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calscot

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Everything posted by calscot

  1. calscot
    As the Easdales are using McMurdo as a propaganda puppet, it sounds like they are at it. The more crap McMurdo comes out with in support of them, the more wary I become of them. They are condescending enough of us to try to play us like a flute, but the problem is too many of the support are are into flute music...
  2. calscot
    It's not so simple a statement as it has two possible meanings. I agree with one meaning but not the other. I actually thought my post explained it...
  3. calscot
    I really wish we had a couple of prominent bloggers who actually sound like they are sane, reasonable and level headed. Just as well we have TRS.
  4. calscot
    Seems like you have an innate desire to be miserable...
  5. calscot
    I don't agree with this. For a start you are setting yourself up to be a failure, the first time you drop points - what's your target after that? It becomes meaningless and complete failure. Secondly, it means you take the eye off the ball for the real goal and task and messes with your motivation. Thirdly, it can make you desperate and therefore make huge mistakes - imagine someone who tries to equal or break their best lap time in motorsport, in EVERY lap. They'll be pushing so hard that instead of getting a good result they are likely to crash almost every race. It's not quite the same in football but there are similarities. We always need to leave room for error and off days. Just think of the pressure of golf and how many have succumbed to it - most famously Colin Montgomery, who never won a major even though he once just needed two bogeys in the last two holes to do it. We should start every game with the aim of winning but aiming to win every game should not be an issue. Winning the league comfortably is a good enough aim instead. If we win every game then that is just a bonus that you look back on, not forward to. It sounds easy enough if you have the best team but how come in 130 years of football, it's only been done once in the world? And that was a very short season of only 18 games. Celtic have already failed in the last two seasons despite having no competition.
  6. calscot
    I would have thought that honour goes to ICT...
  7. calscot
    I would love us to go to court and have Celtic banned from Europe. Result!
  8. calscot
    When you're continually and pathologically slandering a target, you'll be digging up and spinning as much dirt as you can. It's obvious that some of it will be true - but that doesn't make a good reason to listen.
  9. calscot
    Don't understand what people don't get about the backup keeper. It's been explained many times but that explanation is continually ignored. So maybe it needs explaining again. The thing about a second keeper is that he doesn't often get a game, if at all, but it's a really important position that needs someone to take the pressure of being ready for any game where he has to spring into action and do a decent job. I can't see how that job description suits a young, up and coming keeper who could actually do with developing his skills by playing a lot of meaningful games - on loan seems the best bet there. No, the job suits an older pro who is coming to the end of his career, doesn't need to develop or make a name for himself and has been through all the rough an tumble of a professional career that he has exorcised all his naivety and lingering nerves as well as his ego. You need someone of adequate skill and experience and yet who doesn't mind getting a decent pay cheque for not playing much. This is not a productive investment, it's a type of insurance which you only appreciate when it's time to claim. Too many seem to be arguing with themselves: they want to develop youngsters and yet at the same time "ruin" them on the bench. They want to win the league by a mile and maybe win a cup (or at least have a good run) and yet don't want adequate keeper cover. They want to dominate teams of experienced professionals and yet want to play a team of naive youngsters from the U21s. It's a hard balancing act being a manager and at least McCoist has the conception of balancing - as long as he balances his budget.
  10. calscot
    It just backs up what I've been saying for years to howls of derision. So we should be like Arsenal and Man U? Man U "won with kids". People just don't get statistical anomalies. Man U didn't play kids as a strategy, they played them because they were an astounding crop of excellent young players and good enough to win (plus they had plenty of experienced players and rarely played a teenager). Sometimes like draw poker you're just dealt an excellent hand and don't have to make any changes, but that doesn't mean you should have a strategy of never making changes. I keep asking for evidence that the "building a team from the youths" strategy works and all you get is one-offs from clubs who don't do that normally. Only 4/13.something players we even developed in the whole of the EPL never mind a single club. At a glance West Brom and West Ham seem to be the most successful with home grown players, so forget Man U and Arsenal as models of this.
  11. calscot
    I seem to recall them having operating expenses of £40m and so making a pre tax profit of £14m on the back their CL run, and reducing their debt to £0.13m. That seems to have helped them enormously although it's more easily sustainable when you have no domestic challenge and I'm sure season tickets and match day tickets will be down this year as well as TV income and sponsorship. The strange bit for me with regards to Rangers is that how come their operating expenses are £40m and ours are reputed to be £36m with a much smaller wage bill which should make more than £4m difference alone? I would have expected our operating expenses to be more in the mid to high 20s and Celtic's seem to confirm my thinking.
  12. calscot
    The licence fee would more than cover subscriptions to Lovefilm Instant and Netflix, where there are no adverts... While I think the BBC already have far too many "adverts" anyway and the dreaded on screen graphics (the worst ones are those that distract you at the end of a programme to tell you what's on next).
  13. calscot
    I don't think we can ban all and sundry but we do have to make a point when the reporting seems consistently mendacious. The BBC are also a special case in that they are not properly regulated and the fans have no practical way of avoiding paying for their services - actually that is a sore point, the BBC is supposed to be a service to its licence payers and a the large Rangers support are not only being denied an impartial and fair reporting service for their club, but they are also being frequently unfairly demeaned by that same service. If nothing else, statements and a ban will draw attention to the higher echelons of what is actually a British corporation and eventually they will have to take notice. Even at it's basest effect, the guy in charge at Pacific Quay will have to continually explain the situation to many people which surely make him squirm after a while. For me, tabloids (and unfortunately all newspapers are tabloids now in size and nature) have an agenda that attracts their targeted readership and we can buy or not buy them if it doesn't match ours. The BBC are supposed to be an impartial institution that serves all and I'm disgusted at their level of reporting over the last several years. They are making themselves moribund and losing their rasion d'etre. If they can't do what they are supposed to do then it's time to abolish the licence fee. I'd prefer them to get their house in order as a proper BBC could be a great oasis in a sewer of journalistic excrement that today's media represents.
  14. calscot
    This makes absolutely no sense at all to me. He's implying 8m of season tickets are our only income and our expenditure is 36m. With the 22m IPO, we are still short 6m. So what about next year with no IPO? He is effectively saying that we will make a £28m shortfall! (Minus a million or two in cuts.) This is just rubbish even to a layman. Share issues should not be needed for normal operating expenditure as it means you need one every year. Season tickets are also not the only income. Before the meltdown we were bringing in over £36m a year with about a £20m wage bill and still paying off our debts at a couple of million a year, plus paying transfer fees. We're earning nothing from UEFA and TV and less from sponsorship but that should be pretty much covered in the £15m drop in the wage bill. If this is how he really thinks then to me he's not qualified to run the club. Not impressed.
  15. calscot
    Well the most obvious bit you got wrong was that it's "damp squib" not "damp squid" - a common "egg-corn". (A squib is a small banger firework, often connected together by a string so that they go off one after the other sounding like being attacked by gunfire. They don't go off when damp.) Pedantic loyal...
  16. calscot
    People need to make up their mind how players develop. I thought part of it was playing in the first team surrounded by high quality players from whom you learn from. It's been funny over the past year with people wanting a team full of U21's when we already have that in the U21 league - except that's where players "rot". What's the difference? I'll spell it out: if all teams "developed" their youngsters by playing loads of them in the team then all teams would be full of youngsters being optimally developed, so what is the difference between that and an U21 league with the same young players playing each other all the time? It's a paradox to me.
  17. calscot
    I thought many fans wanted lower wages and higher bonuses, now the argument is for no bonuses, and wage deductions...
  18. calscot
    I said 2-4k a week. It all depends on our wage structure where I'd guess he'd be at the top tier. But my point was that even if you're not rich, 100k-200k a year is not a hard living and so if you're at the end of your career and already very wealthy it's easier to choose football and family over loads of money - in the assumption you've put quite a bit aside for your possible retirement. How much are the Canadian league paying him? I can't see him commanding a huge wage these days due to his age, and it all depends how much he wants to come home and how much he wants to do so while playing for the best and richest team in the country that would want him. How much was Frank de Boer on? He is a good example.
  19. calscot
    I'll have to leave it to you to define who they are as I can't really work it out. It suggests we should be going for a lot of other (ex)Scotland players which we don't seem to be doing. There doesn't seem many of these boys at Ibrox right now and there have been a few aging Scots internationalists on the market.
  20. calscot
    Why not? Like you say he went to play in Turkey for 40k a week, the guy is now a millionaire with prospects in coaching and management. He is in his final hurrah as a footballer and can afford to play for nothing - and peanuts at Rangers is still very liveable. I could easily cope on 2-4 grand a week... (I wish) What are his genuine choices? Rangers sounds more interesting for a Scot than Vancouver before you even start to consider family etc.
  21. calscot
    Don't get the "job for the boys" comments. They just don't make sense. As Shiels is a current RANGERS player and Miller is playing for Vancouver and also had a stint at Celtic - who is more qualified as "one of the boys"? Seems just another excuse to moan to me. If there was a job for the boys attitude then how could we ever ask anyone to leave? They are all Rangers players after all.
  22. calscot
    Yeah, only in the sense that he's our best teenager by miles and deserves a regular starting slot at the tender age of 18. No other comparison meant... The good thing is that we have 16 academy players, all of whom have played and 8 of which have played more than 25 times. A bit unprecedented for us. However, they do make up 50% of the "squad".
  23. calscot
    I think McLeod is our Barry Ferguson of today. I don't think Ally can really be blamed for the payoffs of Goian and Boca. Of the players he signed last season - with a about week to do it, he still has some half decent ones: Black is now playing at his best (despite his work-life problems), Templeton is one that most think will come good when fit again, Shiels still could be a decent player when fit and in a better team, and Faure has fired the optimism in some. Cribari and Argi aren't the biggest flops we've ever had and looked good on paper for the position we were in when looking for experienced players at a reasonable wage. We've moved the rest on but it didn't seem all that difficult with the first two I mentioned being the biggest cheques.
  24. calscot
    I can see your point but historically we have always been complaining we don't have enough players and have a predisposition for injury crises. Our squad is definitely smaller than what we have had for decades and I would say it's smaller than the "thin" squad that Eck ended up with. I think the main difference now seems to be due to including pretty much all the youth players who were not previously counted as first team squad. Even trivially, it seems to me that after injuries we could do with at least 22 players available to have a practice game - and two players for every position. If there was a period of time where a consensus of opinion about what size of squad we SHOULD have then I think we'd have some reference to make but opinion for the "correct" size for the squad seems a bit fluid lately. I think the club are far more circumspect now about the numbers who sign and whether they have a chance of being called upon. It seems many fans think they know best even when they are totally inconsistent, surely the manager has some idea of what he needs and as pointed out many times, he is within the smallest budget to turnover in living memory. McCoist has at most of the time had at least one hand tied behind his back and the fans ignore this in their voracious criticism, but at the same time want to handicap him further than he already is. You already seem to be prejudging the situation by using words like "bloated" in a factual sense. I agree we need to make less mistakes and less payouts but it seems only one of our illustrious list of managers is being criticised for this when it seems commonplace all over the country and for as long as I can remember. Players are not robots and so come with no guarantee. Not many people seem to realise the stress that Ally is under and the constant criticism he has to endure. Of course he wants quality back up, he can't afford ONE season where he doesn't win the league and he's also under pressure for a cup - which were often hard enough to win when we were miles richer than anyone. As I said, I think he should be given a realistic budget that is in keeping with good practice for its proportion to the turnover. Whether he uses it to bring in 4 star players or 12 lesser ones is up to him as long as he keeps within the budget. If he can move a player on, why shouldn't he be able to bring one in? And I don't know how that equates to "even more players"...
  25. calscot
    Instead of lookng at the wages of individual players, should we not be looking at the cost of the whole squad? There really seems to be a fashion in slagging off how big our squad is and what they are paid. Not long ago it was "embarrassing" that we weren't throwing money at players to make them come and that we didn't have enough strength in depth, now the trend is to slag off the manager every time he looks at a new player or gives a current one a new contract. We have one of the lowest wage to turnover ratios in the UK, just how low do people want it to go? Surely you can't tell the manager not to spend and at the same time slag his team off as the worst you've ever seen? Surely if we want to squeeze every penny then style of play is unimportant and winning the league the only thing that counts? You can't slag a manager off for winning the league by "only" 24 points with "crap" football and then say he'd spending too much on a team that looks like it might deliver what people want. It just seems like any old excuse to have a moan. Ally should have a set budget which is a reasonable fraction of turnover, and be able to use that budget in whichever way he sees best to achieve the results. If he doesn't get the required results then his job should be on the line. This seems to be the case and is why Ally now has to offload before he can add again. I really don't think any manager needs a fan to micromanage his every move.
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