The Real PapaBear

So if I understand you, you're saying that we were indeed fucked over Big Time by the SPL/SFA, who have not only not apologised, they refuse to admit that any wrong was done, despite their actions being deemed illegal in law. Yet, despite all that, you'd have us prostitute ourselves and accept an invitation to the second class league, when we should never have been thrown out of the top league in the first place. An analogy would be somebody falsely accusing you of a crime and then illegally occupying your house as punishment and then offering you a chance to live in your own garden shed if you'll agree to keep paying the mortgage on the house. If Rangers were to accept any such invitation, without a recognition by the SPL and SFA of the wrongs done to our club, then I'm done with football in Scotland - because then the Tims and their Rangers hating pals would really have done the job of destroying the club. And that's not throwing a hissy fit, that's just not being prepared to support a club who would prostitute itself to those who despise us and who would abandon the league that supported us in our time of need. I want to see us back at the top every bit as much as you do - but not at any cost.

The SPL and SFA have spent the past year and a half trying to mistreat, abuse and humiliate us (that's apart from those who wanted to see us dead). Yet, despite that, there are some Rangers fans who would be happy for us to abandon our dignity and go running when that shower of poisonous dwarves whistle for us to come and save their necks - and for what? So that we can play Morton and Falkirk a season earlier? No way! We should only *consider* any move to an SPL2 *after* we have received a recognition that the SFA and SPL acted illegally, that they failed to live up to or carry out their duties and responsibilities and an apology from both organisations is forthcoming. Short of that, we should wish them a nice season and point them in the direction of the Fuck Off door.

Nobody has said we will follow him if he's shown to be wrong; what we are saying is that he's the only one any of us can trust, and given that, he's the only one we will believe. If it turns out he does back the wrong horse, then he would lose the confidence of the fan base as regards his decision making, but never the trust in his integrity.

If that were to happen you'd have to trust that Walter was privy to information that most of us are not. The only thing, and I mean the *only* thing that we can trust is Walter Smith's love for the club and that he would always do what he believed to be in the best interests of the club. There's not one other member of the board we can honestly say that about.

As i understand it, the administrators job is to find a buyer for the business as it stands, if possible, and only if that's not possible, to start selling stuff off to pay creditors. Now that the HMRC witch hunt has been laid to rest, there would be no shortage of buyers for the whole thing, because any bid which included Walter would be certain to get the fans back.

Every organisation should join in and make it crystal clear to the Board that if Walter goes, we all go. Worst case scanario; Walter walks and so do we. The club heads into administration and everybody who has invested so far will lose everything again. But next time the adminstrators are appointed, we would have no more con-men, chancers and charletans, because any investor would understand that the fan base was no longer willing to put up with people playing silly buggers. They would also know that if a real, responsible and respectable owner/Board takes over, the fans will be there to support them.

Celtic, Bayern and Marseilles I'd put into Room 101, no matter in which order. All 3 make my skin crawl. having said that, I still couldn't bring myself to want Dortmund to win; They have the same self-important, self-regarding smugness as Celtic and Liverpool have. It was just a pity they couldn't both lose. Forza SV Waldhof Mannheim!

The same six that were internationals for their countries, or a different 6?

Brilliant midfielder; Wanker of a human being.

superb work, D'art - you really are speaking for us all in this one.

This is a joke. McCoist's performance as manager (on the field) has been dire all season. He's done what he, or anyone else, was always going to do - but he did it with no style and no conviction. Jim McInally should have been the shoe-in candidate for this award, because let's face it, he won the only third division he could win and he has continued to develop Peterhead from a bottom of the table club to a title contender next season (unless they somehow end up in our division again).

Honest to god, if we dumped the SFL, after what they did for us, just to get back to that shower of backstabbing cnuts in the SPL ayear earlier, I would seriously have to question whether I could still support Rangers. There. I've said it.

Rangers has always been able to afford the players we had. Let's never forget, when we were sold to the crook, our debt was under £20m and falling - down from a high of £80m. We never had any problem servicing the debt, and until whyte arrived, never failed to pay all the taxes we owed and all of our footballing and commercial debts.

I know why you're saying that, Tom, and as a subject area, it is fairly thin ice to be skating on, but I think D'art explains pretty well in his preface what the article seeks to achieve. It's not a comparison, per se, of the loss of life to the fall of a football club, but more of an exhortation as to how we, as a support, should approach a search for truth. I think the main thrust of his article is that organisations, by their very nature, will curl up in defense when they are attacked and that if you ever hope to get to the truth - particularly if you're from a class of people that have a less than cuddly reputation, like us - you have to be very dogged, very persistent and very patient; just as the Hillsborough families were.

I think if you go down the leagues to the 'diddy' clubs of the first second and third divs, you'll find that idealistic owners and boards are in the majority, guys you've never heard of and never will hear of, putting their own personal money into their clubs for zero reward other than knowing that they are contributing - and there's no reason why we couldn't be the same;

By then it would still have been too late. Green would then have been seen to come clean only *after* he had been found out. Green and his tribe are, quite simply, not the right sort of people for Rangers.

Quite so. Green's problem was the non-stop, and usually pointless, lies, half-truths and wild exaggerations, which had the effect of a) making us as a fan base feel patronised and b) making us mistrustful of everything he said. I don't think anyone gave a toss about whether he screwed Whyte (in fact, most of us would chip in to have a commemorative medallion stamped for him because he *did* screw Whyte)The problem was that he was shown to have lied about any number of things; he was shown to be full of bombast and bluster and he was never completely open and honest with us. *That* was the problem with Chuck. After the year, we'd been through, we didn't need another con man trying to sell us moonbeams. We need someone we can all trust; and at the moment that person can only be someone that Walter gives his full blessing to, because Walter and Ally are the only two people at Ibrox that everyone trusts (off the park, anyway).

if ye can't beat 'em....

So, if I understand Timothy correctly; Rangers made sure that one of this secret panel was an Ibrox season ticket holder, so that any punishment arrived at by this secret panel (and no doubt influenced secretly by this secret Rangers fan on the secret panel) would be managable. Then McCoist, shocked at the severity and the illegality of the secret panel's decision, asks for the panel members to be named, thereby exposing the fact that Rangers have secret moles in place, secretly influencing secret decisions? If I understand Timothy correctly, the main point is not that this SFA Panel imposed an illegal and arbitrary punishment on Rangers, (who were already victims of criminal wrong-doing by a man deemed by the same SFA as a fit and proper person to run a football club) but that one of the three people who imposed this illegal sanction was, ehhm, a Rangers season ticket holder?

spot on, rbr. The only thing I'd add was that our debt was £18m *and falling*. I've said this from day 1; Rangers are the victims in this saga. Rangers was forced to sell itself to a crook, and at that point, when the old Rangers board was removed and replaced by the Crook's cronies, Rangers ceased to be an active participant in its own fate and thereafter became the victim of criminals. And rather than supporting a member club, the poisonous dwarves of the SPL took their once in a lifetime opportunity to stab us in the back whilst the SFA followed the mob. the answer to "Why" changes depending of whom the question is asked. The leading instigators are, of course, them across the city and their followers in positions of power in government, the media, the civil service. There was certainly a conspiracy by people employed in some or all of those branches at various times. With the leaking of confidential information by persons unknown to persons unknown, the creation and fostering of scare stories and with the non-stop biased reporting of the media - and their complete unwillingness to investigate the scandal of tax documents being stolen and published illegally - there can be no serious doubt that we have been, and continue to be, victims of a conspiracy by people for whom Rangers is not a football team; Rangers, to them, is the cultural enemy and they will stop at nothing to see us dead.

you may not see the asterisk - but everyone knows it's there.

Is anyone surprised? last week, on possibly his last ever home game as manager, on the day they lifted the championship* what was the thing that was first and foremost in his head? Rangers. That's the difference between us and them; they measure themselves against us; we are their yardstick, they are obsessed by us, whereas we don't give a monkeys what they say or do. (* like Roger Maris' home run record, every championship they 'win' while we're not there will have an asterisk beside it, )

with the lowest number of points to win the league in a season where Rangers weren't even in the division, I think it's safe to say that even the celtic job is too big for TLB

Superb piece of writing.

I know where you're coming from, bud - and to a degree I think you have a point. However, I think you have to define your terms somewhat. What, for example, do you mean by 'conspiracy'? If you mean it's members of the Knights of St Columba or Agnus Dei sitting round a table in a darkened room filled with incense plotting against us, then no, there's no conspiracy. If, however, the people in charge of radio or TV output make the same conscious decision, time after time, to stock panels, guest lists and phone-ins with people who all share andpropogate the same anti-Rangers viewpoint, and to have these shows moderated by presenters with an equally anti-Rangers standpoint, who allow every untruth imaginable to go unchallenged, what do you call that if not a conspiracy? A conspiracy of silence, a conspiracy of inaction, a conspiracy of lies - you don't need a project-managed plan of action for there to be a conspiracy. There is, for example, no question that Rangers is the same club as was founded in 1872. Everybody in the world, from Fifa to the Scottish Courts accepts this. The only ones who (pretend they) don't are Timmy, rival fans at the wind up and, wait for it....the BBC. Time after time, cosgrove, spiers, spence et al are allowed to come out with the same line about Rangers being a different club, that there's an "old" Rangers and a "new" Rangers - and this goes unchallenged, and by it's repetition from a "respected" broadcaster, it gains currency. The BBC are deliberately allowing people they employ to broadcast lies and get away with it. You don't see that as a 'deliberate policy' or 'built-in anti-Rangers bias'? It's beyond dispute that the Scottish mediscape is dominated by Timmy. He who controls the media decides who will work in the media, and he who controls the media controls the message. Now, I will grant you that the behaviour of some of our fans has made it easy for them to paint us all with the same brush, but the point of the BBC is that since we *all* pay for it, it has a duty of fairness and impartiality to *all*.