calscot
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Everything posted by calscot
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It WAS up to Walter to have a team capable of qualifying for the CL in place. And the squad seems to have disintegrated over the last few months. After getting to the UEFA cup final, surely we should have had enough to dispense with Kaunas - even with a few absentees? The squad obviously wasn't solid enough and some of the players were being carried - and when they were given the full responsibility, they crumbled. Players like Broadfoot, Weir, Dailly, McCulloch and Adam are ok as individual back-ups for this season, but as soon as you make half a team from them, then we are pretty poor. The gulf in class between our best players and our standbys is now obvious. We've also got some players who are better than these who didn't get a game like Webster, Hemdani and Cousin - and retrospectively, Furman and Fleck could have done a far better job. The only twinkling of light is that the squad will look much better with the addition of Brougherra along with the return from injury of Webster, Smith, Burke, Ferguson, Naismith and Beasley.
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While I see your point, isn't that a short-termist view of the kind that SDM is now being slated for?
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So how come you were WRONG? He wasn't off to the highest bidder like you said in the slightest, just one that was acceptable to him who would pay the release fee in his contract. ALL the evidence points to Rangers wanting to keep and Cuellar wanting to move because we're out of Europe. There is very little evidence to suggest otherwise. And you will now NEVER be able to prove that Cuellar would have gone had we qualified for the CL. All you did right was predict the outcome of a 50-50 chance. Toss 10 coins and it's likely 5 would have been as right as you. Also don't see the Cousin swap for Davis yet which you also predicted, so when it that happening? What an idle boast.
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Sorry but for players like Cuellar this is irrelevant. Someone with a very good career on a very high average of 50 grand a year for 40 years will earn �£2M in their lifetime. Cuellar will earned more than half of that in one year last season and will probably earn that full amount next year. When you're earning a lifetime's wage in a year, the shortness of the career has no bearing whatsoever.
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I think we have to work out exactly which parts of running the club are done so badly and focus on that. A lot of the criticism recently has been unfounded and often uninformed. You can't change anything without really knowing what you want to change and you can't change things that are not true.
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Darryl certainly has his finger on the pulse - or maybe he just reads gersnet...
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I think there's a bit of a contradiction here that I can't quite resolve. On the one hand SDM and Bain are really cunning and devious and pulling the wool over our eyes and then next they are so bad at it that the say they want to do one thing and do the opposite a few days later. So which is it, are they cunningly devious or blundering idiots who can't make a good lie to save themselves?
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I completely agree too. Cuellar himself asked why he'd want to go to another club when Rangers play in the CL ever year. Well that incentive has been taken away and it's obvious he won't get into the Spanish team without it as playing in the SPL will not get him noticed. He now realises he's a decent player with a big future and so if he can't fulfill it at Rangers, he may as well go to England and possibly triple his money into the bargain.
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"Hurting Murray in the pocket" is a dangerous game as it's the club's pocket not his. He gets hit indirectly, but Celtic fans showed that this form of action is extreme and can risk putting your club out of business for ever. It can really damage the financial health of your club - although Celtic fans went on to save their club by buying shares. However, it takes someone willing to gamble their own millions to keep the club above water in the meantime - for them that was Fergus McCann. In the end his gamble paid off and he walked off with some ridiculous amount of money in his pocket - �£15M I think. We have to remember where the finances of the club start and end and where SDM's money starts and ends and how the two are very inter-related. Too many people are convinced it's all about SDM's money, when most of the time it's the club's.
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I also think Bain is a joke, but with the information I have read, I can't see how he is directly at fault except for the fact he sanctioned the 10M Euros clause. However, when you sign a player for 3M Euros, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea at the time. I accept their could be information that I don't know that shows him to be directly responsible. But I prefer to base opinions on information I do know, albeit while trying to take everything with a pinch of salt.
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Sorry, that's not a definition that's a subjective interpretation of an instance where behaviour can be seen as "extreme" - it's just an example, like when someone asks you to put "extreme" in a sentence. Your definition is probably not extreme in the lives of mafia families... I was using extreme for it's actually meaning rather than any metaphor. Think of say a normal distribution of intensity of rivalry and the tail ends at each side could be describes as the extremes of rivalry. I would put Rangers and Celtic in the upper extremes in this graph. Teams without much rivalry would be in the lower extremes. Lets think of the middle 80% as the mainstream - ie they have a moderate amount of rivalry with a nearby team or with a team that they challenge often for a position in their league. The upper decile could then be seen as the upper extreme and the lower decile the lower extreme. Of course I'm choosing these figures arbitrarily and subjectively - and measuring the rivalry is also subjective. However, I think most people would subjectively put the OF into the upper extremities of intensity of rivalry. In the end I think you're too busy arguing about the semantics of one word, rather than assessing the validity of the semantics of my actual point. Yes, it's subjective, but I think many people have enough information to make a reasonable assessment. Perhaps in this we could measure this by counting all the rivalries that have not transferred a players between them and calculate that as a percentage of all of them. We then need to decide what percentage constitutes "extreme". I can see all this is a bit messy but if we break down the words of everyone's points to make them some kind of absolute, no-one would be able to make many points and our debates would be more like lawers' contracts.
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"Sporting" rivalries can be seen as healthy, but often they can be diseased by social factors. There are quite a few unhealthy rivalries around the world which result in prejudice and often violence. I would find it difficult to agree with the OF rivalry being labeled as wholly, "healthy". I think Mo Johnson, Stephen Pressley and Kenny Miller are typical examples of how the "heart not in it" theory is not a very strong one. It's fine to have a rivalry, but to me it's seems unhealthy and ineffective to let the rivalry RULE all your decisions. I don't know the last time Rangers bought a player from Celtic or vice versa, if ever. That seems to me to be enough of a testament to a rivalry without having to dig a lot deeper. Right now we have an ever decreasing choice of players to bring to Ibrox that could do a job and also want to come. Let's not limit it too much.
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My point was that if most other rivalries are moderate enough to allow players to be transfered between them, then those that don't are by definition more extreme. Not signing players that have played for your rivals before is logically even more extreme. "Extreme" is pretty much a relative word. I can't see how I used it incorrectly especially as I have explicitly qualified it as my humble opinion. I don't think many OF firms would disagree with our rivalry being "extreme" with many seeing that as the beauty of it.
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Must admit it looks like a very weak squad just as we got our pride back a bit.
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I'm sure many people who hang up their scarves would be grabbing them again if we got to another European final...
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As far as I can see, other countries have rivalries but they still buy and sell players to each other. It's extreme enough not to buy from your rivals but it's way over the top IMHO to a avoid a player because he USED to play for your rivals. I don't see why management should pander to that kind of perception from the support. Maybe by smashing the sectarian "spirit" of the club, it can actually be in a position to move forward. In a European league we'd not have much room for that kind of rivalry with Celtic.
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I think this shows that it was purely the big mans choice. If Rangers wanted money it would be far more lucrative to get him to sign a new contract with a far bigger get out clause and then sell him in January.
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I don't see too much problem with selling your best players when you're being offered the kind of money that you tend to spend on four players as long as you invest that money in improving the overall team. Unfortunately the that condition is not being met. Instead we've bought three players for a position that we already have players for and who don't seem any better while neglecting the midfield after the loss of Davis and Ferguson. The longer we have Cousin and Darcheville on the books, the worse it looks for Walter. He should have prioritised the midfield and waited to offload each striker before replacing them. Brougherra was also bought a week too late. He took too big a gamble and lost so can no longer be considered, "a safe pair of hands".
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PS It does now seem like we've got half a squad of stop gaps...
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Wier should have left on a high as his "last hurrah". You can only squeeze so much out of an old sponge... I think this will be a season to far for him. Dailly was an ok stop gap who should have been treated as such. We were supposed to be building a team for success and that seemed to be going well last season, this was supposed to have been completed this summer but instead it seems we've eroded the foundations at the same time as unbalancing the structure and we're now teetering on collapse. We have to do some major remedial work and soon. The 8M has to be spent, no matter what the books look like at the end of the season. It looks like we need to win the league for more than one reason, not least as it seems our only way into the CL as I think the nerves of the club will hinder us too much in the qualifiers. If it was that bad this year, how is going to be next when it's even more imperitive?
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I think that would be a reasonable request that should be complied with.
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Novo only has a year left on his contract which he had to fight for, I can see him leaving for some job security.
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Seems to me that SDM spent our money, King's money, Lewis's money and then borrowed the rest before finally, reluctantly having to put in a huge whack of his own money in the share issue. In the end he's paid about 70M for shares in the club and is unlikely to get all this back with the club worth between 50 and 60M. However, his companies have made profits out of Rangers and he has grown a few companies on the back of guaranteed trade with Rangers. So in the end he's probably still made a small profit but at the same time been able to use his standing as Rangers chairman, to broker many deals for MIM etc. If he hadn't overspent in the Advocaat years and kept Rangers successful, he'd have made 50M easy - ie the 50M he just put into the club during the share issue. Basically he hasn't run Rangers very well recently and has undone any good he did at the beginning. On the other hand, he hasn't really lost anything either and has many intangible gains. Seems to me that he was latterly trying to fatten the cow for sale and failed and so should now probably just take what he can get. I can't see how he can continue and be successful with so much animosity from the fans. I don't think "Murray out" protests are too far away which would weaken his selling position further.
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I can't believe anyone would be so brass necked or stupid to lie on a Friday knowing they would be found out on the Monday. However, there is a mood among the fans where they want to believe SDM lied whether it is true or not. It's the position that SDM has taken himself to.
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Yeah, I have to hold my hand up and say he was right. However, it seems the player made the decision and when you remember that he said he was happy at Rangers - "because they play the Champions League every season," you can see why he changed his mind about staying. I can't believe that SDM and WS would open themselves up to such criticism by categorically saying he's staying on Friday and then selling him on Monday. What would be the point? However, this is a new low for us and SDM and WS will have lost whatever trust the fans had left. Just as we seemed to be heading out of the tunnel, we've plunged back in. Any feel good factor we had for Manchester has disappeared completely and hope now seems distant on the horizon. SDM should probably cut his losses and sell the club on a low as his relationship with the fans is probably damaged beyond repair. If he doesn't leave soon, he could be hounded out.