. Here in Germany, a sentence from Andreas Möller became a familiar saying: “Milan or Madrid, as long as it’s Italy!” (“Mailand oder Madrid – Hauptsache, Italien!”) Everyone still understands what he meant, not just Italy holidaymakers like me. The basis for the superiority was Arrigo Sacchi’s ball-oriented zonal marking, which is still the operating system of football. The whole of Italy adopted it, giving them a huge advantage. In the 90s, Milan reached the final three times in a row, followed by Juventus three times. Clubs such as Sampdoria, Parma and Lazio won European trophies. In 2003, there was the final between Juventus and Milan. The downturn has various reasons. For example, many Italian clubs are no longer in the hands of patrons from their home country, but in those of investors from the US. In England, capital from abroad is accepted, but in Italy, identity and meaning have apparently been lost as a result of this sell-out. You can see that in the outdated stadiums. I’m surprised about this; after all, we are talking about the country where the Colosseum is located. Italy will modernise its arenas for the 2032 Euros. There are plans to rebuild San Siro, once the Scala of football. That’s good: a society needs sustainable and family-friendly places to meet to celebrate football as a cultural asset. But the crisis has one main sporting cause: on the pitch, there is a lack of initiative, commitment, athleticism. Italy spends a lot less than the four other top leagues in Spain, England, France and Germany. The players run less. I read a statistic a few years ago that said that the Bundesliga team with the lowest values ran more than the team with the highest values in the Serie A. Italy has not updated its operating system; it works too slowly. The problem is not new. I still remember how Mourinho substituted two strikers in the first leg against Barcelona in 2010 and three strikers in the second leg because they were getting cramp. In regulation time, not in extra time. This lack of dynamism has continued, and it leads to a quality problem. Where the opponent pressure is too low, no player develops his skills to world class. That’s why there is no Baggio, no Del Piero, Cannavaro, Maldini, Baresi, Gattuso or Pirlo. Today’s Italian teams remind me of a Ferrari that has been throttled back from 200 horsepower, with a half-full tank of fuel, and runs out of fuel 10 laps before the finish. Even the most beautiful design won’t help. Italy were better organised than Germany in the Nations League last month but they couldn’t handle the Germans’ intensity. To borrow from a famous Giovanni Trapattoni press conference with Bayern in 1998: Italy played like an empty tank. Tactically, Italy’s footballers are still good, especially in comparison with the Germans and the English. They’ve all got the ball-oriented defending, the details in one-on-one duels and risk management. The national team benefit from this time and again. In a tournament with seven games, this can work out really well, as it did for the 2021 Euro title. But resting on a 1-0 lead can go wrong. All men behind the ball – that’s something nations such as Georgia have also mastered by now: see Euro 2024. And so the four-time world champions recently missed out on the World Cup twice. Italy last won a World Cup knockout game in 2006. Italy’s tactical clarity helps its coaches to win major club titles. Carlo Ancelotti has been successful for more than two decades, but not in his home country for a very long time. We have to go back to the 90s for the time when Marcello Lippi, Trapattoni and Fabio Capello were the who’s who of the coaching ranks. How can this traditional football nation find its way back to its former glory? It doesn’t seem that complicated. Another heavy defeat brings me to this conclusion. We were knocked out in the 2016 Champions League semi-finals by Atlético Madrid. Our opponents gave 180 minutes of the highest intensity. We didn’t get anything for free at any point. Diego Simeone’s football still impresses me. The good news for Italy is that you can still win with defensive football. But slowing down is not the answer; grandezza alone is no longer enough. You need to add something: power when winning the ball, activity in possession, an unrelenting desire to conquer and attack, the Simeone style. You can learn a lot from the passion of this Argentinian coach. In fact, the whole of Italy should be playing like Atlético. Philipp Lahm’s column was produced in partnership with Oliver Fritsch at Zeit Online, the German online magazine.

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/man-seriously-assaulted-in-stands-at-celtic-park-as-investigation-launched Don't think enough of a fuss is made about how antisemitic that club is. Driven out Jewish players as well.

Ah well, shows how much I know. 2 stunning free-kicks from Rice - Tav-esque......😁

There currently isn't a David Holmes type figure at / or around the club. Hopefully the potential new owners have a few aces up their sleeves.

We need another Souness esque revolution now.... desperately

39 years ago today, this man was named Manager of Rangers Football Club. The rest is history.

After his first few games I reckoned he was a decent enough ‘keeper but with a tendency to fumble low shots especially diving left even under no pressure. I wonder if he takes his eye off the ball thinking he’s got it covered while he wonders what to do next when he’s got it.

That’s generous of you, CF.

Another season in the Championship awaits the baggies. Just not run well enough and don't have the squad required to sustain a real promotion push.

But very inconsistent and been on a bad run since Brugge knocked them out of the CL. Surprisingly, Brugge looked comfortable against them (home and away). For every 4 or 5 nil victory there is a 1-0 defeat. Lost their last 3 games since winning 4-0 away to Juventus. On their day, a great team to watch but very frustrating and inconsistent.

Yeah, good at asking questions, but terrible at answering them. He did admit to a lack of knowledge of other leagues, so his soul / complete data-set is Scottish football. It's a wonder he entered a conversation / debate regarding league reconstruction with no knowledge of how other leagues work or how competitive they are as a result of their structure. Maybe alterior motives but that would be derailing the thread. I think the overall response to the thread shows that most who entered the debate believe that reconstruction needs to happen for the development of the Scottish game. Not that it's going to happen anytime soon as some clubs won't vote for less OF games and sponsors and TV companies won't back it either.

Surely you'd expect a professional keeper to keep their first goal out? Maybe not hold it but certainly palm it away. He might have seen it late and it was well struck but I thought he was at fault for that goal.

Hmm, sure I'd read he had an extension option for 2027. Turns out this isn't about him though its just shitely worded. Also there were plenty of offers there for the aforementioned players, we kept holding out to try and get better offers, and ultimately ended up with egg on our faces because we held on to long, the players got fed up or declined. The only one no one wanted was Goldson, and we decided to go back in and give him another deal.

Yup, been saying this for a while now, he is just not good.

You're not grasping the mathematics of probability. Of course it will vary from match to match; it's not a big enough data set. xG is only useful over the medium to long term, which is why when using player xG, I take season data, not one-off games. That's true for goals scored, too: teams can score 8-9 goals in a single game, but that won't continue over every match in a season. I post single match shot maps and xG, like above, because I think it illustrates where shots are taken from and gives a general idea of the quality of the chances we've created. I don't draw any hard conclusions from it. All you're saying is your internal xG model is better than the mathematicians at Opta. If that's what you believe, then fair enough. I'm not going to argue with you. The Opta model has Dessers on 12.52 xG for the season. You seem to have him on 9 in the last 3 games alone. So he should be on about 54 goals from the 18 full matches he's played (1,674 mins) in the league? He has scored 12 goals. By all means keep calling it bollocks, but its accuracy is self-evident.

There you go you could’ve drowned your sorrows for less than four pounds. 😅

I understand the stats behind it but I disagree with it almost entirely. There are not thousands of chances at Ibrox playing for Rangers for a £5M striker to compare against. I dispute the chances being compared to his actually being similar. If a centre half finds himself through on goal like that and fails to hit the target then fans sigh but are not surprised. A striker on hot form scores those chances. Also, a chance falling to a striker in the final minute of a 4-0 win is not the same as a chance at 0-0 after 10 minutes. But they are treated the same by stattos and both are counted the same for xG. Of course they are not similar, it’s ridiculous to suggest they are. This computerisation of football to spew meaningless stats out just to make talking points is abhorrent and totally unnecessary. I trust my eyes to tell me if when a Rangers striker is through on goal if it is a good chance, a great chance or not much of a chance. Dessers had 4 really good chances on Saturday, and didn’t even force a save from the keeper on any of them. These misses now make other strikers similar misses look ordinary because they will be counted in someone else’s xG comparison. For xG to say we should only have got 1 goal out of 15 chances is just making the stats look ridiculous. Anyone in attendance would tell you Dessers should have had a hat-trick to go along with his double hat-trick from Dundee, but instead we have xG telling us he is performing just as expected. Absolute bollocks to that. I appreciate you love the stats side of the game Rousseau, and they make interesting analysis at times, but I find more and more they paint a picture that is totally alien to the game it refers to. The wee passing wheels and average positional stuff is interesting because it is based on facts, xG is not based on facts. It compares apples and oranges and tells us they are both bananas.

I went for Souttar. Thought he did okay.

A winner - acht well, it was short odds on who'd reply. I thought both goals were Borna's fault.......

The final straw was a long time ago.😀

I don't subscribe to that either, but I do think he is done. Needs moved on.

4/5 of the right type of signings (guys that suit SPFL and beat the low block) makes the world of difference to this team IMO. Its painfully slow, weak and lacks aggression. Has done since the Seville season finished.

Bigger league and ditch the four games nonsense.

Bigger league - 16 teams, play each other twice (home and away). No split but would keep promotion / relegation play offs (Bottom 2 relegated / top 2 promoted. Play off between 3rd bottom and 3rd top). I know nobody would vote for that, but we need to change the format.

The best Rangers defender in my lifetime. Happy Birthday Richard Gough.