Uilleam

Blimey, that Henrik Larsson has fair let himself go!

Tell that to a seven foot Samoan Tattoos are acceptable for: soldiers, sailors, and South Sea Islanders. No one else.

If his nickname is 'Vesper', I might just be out. (Ended badly, i I r c)

You really shouldn't try to provoke envy among the rest of us.

That kind of garbage was generally implemented by the Personnel Manager, who was desperate to gain 'Investors in People' status, to add to his/her own CV. Personnel became 'Human Resources', of course, which caused -still causes- me some considerable amusement, as the personnel 'pros' I have encountered generally looked as human as tailors' dummies and displayed similar resourcefulness. As for FC Midtjyland's adventure training, I should recommend it, indeed insist in it, for all SNP elected representatives, MPs, MSPs, and Councillors. They are aye telling us that we can/should be like Denmark, so it seems fair. Perhaps it ain't quite Highland Hygge, but they can't have everything: they think they can, so it would be a short, sharp, salutary lesson. I would, however, allow them all to have rifles, and ammunition. In the Highland fastnesses, they could only harm themselves, or each other. What's not to like?

"Winter Training Camp"? In the south of Spain? Pah!! "FC Midtjylland players tackle endurance test in the Cairngorms The footballers, in the middle of their league’s winter break, had to make their own fires and were given rifles to hunt deer for food," "The idea to expose the team and management to punishing conditions came from FC Midtjylland’s “mentality coach” Bjarne Slot Christiansen, a former soldier with the Danish special forces." I think that @compo might approve of this, unless, of course, shelters and sleeping bags are a bit girly. FC Midtjylland players tackle endurance test in the Cairngorms The footballers, in the middle of their league’s winter break, had to make their own fires and were given rifles to hunt deer for food Michael Grant, Mark Walker Thursday January 18 2024, 12.01am, The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/danish-giants-fc-midtjylland-face-endurance-test-cairngorms-scotland-wwqzmjq5r One of Denmark’s leading football teams made a three-day visit to the Highlands, where players had to endure freezing temperatures and hunt for their own food in an extreme team-bonding exercise. While clubs from other European leagues usually head to the sun during their winter break, FC Midtjylland, who sit top of the Danish Superliga, sent their footballers on a gruelling trip to the Cairngorms. The squad were based near Inverness and stayed on the Glenfeshie estate, owned by Anders Holch Povlsen, the Danish billionaire who owns the clothing chains Jack & Jones and Vero Moda and is the largest shareholder in Asos. Povlsen also owns FC Midtjylland, as well as tens of thousands of acres in the Scotland countryside. The idea to expose the team and management to punishing conditions came from FC Midtjylland’s “mentality coach” Bjarne Slot Christiansen, a former soldier with the Danish special forces. Players had to make their own fires and were given rifles to shoot deer, otherwise they would have had almost no food. The club’s social media channels show footage of the players walking on snow-capped mountains, braving sub-zero temperatures and heating oatmeal. They were collected and brought back from one summit by helicopter. Povlsen, known as the richest man in Scotland, owns about 220,000 acres of land. The businessman is embarking on one of the largest rewilding projects, which could take at least 200 years. Sites owned by Povlsen and his wife, Anne, in the Cairngorms were used last autumn to rewild beavers in the area for the first time in 400 years. Christiansen admitted he pushed the football team to the limit but had ensured the players all returned safely to their home city of Herning in the Jutland peninsula. “There are some who are tired, and there have also been some who have burned out completely,” he said. “But of course they come home. It is extremely hard. When we are under the most pressure, we find out that we can do more than we really think.” Head coach Thomas Thomasberg said: “It was so cold that we couldn’t feel our hands and feet.” Kristoffer Olsson, the club’s former Arsenal midfielder, said the players had been left entirely to their own devices in the wild and they had been too cold to enjoy the scenery. “It’s an experience we won’t forget any time soon. We were out on long hikes in Scotland and we had to find our own food, where to sleep, water, everything,” Olsson said. “For me the worst thing is that you didn’t get anything to eat. We got some food one day and that was it. It was truly a test, both mentally and physically. We slept in a shelter in sleeping bags, but it wasn’t so easy to fall asleep because it was really cold. “It was so beautiful with the mountains and hills. But honestly, we didn’t have the energy to enjoy it. We were worn out and it was just about survival. It was nice to come back and get some warmth and food. Then you started to feel like a person again.” The team’s experience was filmed for a three-part documentary with the Danish broadcaster TV Midtvest. Whether the extreme approach will do them any good will become clear on Friday, when the team play a friendly match against their rivals Aalborg. Midtjylland are nicknamed The Wolves and have been the champions of Denmark three times, most recently in 2020. They lost to Rangers in the 2019-20 Europa League qualifiers and beat Celtic in a Champions League qualifier in 2021-22. Scottish Championship side Partick Thistle attracted ridicule in 2018 when their manager at the time, Gary Caldwell, arranged for players to spend a day with the Parachute Regiment. The exercise got out of hand as players were subjected to a mock “kidnapping”, with one running away only to be hauled back by four soldiers, while another broke down in tears. Players were forced to wear ear muffs and blindfolds and were placed in head-locks by soldiers.

In 2024, surely just calling them names, or even threatening to call them names, should be enough. Club Statement and Trigger Warning: We will be delighted to welcome you to Ibrox Stadium. Please be aware that you will be subject to invective, which, while unerringly accurate, will be unpleasant for you to hear. We are unable to provide a 'safe space' for those who cannot deal with the truth.

Time for the judicious hamstring pull?

A Bulat Doiged, then.

But I shot a man in Brugge, just to watch him die

Either she has legs like flexible stilts, or her dress is way too long.

Has anyone 'learned' anything, so far, apart from the fact that we could do with a man like Rod Wallace up front?

If there is nothing to rage about, I propose that we rage about having nothing to rage about.

Explains the career of Peter Crouch. Basically, then, Rangers should recruit young, slim, bony ('angular'), players, and should have them hang from the wallbars for a couple of hours every morning, until they stretch to the desired height.

Polaris was the missile carried by the sub, as far as I recall, and not a bad moniker for a striker. Better than 'Scud', anyway. I take the point that the player was perceived to be be less surface to air than air to surface. I have heard a story that John Greig declared his intention to 'build his team' around John McDonald, which perhaps explains something about his tenure as Manager.

He's under a ban, anyway, or so I am told. Nothing to do with the medics, it's for excessive use of the whip.

Contemporary footballers are like thoroughbred racehorses, then, without, it has to be said, the breeding. Perhaps the Club should set up a Stud farm to produce future stars. It could employ somebody like @compo to manage it: too old to interfere with the fillies... Just think, how much the Club could gain from players like Baxter, or Laudrup, covering mares dahn saff...

They are taking him, but are they obliged to bring him back?

Never underestimate the plucky Belgians. With Lammers offski (oh, please Lord, let it happen), there will be a space in the Euro squad for him. Whether this would be a good signing or not is open to debate, but a front three of Batshuayi, Silva, and Sima looks.....interesting. All on loan, of course, but looking to attract interest from big, big payers. And, don't forget, exposure before the Euros, for Batshuayi, and Silva, could figure in the calculations. We'll see.

Your gonna need a bigger septic tank

Don't shoot the messenger. Don't bet in reliance on this. The tweet is from Jan 1st.

Apparently, in an interview, or at a press conference, a journalist said to Beckenbauer that he was a great player, but asked him to explain that, as he was not the fastest , and many players would beat him running between Point A and Point B on the pitch. Beckenbauer replied that he would not start at Point A. FRANZ BECKENBAUER 1945-2024 | MARTIN SAMUEL Franz Beckenbauer redefined what a defender could be Late German hero who, at the age of 20, lost the 1966 World Cup final to England beneath Wembley’s twin towers, spent a lifetime exacting his revenge Martin Samuel Monday January 08 2024, 8.30pm, The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/franz-beckenbauer-redefined-what-a-defender-could-be-j2x9lnd7g It was a resemblance to Kaiser Ludwig II of Bavaria that first gave Franz Beckenbauer his nickname. An unfortunate juxtaposition with a bust of Emperor Franz-Josef after a friendly international in Vienna helped, too. Yet by the time he retired, regal doppelgangers had been long forgotten. There was only one Kaiser Franz and that title and reputation rested on his talent alone. Football historians still debate whether Beckenbauer invented the modern position of sweeper — there were certainly antecedents in an attacking sense, not least Ernst Ocwirk of the great Austria side — but what is undeniable is that he made the position uniquely his own. Beckenbauer, more than any player before and quite possibly since, was both the last line of defence and first line of attack. That his greatness coincided with a high point for English international football means he is also inextricably linked with the fortunes of this nation, perhaps more than any other footballer not from these shores. Beckenbauer runs with the ball against the Soviet Union in West Germany’s victorious 1972 European Championship final REX Pelé never played at Wembley; Diego Maradona did not return after mesmerising there in a friendly at the age of 19; but Beckenbauer lost the 1966 World Cup final beneath the twin towers as a 20-year-old and then spent the rest of his career extracting revenge. His German team eliminated England from the 1970 World Cup, ran rings around us in the 1972 European Championships, and then conquered Poland — who had eliminated England in the qualifiers — on the way to their 1974 World Cup victory. That was the first leg of Beckenbauer’s World Cup treble. He won the World Cup as a player and captain, then as Germany’s manager in 1990, and finally as a politician, when he helped claim the hosting rights for the tournament in 2006. Only the last of those achievements has lately lost its shine. Beckenbauer the player, in particular, remains unsurpassed. He is the only defender to win the Ballon D’Or twice, in 1972 and 1976, finishing runner-up on two further occasions and third in 1966. That was the year Helmut Schön, the German coach, decided to sacrifice his creative talents in the World Cup final, detailing him instead to man-mark Bobby Charlton. Beckenbauer breaks away from Charlton during the 1966 World Cup final GETTY IMAGES It was a rare aberration, and negated by Sir Alf Ramsey instructing Charlton to mark Beckenbauer, who had already scored four goals in the tournament and would be voted its best young player, ahead of Alan Ball. For the decade after, however, English players would be devoting their best efforts to chasing Beckenbauer everywhere he went. For fans of a certain age, his name remains the shorthand for any defender who attempts bringing the ball out from the back. When Ron Atkinson joined in games in training, he would provide a mockingly self-aggrandising commentary on his own performance. He was always “Beckenbauer” when on the ball. Describing Dave Bassett in his early days as a player-coach at Wimbledon, Wally Downes told me: “As coach he could play himself anywhere, and he fancied being libero [a sweeper], like Beckenbauer. Two block tackles and a headbutt later, he’d make it to the edge of his own penalty area. . . ” It’s a delightful image, the leaden-footed wannabes trying to emulate the skills of the master. The reality is, even the greatest of them couldn’t come close. Beckenbauer could, quite literally, have played anywhere his coach demanded. Bayern Munich first identified him as a promising centre forward, prodigious enough to have scored more than 100 goals in a single season as a schoolboy. He represented their youth teams in that role but was playing left wing when he made his debut in 1964. He was still a creative midfielder when he was told to follow Charlton, but by the time the next World Cup came around he had reinvented — some would say invented — himself as an attacking sweeper, Germany’s defensive saviour, and playmaker. It was a quite brilliant concept. Beckenbauer’s reading of the game made him an outstanding defender, while hiding at the back allowed him the space to start masterful counterattacking moves. His distance from the forward players did not matter. Beckenbauer had the intelligence and passing range to pick out a colleague running into space — not least his club and country team-mate Gerd Müller — or to start a move by playing raking balls to the wings. His ability to find Günter Netzer helped destroy England in the European Championships and, when the opportunity invited, Beckenbauer would summon his powers as a midfielder and break through the middle on his own. He had quick feet, quick thought, and gave quick passes. He was the most Brazilian German footballer there has ever been. The idea that playing sweeper allowed him to be idle was exploded by Schön’s predecessor as Germany coach, Sepp Herberger. “So many players are like clockwork toys,” he sneered. “They run themselves silly and then stop. Franz is so smart, intelligent and mature he could play until he is 40.” He didn’t, of course. He retired from international and major European football at 31 — one World Cup, one European Championship, three European Cups, four Bundesliga titles, four German Cups, the European Cup Winners’ Cup and an Intercontinental Cup — with a move to New York Cosmos but, by that time, had completely redefined what a defender could be. Even now, with Pep Guardiola’s inverted full backs, we are watching updates of what Beckenbauer imagined for the role. That he should then distinguish himself as a coach should hardly have been unexpected. At the 1974 World Cup his qualities as a leader had already been tested when his team-mates threatened to strike on finding out they were being paid less than the players of Holland and Italy. Beckenbauer talked them down from that ledge, then came to Schön’s rescue when the coach suffered a personal crisis after a group defeat to East Germany. Beckenbauer spoke at the next press conference, made the logistical arrangements for the next game and shared management duties until Schön had regained confidence. It was no surprise, then, that 16 years later he would expertly marshal a German team to overcome Maradona’s Argentina. “The best footballer in German history,” the national team’s present head coach, Julian Nagelsmann, said. “His interpretation of the role of the libero changed the game, this and his friendship with the ball made him a free man. Franz Beckenbauer was able to float on the lawn; as a footballer and later also as a coach he was sublime, he stood above things. When Franz Beckenbauer entered a room, the room lit up.” Indeed. He follows Charlton, leaving this earth only three months later; two greats of the game, still marking each other into eternity.

How much am I bid for these guys? Beckenbauer, left, in 2002 with Pelé, who died in 2022, and Sir Bobby Charlton, who died in 2023 KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES