maineflyer

Go now Walter, you complete fukking dinosaur. Don't wait until the end of the season ...... and take Laughing Boy and McDowall with you. Boo's ringing round Ibrox at the final whistle, the league being thrown away against the bottom team in the league, the club faced with selling what little talent we have to keep the wolf from the door. What a complete fukking shambles.

Can anyone honestly say they are entirely surprised?

Still happy to defend your manager?

Any score yet folks

No - but hoping someone with an ear to a radio might occasionally post an update for those of us over the hills and far away.

5-1 Boyd 4 Davis 1 Miller misses 18 (3 pens)

You've no idea how much I want to believe that.

Cammy, you and I know that SDM fell off long ago and went for a walk in the woods. The horse has been running off course and riderless for about twelve years or so. We are in such a fukking mess and the straits are so dire that it really is crunchie time for the club as a whole. 135 years will count for fukk when the door closes. Think FW Woolworth.

Correctamundo. Couldn't agree more.

Ha ha - well that cheered me up. How's the throat?:devil:

That's the really brutal truth. Once you go downhill far enough you start sliding faster and faster. This could be the edge for Rangers. People need to understand what's at stake here.

It could just be that it's already too late and that the good ship Rangers and all who sail in her are already consigned to the scrapheap. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it?

It's what you get when you play the game but don't play it well. And I'm not just talking about what we do on grass with a football. These are very, very worrying times.

OK, I'll bite. I am of course devastated that I didn't win this wonderful prize, although refusing on principle to enter the competition may have limited my chances. However, consolation comes from knowing I will easily find something else to burn.:cheers:

Erm ... everything you said, reversed ..... then doubled. So there.

I doubt if we have anything like a marketing department, at least not one that actually gets involved in marketing anything, at least not marketing that anyone else would recognise as marketing. The JJB deal simply replaced one selling platform with another but neither had anything remotely to do with marketing.

Quite right. I wouldn't have said that either. However, that has no bearing on where we are as a club ot smith's role in it.

That's totally irrelevant and has got nothing to do with the point I was making. It's notable that you only comment on my post where it deals with Smith and that may be why you seem to take everything out of context. Are you making this up as you go? Why do you think football managers DO get sacked? I said Smith should have been sacked for his negligence in not having the team properly ready for the Kaunas game and thereby failing to prepare us for the essential task of qualifying. What is it about failure you find so hard to face up to? He had a critical objective, he failed. Either you're suggesting it was someone esle's fault or we should just say "bad luck" and forget it. We're not talking here about losing to St Mirren but about a failure that will have a severe and long lasting effect on the club. If Smith isn't capable of taking us past teams like Kaunas when it really matters then why is he here - surely that is exactly when we should have seen the need to replace him with someone who COULD do the job. I don't give a monkey's how good you think Walter Smith is at not getting beat - he got beat by Kaunas. The world is full of failed football managers who tried to be hard to beat but couldn't win when it mattered. His task was to ensure we qualified for the CL this season and he failed to achieve that. If he cannot achieve what is needed then he should have been shown the door. Rangers isn't a charity and Smith should not expect or be given special treatment. He didn't take us the the CL, he hasn't bought well, he hasn't used his players well, he hasn't brought through our younger players. Instead of making excuses for him, tell me why he has achieved to deserve to be Rangers manager - but please don't justify Walter Smith by telling me how good the manager of Kaunas was or how late in the game they scored. Walter Smith had 180 minutes to beat Kaunas and couldn't do it. IMO, there isn't really much logic to be found in your post - other than the logic of trying to score points and I've no doubt you'll be prepared to test anyone's stamina in that respect - but it does seem contrived to me in so much as you extract selectively to support your own argument. Smith is a poor manager, has always been a poor manager and he's attracting residual support from a minority only because he was manager through part of the niar years.

Sadly, attempting to split the regime and allocate blame to one and exclude the others simply won't do. It is undoubtedly the case that David Murray should carry the can for the mismanagement of the club. It is his responsibility to see that capable people are in position and are actually delivering what is required for the club to succeed. To that extent, Murray intalled both Bain and Smith and should bear responsibility for their actions. However, just because Murray ultimately shoulders responsibility, it does not absolve the likes of Smith for his own performance as manager. No matter how much we may wish to take a lenient view of our manager, he was grossly culpable for the Kaunas debacle and no amount of deflection can alter that. Regardless of whether the late acquisition of new players was due to Martin Bain (and it's only speculation to say that it was), Smith chose a most inappropriate team selection for that game and got his tactics completely wrong. He virtually admitted that in a post-match interview. Even with the players he did have at his disposal, they could have been better prepared and better deployed. What defeated us that night was Smith's own mindset - HE wasn't ready and HE didn't do his job properly. The fact is that mediocrity is entrenched at Rangers, from top to bottom and in every aspect of the club's activities. The lead comes from the top but I cannot see a single aspect of the club where excellence is pursued. I have some experience of turning around failing companies and I'm afraid I see in Rangers all the worst symptoms of failure. Only new leadership, followed by root and branch change throughout the organisation will sweep away the acceptance of second best that runs through the club like a virus. Murray is an ego on stilts, who runs businesses like chesspieces on a board but wouldn't have a clue what to do in the engine room of a company. He is basically an incompetent at this level and is grossly inexperienced at the task required at Ibrox. And doesn't it show! I'd rather not waste time expressing opinion on Bain, he's really not worth the effort and must be the luckiest and least-deserving millionaire in the country. Smith never was a particularly good manager but rode a wave for a few years and ultimately left the playing side of the club in a hell of a mess in 1998. His managerial career started in 1991 on the back of Souness' momentum and celtic nowhere in sight. Six successful years and a fortune in spending followed, after which he has achieved almost nothing at all. That's a fact. Irrespective of what the financial circumstances were at Everton, Smith's departure from Goodison was universally met with relief and joy. His short tenure at Hampden stood or fell on one crazy shot by McFadden in Paris that the manager had no part in, didn't plan for and could in no way have forseen. Take away that one amazing strike of the ball and Smith's term as Scotland manager looks entirely different. I mention these two episodes in Smith's career in case anyone thinks he is being judged too harshly in his current job. He's not. Don't try to exclude Smith from blame for the mess we're in at present. He knew the implications of not winning the league last year but still chose to pursue every trophy in sight. At the end of last season he knew, as did Murray, that we simply had to qualify for the CL. Yet when the first hurdle appeared, we looked nowhere near ready. It was gross negligence on Smith's part as manager and he should have been sacked out of hand for it at the time. That he wasn't says everything that needs to be said about Murray, who then embarked on a spending spree to collect players we didn't need and would never use - or who would be used in positions they had never played in. The upshot is the financial mess we find ourselves in and no amount of contrived analysis will change it. Regardless of whether we win the league this year, we are about to take another significant step downwards on the stairway of decline. Our best players will almost all go in the summer and be replaced by worse or less experienced. We will either have Smith at the helm or McCoist, God help us, and imo we will be lucky to finish in the top four next year. Anyone who was around in the 1980's will know what to expect. Murray blaming this state of affairs in the global economic situation is fatuous and typically dishonest. He shows nothing but his self-interest when he makes these statements and while he gives precedence to his personal reputation, the club will continue to spiral out of control.

I agree with your sentiments but the gross mismanagement started many summers ago. Kaunas was merely the latest installment. There are going to be a lot of very disillusioned Murrayites come next August. Personally, I hope they choke on their precious season tickets.

The midfield looks set up in a very defensive manner, with almost no linkage to the fowards.

He'll need to show a lot more than he's done to date. Few opportunities so far but to be honest, he's been woeful every time he's stepped on to the grass up until now. I've yet to see what the fuss was about. Best song in the whole squad though.

And with his final act of failure, David Murray confirms there will be only one big club left in Scotland. What always irritates me about his periodic revelations is that after twenty years in the job, David Murray is still apparently discovering what needs to be done. Why is he blaming the economic crisis for the club's ills? Could it be the same reason that Gordon Brown wants everyone to focus on Sir Fred Goodwin? Surely with record season ticket sales in the bag, current finances cannot be down to any wider economic crisis. Forward planning might have to take this into account but he should not be deflecting from his own failure at this time. He is spinning as Murray always spins (lies for want of a better word). What he actually needs to explain to supporters is how there can be such a gulf in financial performance between the two sides of Glasgow. He needs to stop blaming others and start looking at his own shortcomings, they won't be hard to find. But at the heart of our problems lies this culture of deflection and denial. You see it from all sides of this club and it is slowly suffocating the life out of us. It is the culture of David Murray, who fell in love with the big shot limelight and cannot say or do anything that might compromise his place in it. I've been saying for some time that the end game was slowly coming into view. We have the respite of only a few short weeks until the end of this season to enjoy any sense of normality. After that, the hammer is going to fall hard on the world of Rangers and the freefall of Murray's tenure will finally come to earth. You won't recognise this club next season. Just don't let the bastard play politician and blame any economic crisis. This is his inability to manage the club properly and do what other, more able chairmen have been able to do.

Our old friend and fellow Gersnet member, Scotzine, has found yet another opportunity to demonstrate his even-handed attitude towards Rangers FC.

It's equally incredulous that the chairman and manager of Rangers should only now have enjoyed some mystical revelation that our squad is too large and too expensive. Apparently it wasn't too big or too expensive when we had already lost out on CL competition but were still buying players, several of whom have barely featured. Anyone who still believes these people know what they're doing seriously needs to re-examine the facts. Looking at Smith being interviewed on the TV today, he acted like a man who had just found a mirror and seriously wished he hadn't.