Germinal

Was thinking about this on the way home. Wild ideas with no substance to them:

Danny Graham - disappeared off the face of the earth since his Swansea days.

Michu - if he's recovered from his injuries.

Joe Garner - injury prone but has ability.

Peter Crouch - can't get a game at Stoke!

In reality I doubt any one of these players would even consider the Championship - they'd probably not consider the top league either. Maybe a realistic target could be Stevie May, who's a bit pish but would certainly do the job at this level.

It was on the referees diagonal, so it was nothing to do with the linesman in terms of the actual decision, although the linesman appeared to agree/confirm by moving quickly to the bye line thus indicating in his opinion it was inside the box or possibly he was just doing what he perceived as the "right thing" if he wasn't sure by supporting the referee's decision.

 

I was more or less in line with it and at first it looked like a penalty to me but on the replay you can see the foul is just outside the box and the player's momentum carries him into the box.

 

It was the referee's shout and he got it wrong, it was marginal, it wasn't an "appalling decision". It was close but the referee was wrong.

 

What Warburton should have said was that if we had taken our chances and defended better, it wouldn't have mattered.

 

We should be dignified and magnaminous in defeat and not parrot what others have done in the past.

There's no point in football anymore. We'd be as well saying we will be the only club in the world which doesn't have players who will dive.

Pathetic though it is the sans pareil administration of football in general & Scottish football in particular means that grown up behaviour is not only ineffectual but actually harmful. I don't like it any more than you do but that's the reality.

WE are pleased to announce that payment has today been sent to Sportsdirect.com Retail Limited of the full amount of the loan facilities provided by that company to The Rangers Football Club Limited.

 

http://rangers.co.uk/news/headlines/club-statement-58/

Now wash your hands. Expertly done!

No argument there.

Not just the repayment cock-up, but King's comment about never having seen someone tanked by a judge was very ill-advised given his history.

I'm on his side, but like Desmond at celtc he needs to be told to stfu because he's a bit of a PR bombscare. I know successful businessmen generally think they can do little wrong but it isn't beyond the wit of someone at Rangers to politely suggest he shuts up.

In other news, the SPFL are to re-introduce heavy leather balls, allow barges on the goalkeeper, enforce the mandatory wearing of flat caps and appoint Gregor Stevens and Ian Black as national coaches.

For Christ's sake, is football in Scotland ever going to evolve beyond hammer throwing?

Certainly I hope I'm wrong about official attitudes to Sports Direct. But all Ashley has to do is to say to Govt. person X that OK, his practices are sharp but if he changes them he'll have to offload about 5,000 workers. Govt. person X then has a choice of enforcing employment law and chasing Ashley through the courts, or buckling under.

End of chat, end of investigation.

http://www.gersnet.co.uk/index.php/news-category/current-affairs/545-looking-back-looking-forward

Christmas time, mistletoe and wine, moisture sizzling on overhead lines...once again the Festive Season brings with it to our soggy corner of the world not a crispy, Victorian snowscape but a squelchy, Weegieian mushscape, in which the fallen leaves of autumn moulder beside the beer cans and crisp pokes along the pavements of our towns. What an issue we have with putting rubbish where it belongs! Yesterday the dog proudly delivered to my feet a crushed can of Holsten Pils; not that unusual, except that the can was of the old-school ring pull variety, which I haven't seen for nigh on two decades.

At least the middens of our streets is consistent, something you can rely on. Most things, Christmas included, are constantly changing. Even Gersnet now features text speak: emphatically not 'lol'. Shopping for presents the other day, I was assailed by a Sky poster advertising a new version of the Cinderella movie, with the heroine herself prominently displaying a cleavage you could post your Christmas cards down. Being male and straight I hardly object to the female form but it's less a message of good cheer and more an excuse to gawp at some tits. Perhaps in the future the Yuletide Log and fairy atop the tree will be joined by a bosom hung jauntily on every door.

But like the beer cans and despite the changes, the past remains with us for as long as we leave it lying around, and people will find both good and bad things to do with the remains.

Translating that statement onto Rangers presents something of an existential philosophical poser, as this club has long made a fetish of the past, both culturally, as being rooted in a tangible and traceable Scottish heritage, as well as for less savoury reasons of commercial exploitation. Where does one draw the line between the dignity of those ship workers who packed Ibrox over a century ago, and the beers cans they may have dropped on route? We each draw our own lines, which probably explains why so many people have different views of the same institution.

Even so, nothing Rangers has done previously comes close to the commercial vulturism of Mike Ashley and his awful Sports Direct operation. Revelations this week in The Guardian suggest a new level of pressure being brought to bear on this business, but anyone getting their hopes up are surely overly optimistic, even at this time of the year. The best anyone can hope for is a small PR change in Sports Direct's M.O.; real change will not be effected, for that is not how business works.

In a previous job of mine, the employer served notice that anyone who clocked in more than three minutes late would not be paid for a full quarter hour after their shift started. The rather obvious result of this, that anyone more than three minutes late sat in the canteen for 15 minutes on the grounds that they weren't being paid, didn't seem to occur to whoever thought up the idea - and why should it? In late 20th and early 21st century Britain, Scotland included, the employer holds every card and if the employee doesn't like facing an opponent with a loaded deck, the employee can sling his hook.

Sports Direct will view their present bad publicity as little more than an irritation, and I have grave doubt that HMRC will take any action. Virtually every low paying job in retail has a staff search in operation, and these are, to the extent of my knowledge, without exception done out with paid working time. It's just accepted, although not by disgruntled staff. It is odd that the crappier the goods, the more paranoid the business is about staff theft - were staff not on minimum wage they'd would be more likely to purchase a Donnay T-shirt at £3 than nick one - it's a lot of risk for very little reward.

However, the point is that if we hope this pressure may affect SD to the extent that it alters their parasitic relationship with our club I feel we are being overly cheery. An alternative title for this thread was going to be 'Seven Years a Slave' because I think that in the end we will be obliged to see out contracts with SD in full; the entire weight of business practice is behind them. Only some unforeseen event might get us off that particular hook, and 'you never know' is hardly a strategy to be relied on. As we approach the time of year when we look back at time past and forward to days to come, I'm not certain there will be any quick - or even modest - resolution to our corporate clusterfuck.

It seems that we're faced with a very long haul. Unless there are people who are willing to fund the club twice - once to provide the resources needed to run it properly, and once to replace the revenue leeching out Ibrox and into Sports Direct - we have to crawl forward, alive and a lot healthier than before, but heavily debilitated by the infestation in our bowel. And as we saw at the weekend, that might mean some steps back as well as forward. Here, it's our history which hampers us, because quite a lot of fans don't seem greatly inclined to cut the team any slack.

Asking the paying customer not to worry about results for a seven year period is probably a bit much, but there has to be a realisation that we have a long way to go yet. As far as I can see, we need one striker, one who would be playing at a level below his ability, and we'd be well placed for automatic promotion - not that we're badly placed as it is. Going forward, we certainly need a better centre back pairing, given the amount of work they have to do even at Championship level. Granted the top league isn't much better but it is a bit stronger and we will need to address that.

Other than that the main focus must be to keep inching forward, a game at a time, while trying to find some antibiotic which might flush the worst of Sports Direct's norovirus out our system. It may be that time is the greatest healer - but who ever gives Rangers time?

Anyway, Merry Christmas! To paraphrase Tiny Tim, God help us, every one.

Grim news indeed, which reminds us how lucky we are in this neck of the woods. Poor Arnold, how his family must feel.

What his brother finds interesting is hardly evidence against Regan; that lurches into the realms of the easily mocked and dismissed.

The ties with Lawwell however, which he carefully omitted from his c.v. on the radio, make for something rather more substantive and might explain why he's so keen to be Mr I'm first through the carousel at the airport.

But the bottom line is, as in all interviews I have heard or read with him, that the ills of Scottish football are always either the fault of, or related to the ills of, Rangers Football Club. It's an infantile reading of an industry in decline since the early 1980's, taking the easy way out and avoiding confronting the really difficult decisions - is it possible to prosper with teams drawing crowds of less than 1,000 at lower league level and less than 5,000 at elite? The answer is self evidently 'no' but rather than grasp this thistle Regan, like all CEO's before him, prefers to steer the well holed steamship of reconstruction up the Clyde one more time, a hulk which becomes more depressing every time it is hauled out of dry dock and thrashed up the watter in the hope that the foamy splashes will conceal the crappy effluent.

I've no doubt that the man's time at the SFA will be ending shortly, as his kind of managerial figure moves around in a five year cycle or so; anyone who looks, really looks, at Scottish football over his tenure and finds it improved, in any material way, is deluded enough to get a job at Radio Scotland.

Is the national team performing to a higher standard? Than a Levein team, yes, but I'm not sure its possible to be damned with fainter praise than that.

Are domestic teams performing better at European level? Emphatically not.

Are they playing a more progressive style of football? Outside of Rangers, not that I have seen. Some say Hearts play passing football, maybe. The brief highlights I've seen suggest no advance on the 'long ball into channels crap' which should have gone out with the ark.

Are attendances booming, improved or even just up a bit? As with the Levein comparison, those who find joy in an extra 1,000 or so fans over the course of a season are either creatures of rare optimism or just plain dense.

Surfaces? Youth teams? Outstanding individuals? European level coaches? Anything? Anything at all?

What a shambles our game is. Anyone over the age of 40 will be well aware that we've gone from a period of tens of thousands going to games to a dribble of thousands, with far better entertainment alternatives available. Cap'n Regan will be well paid for his time, but I can't see that anything of note will come from his time at the SFA. The game continues sinking, and the rats will desert the ship soon enough.

He was on the radio last night as well, and before I lunged for the 'off' switch he must have mentioned his 'lack of baggage' about three times. It's possible to protest too much.

I'm not sure I could take being quoted at higher odds than Ally. Poor Lenny.

Not much of a revelation, I think 99% of fans knew that we were missing out big time on revenue from retail.

It's one of those situations, I think. where you have to accept that there isn't a solution which suits, and that you just have to work through it until you can change it. In this case, that'll probably be nearer the 7 years than 1 or 2 because, although there's a chance that the deals struck may be considered void if the signatories for Rangers are found to have erred in law (being nice for Frankie), the chances are that that process will run parallel to the SD deal - the law doesn't move fast, we certainly know that!

It's like this bomb Syria thing, if we don't bomb we probably leave ISIL nutters to attack us, and if we bomb, we probably create more ISIL nutters to attack us. Sometimes you can't win no matter what you do.

Only speaking for myself but I'm at the point where the money which could have been used to renovate the stadium, improve the team and so on just has to be waved goodbye, because I don't believe we're going to get it. Happily, investment from the board and fans in other areas ought to be enough to get to a high enough standard in our shite league to achieve some success, but we may need to play a seriously long game before we get back to paying large salaries for players.

So while Keith can fill the inches with tears over a missing £17.5m, it's not keeping me up at night. Them's the breaks, I guess.

£500,000 for seats in the Directors' box? To see a team you don't even support?

What a shit businessman Easdale is.

Although I'm all for the attacking ethos of Warburton, I wouldn't be hugely upset if Tav didn't bomb forward quite so much. Make us just a little tighter at the back and possibly draw the opponents' left hand side forward a little, opening that flank up for our attackers a little.

Love the tactical analyses, Rousseau.

On the face of it I don't disagree, but common sense is not a facet of the law. This is usually a good thing, since one man's common sense is another woman's extremism, so we have to hope that laws are framed with enough of what society would see as a broadly acceptable basis in shared wisdom to do the job. But when it comes to financials, and I only speak from my own experience, the basis is entirely on allowing owners to facilitate their own wealth accumulation and in no way focused on what may or may not be good for an individual business.

It's this ethos, prevalent since the mid-80's, which allows characters like Whyte not only to operate but to operate over a period of time, despite their previous behaviour. Radio 4's You & Yours has, over years, provided examples of these characters and their behaviour, and the most depressing aspect of it is that the law offers little comfort to those burnt.

So while it's obvious to us that the contracts are insane, hurt the business and are on any basis manifestly unfair, the law may see it differently.

Best of luck to the legal team, but trading laws in the UK are not set up for the benefit of the customer, so there's no chance at all that 'common sense' will be applied - that was a (presumably) one off aberration which you'll wait a long, long time to see a court repeat.

If Ashley has his legal cards in order we have no chance, regardless of how onerous or self defeating a contract may be. But I like the cut of Rangers' arguments, they seem based on reasonably solid legal objection.

There has to be space for mocking or ribbing between rivals, and the reaction on this thread shows that Rangers fans can both see this as the deflection it is and take it in a 'if you give it you've got to take it' kind of spirit.

That said, I'm not sure it deserves a headline the size of the Brandenburg Gate, even on a slow news weekend, and even for the Sun.

Christ, what a dispiriting thread.

Bollocks to all that passing shite, let's get some people in who can run more. I know that's a gross oversimplification of what people are saying but that's also what it feels like a lot of Bears would like. Effort! Fitness! Work rate! And if they can pass, that's only a bonus.

No wonder our game is so shite.

Can't see a lot of point to it, but equally I think TB is as wide of the mark as one of Kenny's shots in his assessment of the man.

Each, as you say, to their own.

People are allowed to hold a critical view of our club without being banned,m for goodness sake. Granted the likes of that quasi-literate, semi-comprehensible Dundonian with the boulder on his shoulder should be politely asked to steer clear, something he'd probably enjoy shouting about from his reserved place up there on Golgotha, but Tom's in a different class altogether.

Besides, banning people you disagree with is a bit, well, Islamic State for my taste.

Since it's pick on Bruno night, I'd like to ask why do you put 'lol' in every post?

I appreciate it's just a rumour but I can't see what benefit any young player could gain by leaving a team in the Eredivisie and coming to the 2nd tier in Scotland, even to us.

Definition of ratiocinate in English:

verb

Form judgements by a process of logic; reason.

English is full of words like ratiocination, great lego-blocks where two or three chunks combine to form a user friendly, tasty Yorkie bar of a word. It's no surprise that ratiocinate is, according to the dictionary, a mid-17th century word, for its logical construction fitted a time when an insistence on empirically based reason and judgement would usher in the Age of Reason, away from the dark years of superstition.

Alas, as with all things human such an ideal proved a disappointment: the Age of Reason led not to a planet peopled by creatures of pure intellect, but to ever more refined methods of killing and dominating, culminating in the great, clunking full stop of the atom bomb, the point at which even the most optimistic of souls stopped believing science had all the answers, or at least that it might have the answers, but some of them were too awful to listen to.

Only the ever positive Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, continued to believe in ratiocination and found a place in his stories for life forms which had evolved beyond even the physical sphere and become, instead, swirling clouds of gas, from whence emanated an English or patrician American accent like Gore Vidal's, chastising Kirk and the rest as being slaves to their primitive urges. Humans quite liking their urges now and again, it was only Spock who even considered the concept, and the crew's imprisonment would end only when the Queen of the Intellect People, as an idle amusement, assumed human form and was immediately subject to one of Kirk's primitive urges in particular. Her uncanny resemblance to a hot chick from the valley circa 1965 probably helped the brave captain in his knobular activities, but in any case, thus distracted by Kirk's attentions the alien death-grip would weaken and the Enterprise would race away at warp speed, perhaps pondering the TV truism that if you're in a tight spot with a lady, even one of pure intellect, whipping out the old trouser truncheon will soon bring them round.

Creatures of pure intellect (or even reason and logic) are somewhat conspicuous by their absence on the football front, but it's to the high brow we must look if this never ending saga of Rangers and the tax man is ever to be sorted out. I may be more swirling cloud of gas than creature of pure intellect, as the fug of my boudoir will attest, but the situation doesn't actually seem that complex to me. Murray, in charge of Rangers, employed some highly questionable but - crucially - legal at the time tax wheeze which reflected no credit on him, the players or our club - but going beyond that into claims of cheating and looking for title stripping is rewriting history and attempting to enforce a retrospective narrative which simply doesn't stand up to logic.

The syllogism that Rangers didn't pay tax on some players' contracts, therefore shouldn't have had player x, y or z, and therefore shouldn't be allowed to keep cup x, y or z is the painfully contrived thesis which needs examined, if only because it generally precedes a plaintive whine about stripping titles or cups and seems set to be the dominant motif of those who would be dispossessed.

It's not that tough a concept, but remember we're dealing with the intellectual equivalent of Kirk's cock here, rather than the swirling cloud of intelligence.

When David Murray signed player x, he agreed to pay him £x over x number of years. This is a contract. The point at issue in all this is how Murray arranged for £x to get to player £x, not whether he could have done so or not - the latter is a given, whether the steel tycoon paid it normally (if only), borrowed even more from the banks, or stood on Edmiston Drive selling The Morning Star to raise the shekels - it's a moot point because one way or another, player x was getting £x and was going to play for Rangers.

The issue is HMRC feel they, too, should have got a cut, a position I think most sane observers would find fair enough but not, alas for HMRC, the position of the law at that time. But HMRC's claim is, despite its rather elephantine presence, neither here nor there in terms of title-stripping, because the logical fact we must never lose sight of is that the players were getting that money no matter what, ergo they would have been playing for Rangers no matter what. There is no empirical evidence anywhere which suggests Murray was using EBT's to save money; he was using it to lure players northwards. Had the EBT route not been open, everything in the man's history suggests he would have found another method - everything we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty says that every player who signed and agreed an EBT would have been there without the EBT anyway, the only difference being Rangers would likely have been several millions more in debt than they already were.

It's a completely false flag, and that's possibly the reason informed onlookers such as ex-players and ex-managers, who may or may not have their own tax arrangements at the back of their mind, will have no truck with it. Fans, less concerned by ratiocination, are putting 2+2 together and coming up with 3, rather as Murray did with tax arrangements himself.

Just as well there's no tax on intellect. I have no time to listen to the phone ins but have no doubt they're red hot with angst, anger and outrage, not useful qualities when one is attempting to come to a ratiocinated decision. Not being a great fan of the incestuous world of the law, where going to the right school or knowing the right people still seems to be a far greater qualification for a top job than being good at it, I have my concerns that what seems to me to be straightforward enough thinking on the subject of Rangers and titles will be used, with people involved preferring to play to the gallery and self-interest. If they do, they do, and there's not much we can do about it. But whatever the up-shot is, even some worst case scenario, it's surely telling that after a long running shambles in which our club behaved in what I believe to be an indefensible manner, it's we who, incredibly, end up on the moral high ground.

If that's not reason enough for some people to try to think again, logically and with reason, there's no hope.