Hildy
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Everything posted by Hildy
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Ian, join the RST. It believes in fan ownership. I'm a member of the RST's BuyRangers scheme, so I am part of a group that owns around half of one per cent of the company. Don't expect us all to one day sing from the same hymn sheet. Even if you live longer than Methuselah, you won't see that happening. It's not something to worry about either.
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Ian, we could own the club ourselves, but it seems that we'd rather take the risk of another Craig Whyte waltzing through the door than being constructive in addressing our problems.
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Rab, no-one ever believed that a 'fraudster' could get control of Rangers, and yet, like administration and liquidation, it happened. This is just one more example of the Rangers support not looking hard enough at the future and contemplating unpalatable scenarios.
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So Ibrox must not be given up, and Auchenhowie is vital to our wellbeing? What will happen if the cost of retaining both becomes too great? I'm not advocating their sale, but I am wondering if a harsh economic reality will put pressure on the club to release one or the other at some point in the future. It's easy to put a 'not for sale' sign up, but the Scottish football landscape may make it difficult for Rangers - and Celtic - to retain a football ground and a training and administrative centre. Ideally, we will keep both indefinitely, but the Scottish football environment falls a long way short of being an ideal world. We thought that administration was impossible for a club like Rangers, and we were wrong. We thought that liquidation could never happen to Rangers, and once again we were wrong. We should at least be contemplating this scenario rather than pretending that it can't happen and then being shocked when the unthinkable actually happens.
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Brahim, I can see that you want to retain Auchenhowie, and I can fully understand your reasons - it is effectively where Rangers lives now - but what about the stadium itself? It's under-used and expensive to maintain. Is it as much of an essential requirement as Milngavie? Are you saying that we need both and that there are no circumstances where you would consider giving up one or the other?
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Scottish football is ailing. There are many reasons for this, and we could doubtless compile a long list, but most would agree that the outlook is fairly grim. When we return to the top, there will be a flurry of activity for a while and the game will have a brief period of uplift as old battles fire up again, but Scottish football's best days were in the past - and in the past they will probably remain. Where will this leave Rangers? Within our own support, ambition is ebbing away and aspirations to do well in Europe are evaporating. If this is the future, where Rangers are content to fight for a title that has about as much prestige internationally as the Challenge Cup does domestically, unless we secure an invitation to a more lucrative and competitive league, something will surely have to give. We talk just now about the possibility of losing Ibrox and/or Auchenhowie due to boardroom incompetence or perhaps something more sinister, but if Scottish football is going to continue to be a marginalised poor relation in Europe, can we really afford to retain both of them - even if the club is run in a professional and competent way? Can Rangers, within the context of Scottish football, afford to retain an increasingly high maintenance stadium - and a modern training facility? I'm sure we don't want to part with either, but is the sale of one of them the inevitable consequence of our football environment being so impoverished?
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In some ways, this is quite amusing. If administration happens, the Celtic support will be shouting from the rooftops that we are the same club and that the higher points penalty is justified. How strange then that administration 2, if it happens, will probably do more to demonstrate to the masses that we are the same club then anything that has gone before.
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Zappa, you said it yourself. What you REALLY want to see is Ally leading Rangers to a league title. What I want to see is Rangers winning a league title as soon as we possibly can. The priority should be Rangers - not Ally. This Ally love-in is clouding people's judgement. Rangers must have a good manager. Currently, who would honestly say that we have one?
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Super Cooper, as I said on here fairly recently . . . One lesson that needs to be learned from recent years - I don't think we can afford to employ another manager who was a playing hero. Many who defend Ally are doing so out of a sense of loyalty to a guy who was a fantastic player for us: a genuine legend. They just cannot bring themselves to admit that Ally might not have the credentials to do the job we would all like him to do. People who cannot handle McCoist being criticised sometimes even go as far as to suggest that the Rangers manager shouldn't be criticised at all. 'Ally's a true blue - leave him alone'. With this in mind, it's probably better to avoid all the ex-Gers who are in management unless their records are so exceptional that they just cannot be ignored - like the recently retired Alex Ferguson. If Gough, for example, came in and made a hash of things, we'd have to go through all this turmoil again. When Ally goes, whenever that is, I think it may be advisable to seek out a replacement who has never worn our colours at all. Yes, it's sad that it has come to this, but in the long run it might be a lot less troublesome. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
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If anyone here could afford to put £20m into the club, would they do it with Ally in charge of how it is spent? We have problems everywhere we look, but if serious money is found to spend on the team, it would be a big mistake to allow it to be spent inappropriately. There are problems at board level, but there are problems with the football operation too. Anyone willing to invest in Rangers would surely want an assurance that a proven manager is in charge of identifying new talent. Do we need to wait until things go wrong at the top level, or will something be done to influence events before we get there? Having more money is highly desirable, but so is having a manager who is capable of getting the very best out of it. We surely cannot take the chance of finding new investment - and then seeing it frittered away with little or no reward.
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Cal, potentially, and I would agree that this is an overused term in the Rangers support, we can be so much better and so much bigger. We have many things going for us, most notably our fanbase, but that will begin to erode unless we recover and get the show back on the road in a big way. Do you really see the next hundred years being a battle played out between us and Celtic without some kind of change happening? Sooner or later, preferably sooner, a change will occur, but we need to do all that we can now to hurry beneficial change along. Celtic, as I understand it, are doing their utmost to find a way of abandoning Scottish football's wreckage. If they have to, they will go it alone somewhere else. If they succeed in getting out without us, we'll be marooned indefinitely in a football landscape that will gradually suffocate us. We can't afford to sit back and pretend that the future will be as glorious as our domestic past. We have to be working on and off the field to either be on the gravy train - or to help others crash it. We are on the wrong end of a huge imbalance in European football. We can either accept this, and trundle along unremarkably, or we can put our house in order and make sure that Rangers is on the right side of history as big business carves the game up. If we don't show the ambition that a club our size needs to properly survive, we will be left behind in the football equivalent of the third world.
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Cal, essentially you are telling us that we should know our place, that we should accept it unquestioningly, and that we should do nothing to challenge or change the situation as it already stands. This pessimism, this defeatism, wrapped up in a tidy bundle labeled 'realism', should be alien thinking to a club like ours, but I know that you are not alone, sadly, in your belief that we should be content to be a peripheral force in the world game. David Murray asked that he be judged by our efforts in Europe. Now, we have fans praising the fitness of our postmen as an excuse for the incompetence that runs through our club like the Clyde runs through Glasgow. We have fallen so far that we are coming up with the most feeble excuses imaginable to disguise our shortcomings and inadequacies. Raise your sights from the acronyms that have watered down your ambition and demand that the club be all it can be - not all that you believe it can be - which doesn't appear to be very much. We have battles to endure on and off the park to clear the way for a better future - a far better future than competing in a two horse race with Celtic for a title that becomes less prestigious with every year that passes. Rangers must recover - we can all agree on that - but it must recover to a level beyond that of European humiliation and dreary unwatchable football.
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I think Calscot's post above sums up the damping down of ambition within the Rangers support. Apparently, we should be happy in our council house and stop dreaming of mansions. We are Saltcoats. We even talk up postmen to deflect from our own inadequacy. The realism spoken of reflects the aspirations of those whose horizons are about as far off as Ailsa Craig. The tone reminds me of schools which limit the ambitions of their pupils to the mundane, the ordinary and the 'realistic'. Reaching for the stars? 'Don't be daft, lad - you can get a job down the pit'. We need to set our sights higher than the gutter that is modern day Scottish football - even if that means dragging the 'realists' in our midst along with us.
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One lesson that needs to be learned from recent years - I don't think we can afford to employ another manager who was a playing hero. Many who defend Ally are doing so out of a sense of loyalty to a guy who was a fantastic player for us: a genuine legend. They just cannot bring themselves to admit that Ally might not have the credentials to do the job we would all like him to do. People who cannot handle McCoist being criticised sometimes even go as far as to suggest that the Rangers manager shouldn't be criticised at all. 'Ally's a true blue - leave him alone'. With this in mind, it's probably better to avoid all the ex-Gers who are in management unless their records are so exceptional that they just cannot be ignored - like the recently retired Alex Ferguson. If Gough, for example, came in and made a hash of things, we'd have to go through all this turmoil again. When Ally goes, whenever that is, I think it may be advisable to seek out a replacement who has never worn our colours at all. Yes, it's sad that it has come to this, but in the long run it might be a lot less troublesome.
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What do we want from Rangers? Are we content to be an also-ran in the global game or should we be strutting the main stage? Why should cities like Barcelona, Munich, Manchester and Madrid possess the European football elite while Glasgow hosts the poor relations. Is anyone happy with this? Off the park and on the park there needs to be change. This idea that we have to be whipping boys for clubs which are favoured by a CL cartel is not on. If Rangers - and Celtic - settle for being marginalised then marginalised we will be. I want Rangers to be playing in the big league, savouring the limelight, playing like Bayern and competing for the top prizes - and I'm not going to settle for less. I want Rangers' ambition to match mine. The way we are playing, copied from the previous manager, is unacceptable. Many fans are either bored rigid or they've given up, and impressionable young minds are looking elsewhere for glamour and a sense of occasion. Rangers can't afford to be boring any more. We have many mountains to climb before we get what I want, but we should at least have dispensed with football drudgery. At this rate we'll be as unwatchable when we get back to the top as we were when we left. We need to be better than this - a lot better.
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Smith's negativity was soul-destroying. Too often there was no joy in spectating because there was an absence of entertainment. The team would retreat into a defensive shell, take a battering and hope for a break. There was nothing to cheer. The ball belonged to the opposition and there was little effort to do anything other than hold out. Fans complain about a lack of atmosphere, but when one team plays submissively rather than competitively, there is very little to cheer or sing about. This isn't sophisticated football - it's horrific football. We used to give Bertie Auld and Tommy McLean pelters for having their teams playing in such an adventureless manner, so why should we applaud a Rangers manager for inflicting such monotony on us? Unlike McLean and Auld, Walter Smith was outspending the opposition in Scotland by miles, but we still went to Parkhead, camped in our own half, hoped for several world class saves from Andy Goram and tried to catch Celtic on the break. It may have worked a few times, but it was a dire way to prove superiority for a club that was so financially advantaged. Rangers needs to rid itself of this ghastly legacy of fearful football. Willie Henderson was on Rangers TV a few years back and was heavily critical of the way the team played under Smith. I don't think he's been invited back since.
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The football under Smith was dreadful - and I did say so at the time - frequently. McCoist, rather than having his own ideas, is copying the unimaginative and dull Smith style, and while some people - but not me - will excuse turgid football if it gets results, they won't at the level we're at just now, and why should they? A club like Rangers, with only one serious challenger in Scotland, should never have safety-first football as its favoured option. Rangers needs to change the awful negative football culture that exists at Ibrox, but it won't happen while Ally is manager.
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We have a cynical steak within us in this town. Remember the Glasgow Empire theatre - the punters howled performers down without any hesitation. It was before my time but its fearsome reputation lives on. I hate people booing our own players no matter how poorly they are playing. It's counter-productive and bad form. I have no problem with people being constructively critical on message boards, but slagging off our own players in mid-game is beyond the pale. I can honestly say that I have never booed a Rangers player at the match - but I have certainly been ferociously critical in the pub afterwards. I can't think of one good reason why a fan would want to unsettle his own team's players while the game is underway. It only makes a bad situation worse.
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In tribute to those that perished in the Ibrox disaster 1971
Hildy replied to ian1964's topic in Rangers Chat
http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/latest/40-years-on-ibrox-disaster-still-haunts-referee-1-3252973 -
Happy New Year, everyone.
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£2 a month is £2.4m a year on top of season ticket money if we can get 100,000 members - and as we are Glasgow Rangers and not Cambuslang Rangers, this figure is not unrealistic. We'd also have a club that was not a vehicle for profiteering by its uninvited ownership. Money would not be leaking out the club to goodness knows where. Take care, Rab, and have a good one. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
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By the away, Rab, we have a predicament just now because rogue ownership visited it upon us - and we let them. It will happen again one day if we don't take steps to prevent it. And that means fan ownership.
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Rab, whether it's Dave King, BuyRangers or you or me that wants a controlling interest in the company, enough shares have to be bought to go over 50%. No-one with shares in the company will lose out unless the company crashes again. When enough shareholders agree on a change of status, the process can begin with the help of professional advice and guidance. When the club is fan-owned, you'll be a member of the club rather than a shareholder in the company, and you'll pay an annual membership fee if you choose to - it's not compulsory. Those who are members will have a vote on who is going to be the club president, and Ibrox, for example, will not be sold without the consent of the membership. I'd be inclined to set the membership fee really low to maximise uptake - £2 a month (£24 a year) - but I believe that different categories of membership should be made available to those who are happy to put more money into the pot - but no matter how much they put in, it must always be one member - one vote when elections come around. All fan-owned models should be looked at before a decision is reached on which one is best for us.
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Bluebear, in a future presidential election at Rangers, every member of the club, and there could be 50,000, 60,000 or 100,000 of them, will have one vote each - no matter how much wealth they have. Fan groups that are fifty or a hundred strong will only have as many votes as they have members of the club. One member - one vote. Imagine what discussions were like in the British government when the idea was first mooted that every man should have a vote in elections. Like you, many would have had serious doubts about proceeding with such an idea, but when we look back we wonder why it took so long for enlightenment to dawn. When we eventually go down this road, we'll wonder why we were so lacking in confidence, so subservient, so trusting to luck that the right leader would always emerge, and so naive in believing that it was an appropriate way to look after our club and deliver it into the future. Rangers is a rotten borough. It's time to make it a fully functioning democratic club fit for the present - and the future.
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Bluebear, if the club falls into dangerous hands under a fan-ownership model, we will have elected them and we will be able to dispense with them at a following election. Democracy isn't perfect but it's far better than random self-invited ownership. Rab, you are correct. Dave King is not a a supporter of the fan ownership model. If he takes over the club one day, though, I will expect him to approach the fans for extra cash while he retains control. A poster on here is convinced he doesn't want control. Time will tell. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk