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The chickens are coming home to roost. NEVER MESS WITH THE JUJU!! @Whosthedado had the title won two weeks ago...

We've been playing poorly for weeks and there's no indication we'll improve. The game against them at Ibrox was when we blew it. That was a must win game and we couldn't do it.

We can do it and, ironically, now we have the underdog status again, we may play better but there are two key issues: 1) We're not scoring enough goals 2) We're conceding too many As such, I think the odds are against us but you never know...

The question is most properly addressed to the players, and it should be in two parts- Can you do it? Will you do it? It is clear that it 'can' be done: Helicopter Sunday, and other damned close run things, happened, actually, and gloriously. It remains possible. It is difficult to envisage that it 'will' be done. The players have spurned the opportunity to make it happen -Motherwell (at Ibrox!!), and Ross Co.- were six points thrown away, meaning, realistically, that winning all remaining games, including a victory at Piggery Place, is required. That, I fear, is too much of an ask, a stretch too far, for the current playing staff. They have run out of that road marked 'playing badly and winning' (as was, as ever, likely), are increasingly vulnerable to organised and determined opposition, and look shot, tired, and confused, bereft of ideas, of confidence, and of desire. I do not see how improvements may be made, nor what players could, or would, stand up, be counted, and drive/pull the rest up to the required standards. I cannot even be confident that they will win the outstanding fixtures against 'the rest'. If the Will is there, it will be done, but they look gey, gey, short in that department. Now, as for the Scottish Cup.......

Here's Gideon Haigh on Underwood. (Haigh is always worth reading, even with typos, which are several in this piece). Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Derek Underwood 1945-2024 GH on England's one-of-a-kind spinner. APR 16 READ IN APP Artwork by Fisher Classics There was no reason for Derek Underwood to bowl left arm. He batted right-handed. He wrote right-handed. Everyone else on both sides of his family was right-handed. It was just that when he first stooped to pick up a cricket ball while watching his father Leslie bowl medium pace for Farnborough in Kent that it was with his left hand. Nor was there any reason for him to bowl as he did, as a spinner operating at just below medium pace with a low arm from round the wicket. Nobody told him to. Nobody affirmed him. Tony Lock was so dismissive of Underwood as a colt he took him for a batter. The technique proved an advantage when he was picked by Kent as a seventeen-year-old because English county pitches, dressed in Surrey loam, had grown so slow: he was the youngest man to take 100 first-class wickets in a season. As Underwood described in his autobiography Beating the Bat, however, he was constantly counselled by captains, coaches, selectors and critics to change, to adjust his speeds, angles and attitudes, to conform to the stereotype of the left-arm orthodox - something closer to a Bishop Bedi or, in his own country, Don Wilson. What people didn’t realise, Underwood recalled, was that he had usually tried all these ideas first and found them wanting. He professed not to be fussed by the difficulty of classifying him; his preferred self-designation was ‘mean’ bowler: ‘I hate every run that is scored off me. I don’t like trying to buy my wickets. That is just not the way I play the game.’ He was nicknamed ‘Deadly’. It was perfect in its way. Nobody could have looked less lethal, with his clean chin, receding hairline, ten-to-two feet and more-or-less constant dishevelment; but ‘Deadly’ went with his remorseless control, his menacing fuller length, his inhibiting stump-to-stump line, and that refusal to barter wickets for runs. Geoff Boycott referred to him as having ‘the demeanour of a civil servant and the mentality of a rat catcher.’ Alan Knott, his great confrere, noted Underwood’s ‘supreme cricket fitness’: so grooved was his action, he was a stranger to injury. Doing what came naturally did not always come easily. While wet pitches made his name, Underwood saw these as a mixed blessing. The trouble was he so often went out and confirmed these suppositions, starting with the afternoon the twenty-three-year-old routed Australia at the Oval in 1968 by taking seven for 50, including four for 6 in his last twenty-seven deliveries. ‘I was shattered by the end of it, and felt no particular elation at the time,’ he recalled. ‘My first desire was to get back to the dressing room, and I remember thinking to myself how peaceful it looked as I entered the deserted room.’ He claimed not to have watched footage of the day. But for a decade and more, he was English cricket’s go-to guy on anything other than a green seamer, and even he could be handy. At Adelaide in 1975, he claimed the first seven wickets of the Test match. Underwood’s other great service for England was as a nightwatchman, which was a decidedly dangerous occupation in the days before helmets, and which he perhaps rendered more perilous by a technique that involved playing everything, even bouncers. ‘Whenever I see a bouncer coming I automatically get into line, body behind the bat and ball,’ he explained. ‘That is what I was brought up to do. Nobody ever told me what I should do next and I never learned.’ Tony Greig called him ‘one of the bravest tailed batsmen I have ever seen’ and recalled greeting him at the Gabba in 1974 with Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in their pomp. Any advice? asked Underwood. ‘Yes,’ said Greig grimly. ‘Fight for your life.’ After an over of bouncers from Thomson, Underwood came down the pitch and said simply: ‘I see what you mean.’ It’s funny, but Thomson was a bowler I often put in the same bracket as Underwood - not of course for pace or danger, but because of their sheer untutored uniqueness. That 1974-5 summer was my first as a cricket watcher, so I took them both at face value: why should they not bowl the way they did? I’ve waited my whole lifetime and seen nobody like either of them. The same thought occurred to Knott: But, then, the game no longer makes any pretence of balance. As Underwood’s death was announced, an Indian Premier League match was underway in which runs were scored at fourteen an over and thirty-eight sixes were hit. A ‘mean’ bowler now seems almost unthinkable: the ball might as well be struck from stationary tees. In the circumstances, one might as well do what comes naturally.

I think we'll beat celtic, but screw it up in one of the other games.

What happened to 'No Surrender'? Sheeeit...ain't nothin to it but to do it.

I get the fact that our recent record is rubbish but it's a one off game against a mediocre Celtic team. We are not playing Real Madrid for goodness sake. I think its definitely winnable.