Germinal

This Saturday the Rangers Charity Foundation are hosting a collection for the Ibrox Parish foodbank collection outside the ground. As most will know there's an Asda about 5 minutes walk from the ground so if you can afford to go the game you can manage a tin of veg or some UHT milk. Alternatively, you can donate cash in a collecting bucket. This is being quite heavily trailed in the media and on social media by people like the local MP ( so it would be good to get a strong response. Having done some collecting for the local foodbank I know people sometimes raise concerns about scroungers and skivers getting food for nothing. All I can say is that I've only seen people with chronic problems in their lives using the service, from family breakdowns to mental health issues. Qute a few ex-servicemen as well, which seems incredible in these days of Help for Heroes and the like. Bottom line is that even if some people are swinging the lead the vast majority are simply people in need and that makes it sadly necessary, far as I'm concerned anyway. Here's the spiel from the club's website, hopefully they won't mind copying and pasting this one: Supporters of both clubs will be able to donate items outside the Rangers Megastore on Saturday up to 3pm and those not attending but who would like to help are invited to drop donations off during office hours up until 5pm on Friday at the foundation’s offices at Argyle House, Ibrox Stadium. Fans are asked to bring dried goods listed below and to dig deep into their pockets and make a financial donation if possible at one of the collection buckets around the stadium. Full list of items required: UHT or powdered milk, sugar, fruit juice in cartons, pasta sauces, tinned sponge pudding and rice pudding, tinned tomatoes and other vegetables, tinned fruit,tinned meat and fish, rice and pasta, cereal, jam, tea and instant coffee, biscuits or snack bars, Instant mash potatoes, tinned soup, tinned beans, and toiletries including toilet roll, toothpaste and feminine hygiene products. http://thirdforcenews.org.uk/tfn-news/glasgow-foodbanks-emergency-appeal-after-school-holidays-leave-shelves-bare?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TFN+digest+Tuesday+16+August+2016&utm_content=TFN+digest+Tuesday+16+August+2016+CID_ca76fe569a5ddc7f4fdc8cad5ceaf20b&utm_source=Email+marketing+software&utm_term=Glasgow+foodbanks+emergency+appeal+after+school+holidays+leave+shelves+bare https://www.facebook.com/ChrisStephensSNP/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf

I like Garner, I've seen him quite a bit & I think he'd score lots of goals here. But... He's bumped around in the lower reaches of England for quite a while, always impressing but usually succumbing to injury at the wrong moment. I'm not certain there's any resale value in him whatsoever, any English club which was going to take a gamble would have done so years ago. Against that is I suppose that he is probably the fourth or fifth target we have tried to land. If players don't want to come, there's not much can be done. I was told, whther right or not I have no idea, that Danny Graham, the Swansea striker, was being pursued earlier in the summer (apparently he has family in the north of England, Geordie or somewhere like that, & the idea was he might not mind working in Glasgow for a season and a half), but the money made it a non starter. Even if that was hooey, it does highlight the drawbacks of the market we seem to prefer to operate in.

Maybe if the official site wasn't as dull as paint people might use it more anyway. No amount of SEO is going to have me using it until they make it better. It's like the new podcast, I know it's just new and finding it's way but man it's dull. No sense of occasion. The old Rangers News used to be mince as well, mind you. I do get fed up with the lack of imagination at Rangers sometimes.

Alternatively, a missing comma makes it: 'The light Blues has been, operating north of the border for only a year, but that's been long enough for Warburton to form an opinion.' Grammatically poor but that rarely bothers the printed press, and it bears the hallmark fury of the Celtic man sent to cover anything Rangers. I am only joking, btw.

Don't want to come across as a doom monger but while Warburton is correct in much of what he says, it's too late, and far too late at that. His arguments have been advanced by many observers for nigh on 20 years, if not longer, and each year that's passed without action has made it harder for the business that is the game here to deal with their market: better standard of competitors, better marketed competitors, larger competitors, better funded competitors, less socially divisive competitors, ease of transport, omnipotent TV coverage of far superior product. It was always going to be a hard slog to get the game here in any condition to deal with the onslaught of the Sky TV football revolution, but a cold analysis says that we have consistently responded in ways which extract maximum damage to the game. I include our own team in that, us as fans as well, but more broadly pretty much everyone who goes to, coaches, plays, broadcasts or comments professionally on the game. It's been a landscape of the lowest common denominator, a putrid playground where short, medium or long term business models are ignored in favour of pandering to dimwits. The ethos of the game has been blind, parochial self interest over any sensible approach which might yield a mildly profitable and sustainable future. Anyone who can point me to a mature strategy in which the meagre incomes of the game are distributed in such a way as to encourage participation and/or interest, I'd be very grateful. Even the new League Cup, hailed as quite good, is only a stumble in the right direction - the example of the Skol Cup is before us, but we ignore it in favour of the sectional fiasco it replaced. It (the Skol Cup) got binned because 'big' clubs wanted to focus on Europe - that's hardly an argument anyone can make nowadays. A straight knock out competition, result on the night and done with by the end of October was successful and there's no reason why it can't be again. But here we tip toe reluctantly toward the model of the last successful product we had, because a few teams want to pretend they can compete with Europe's third or fourth tiers. Byes for teams in Europe? Leave it out. I can't believe teams don't realise how far down the order we are - granted, football is about emotion but at some point cold reality has to intervene. Ironically enough for a game which spends untold hours and energy pointing fingers at Rangers and shouting 'zombies!' the game here has been dead for years. Unpopular in the wider society, of minor interest to the money men, a joke at national level: it's really only the defibrillator of poking Rangers which produces the odd spasm. At least we have a manager who plays a vibrant style, but in the context of Scottish football it can only remain a vibrant branch line and one which has extremely limited access to the junctions to better things. People might have ideas to pep things up, but they would have to have been implemented decades ago. We're now like a local ironmonger trying to compete with B&Q and Amazon: the business model is fundamentally unsustainable and only a residual customer base, enticed in more through nostalgia than interest, keeps a few isolated outposts like Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen going. Fair play to Warburton for his input. But, ach. It's not rocket science, but it is too late.

I'm 45 and haven't kicked a ball in nigh on 15 years but I never played dirty anyway, I preferred Jardine to Stevens. If you're fast enough to mark your man, wiry enough to deal with shoulder to shoulder stuff, and good enough at timing a tackle you're 50% there. Get someone competent to teach you about positioning and really that's it, then and now. Plainly the better you are at these basics the better the player you will be but every single professional should be able to do achieve a reasonable standard, & our defenders just flat don't, Wallace excepted.

I'd find it hard to believe that David Weir hasn't left Warburton is no doubt as to the importance of effective defending, though.

I can understand us not being able to get first rate, or even second rate, players in - as fans we are reflexively guilty of doing a Jim Morrison and wanting the world and wanting it now, but Warburton is still very much operating with at least one hand tied behind his back financially. Even so, it's hard to believe there isn't at least one defender better than Wilson or Kiernan available somewhere, and what really amazes me is that out of nearly 40 pro or semi pro clubs in Scotland there isn't a single CB prospect worth taking a punt on. If you grew up watching Miller & McLeish keep Hansen out the Scotland side, or the 9IAR players like Gough, McPherson, McLaren, down to Colin Hendry, this is just incredible and a damning indictment on the game. I was a defender in my younger days for the very good reason that it's not the hardest job in a team to master - somewhere along the line the coaching has just collapsed.

Until 'tackles' like that one last night are an automatic, no discussion required, straight red card the game in Scotland will remain stuck in garbage mode.

I like Chick and will miss him when he retires. But my amazing super sensitive sleights upon Rangers senses recall a match report the Great Man wrote in 1987, as Souness' Rangers moved within touching distance of a much awaited title. His conclusion, from memory but I think almost word perfect: 'It amazes me that Rangers are being criticised for trying to walk the ball into the net. Are some people never happy?' If anyone is that bored, it'll be an Evening Times report from a home game around April or May 1987 against, I think, either Hamilton or Motherwell.

2-0 to France

'Do I pay attention to other teams?' Clearly.

You kind of don't want to let them know how much this hurts, but even so...unbelievable.

I simply do not understand why the RF model, which was achieving it's aims quite effectively, needed to be hooked up to bodies which hadn't achieved as much.

I doubt anyone disagrees that we have to get maximum value for players we don't need. But for us to get money for Bell, there would have needed to be at least one English club ready to take a chance - to the best of anyone's knowledge no such club was about. There would have had to have been two Scottish clubs willing to pay a fee - 99.9% certain no such club exists. No matter how much you shout about it Cammy Bell, a goalie who had one undistinguished season in the second tier of Scottish football, another season sitting on a bench and who was briefly a squad member of one of Europe's least impressive international sides was not an asset which could be realised for cash: having 'signed by Ally McCoist for Rangers' is not a positive on your c.v.

Completely lost. The 3 resignees from RF. Are they objecting to givernance within RF now or are they objecting to the strategy it is adopting re.amalgamation? When Mr Ewart refers to the new RF board, when did this new board come about and who's on it? I'm bewildered.

Portugal 1-1 Wales Germany 1-2 France

Wish I'd put the Welsh down for a goal, with Vertonghen and Vermaelen missing they're definitely good for one. Plus Lukaku, the defender, looks mince.

Poland 1-1 Portugal Wales 0-2 Belgium Germany 2-1 Italy France 2-0 Iceland

Watching England fair reminded me of Ally's Rangers.

Curse you, EU referendum. Better late than never. Germany 3v0 Slovakia Hungary 0v2 Belgium Italy 0v2 Spain England 2v1 Iceland

I do care, because we saw a week or so ago what can happen when the media and others stir the pot too much. And goodness knows, the pot doesn't need much stiring here. It's really, really poor from the Record.

And what if the second team were only interested if the deal was on the same terms as uniteds? You're quick to go dan, man.

Coopersfield. Although that was Ibrox.

I'm only worried about the complete gibberish that fella uses. I hope his practical skills are better than his articulation: individualise off-season down-side de-condition Shakespeare was a great one for inventing words as well. But he never coached a football team, so far as we know.