calscot

How is that making excuses? You ask him if the hectic schedule affected the results and he says, yes. Seems to me he's just agreeing with the bleedin' obvious.

I wanted Man U to win as Fergie seemed to genuinely want us to do the quadruple...

He makes Broadfoot look like a super star...

I think it's Setanta 1 for Celtic and 2 for us. If I'm watching with a Tim mate of mine I'll probably be alternating the channels for five minutes each. If it's just me I'll be watching the Rangers game and flicking it over for the score every five minutes. Unlucky Gribz, I hope they don't spoil it for you.

PS Tommy was a great football man and it's a real shame he died so young.

Yeah, welcome Ricky. We're fine with Celtic fans who are reasonably polite and respectful. As long as that's the case, disagreeing with us and a bit of banter is also fine.

I can't even be bothered guessing - there been so much speculation in the last few years that has turned out to be so wrong that I'm a bit bored with it. Walter has totally surprised me time and time again that I'd prefer just to wait and see. However, in saying that I can see him buying a few promising cheapies from the SPL, a couple of solid players from lower or relegated Premiership teams, and one or two lesser known players from abroad.

We've won a load of diverse trophies like Glasgow Cup, Soccer Sixes etc...

I would presume Ambrahamovic is the majority share holder of Chelsea as a limited company. In that case he is not liable for any Chelsea debt whatsoever, the company are. Owners of a limited company have "limited liability" for debts, hence the name. Debts would be paid for out of income and assets of the company, not Roman's pocket. He has probably loaned Chelsea the money from another of his companies and therefore Chelsea owe that company. If he called in the debt then Chelsea could not pay and so would be bankrupted and liquidated. All assets would be sold and whatever money raised would be shared by the creditors - including Roman. However as he'd be lucky to get about 40p in the pound it's not really worth his while and he'd be better waiting for Chelsea to pay him back over a number of years from their income. However he'd be losing about the same amount of money in interest. The only way out would be to get a buyer but with over 700M in debt to take over, no-one in their right mind would do this as they could not borrow on a company that has more liabilities than assets by about 2:1. If I was a Chelsea fan, I'd be worried. We're in a better position as SDM swapped his money for equity rather than an interest free loan. However, our assets were still greater than our debt by about 50%. I think it's good to see clubs that get into too much debt get into trouble as it's not fair on clubs who cannot compete with them due to keeping financial stability. It's akin to an athlete taking drugs to compete and almost killing himself. It's not fair if others can't compete with him because they don't want to take the same risks. There should be rules where a club cannot increase it's debts to more than half its turnover without incurring a deduction in points as a penalty. That would have stopped us going too far a few years ago and Hearts would be hit big time. Gretna would never have been able to get into such dire straits and neither would Leeds. The Man U takeover would also not be possible and Chelsea wouldn't have been able to buy the league.

What? Play our Left back/right mid/left mid player as a right back? Surely that's way out of position!

We played 4-4-2 against Motherwell and many others, so don't know which matches you're refering to. I seem to recall that the 4-5-1 formation was hardly defensive in the SPL as it usually worked more like a 4-3-3. The loss of Beasley, Adam, McCulloch and Naismith has certainly limited our attacking options on the left. The loss of Hutton and Burke has done the same for the right. I think one of the reasons we didn't win that game is that the pressure is so high now that when they equalised, our players lost patience in the build up and resorted to long balls. They looked like they didn't feel they had time to play the ball around - and you could see that the fans were egging them on to get the ball up the park as quickly as possible. They need to show more composure in the last two games.

I can't see how the 4-5-1 formation has cost us the league when it seems to have originally put us in the position to win it. Ironically, most of our worse games have been when we played 4-4-2 - including the Motherwell game. It seems to me it's more down to tiredness - at least mentally, fixture congestion as well as injuries piling up. Celtic won nothing when they got to the UEFA cup final with far less games to play. That's shows that it can affect your domestic form.

Some defenders do put their hands behind their backs in the box (and I do too now) but not when they are running. Broadfoot's was definitely not a penalty in my opinion and in fact looked to be trying to pull his arm out of the way but as his back was turned when the ball was kicked he didn't see it till too late. However, we had a double penalty claim - their keeper took out one of our players in a late tackle at the same time as their defender handled the ball.

I never heard an *** or FB during the game and as I was watching with a Tim, I'm sure he'd have pointed it out if he'd heard either.

They really are making a big deal out of something that is normal at ANY event attended by a load of people standing together outside - open air concerts for example. The pictures depicting it as akin to a war zone are grossly unfair. Now, I really hate litter and littering and even take the time to pick a lot of it up in the vicinity of my house and at work. However, I think there is mitigation here. It's obvious the fans will have bought a lot of bottles and cans, be it of alcohol or soft drinks, as well as food for the day. They were all squashed in tight making moving around very difficult and there is no way they could all keep going back and forth to the bins. Ideally maybe everyone could have carried a black bin bag and disposed of their own rubbish, but in today's society that's never going to happen. The council should have been prepared for this and paid a lot of overtime to an army of cleaners to clear the rubbish during the night. Edinburgh do this every night during the Festival. I think that ironically, if say only a quarter of the actual rubbish was dropped, it wouldn't have made the job easier in the slightest. It would still be spread over the same area. It was completely negligent of the council to not start cleaning until the next day with what looked like too small a workforce.

Yeah, "error on the page" is correct, and normal for anything by Spiers. You can see all the comments by the Tims who, not surprisingly love the guy. I think it shows what kind of reporter you are when one side of the OF love you while the other side hate you. Glen Gibbons is very negative too but at least he is disliked by both sets of fans. However, it is quite funny when the Tims are commenting how impartial he is one day (when slagging off Rangers) and then calling him a biased Hun the next (when slagging off Celtic)...

I think Beasley could do a job on the left with Naismith for the future and we still have McCulloch and Adam too, who should be fit next season. We're weaker on the right as Davis is not the best in that position and Novo doesn't seem to get enough of a shout there. Burke is just too inconsistent and injury prone for me. I agree about the middle role though - Barry just isn't quite up to it and drops too deep too often. It's a priority position to fill. Darch is pretty good up front but we could do with someone to replace Cousin. Hopefully that player could be a class striker who can hold the ball up with Darch as backup. We need a striker who has a combination of Darch's ability to hold the ball and take it right up the pitch, Boyd's predatory instincts, and Novo's tenacity, work rate and ability to track back and win the ball. That would be some player. Hopefully Stevie Smith can get back to his previous form or even up to Hutton's later form. That would give us far more attacking options on the left. I do admit now to regretting selling Hutton - if I knew we would get to the UEFA final I would have wanted to keep him at least till the summer. Walter is probably thinking the same. We either need a new right back, or to get Whittaker playing well in that position. I'm not sure if Weir will last another year and even if he does we need a backup and successor. Is Webster good enough or should we look for another Cuellar? Goalkeeping is a position that is looking good.

One strange thing about the footage is that of all the instigators at the front, I can't see many Rangers tops. Now contrast this with the sea of blue white and red you see with all the well behaved fans earlier... Are these really Rangers fans?

Thought we were pretty unlucky last night or maybe the reality is we didn't get much luck. We created the better chances while Zenit had most of the ball. The shooting statistics are a joke as countless Zenit "backpasses" to Alexander will be counted as "shots on target". In the end we gave them a good game and don't deserve most of the negative reporting we're getting about the game. Yes, Zenit were marginally better, but not by much. We were well in the game right up until the last minute. We just couldn't put one of our many excellent chances away and were seemingly denied a "double" penalty shout when they simultaneously handled the ball while their keeper brought down one of our players in a late tackle. Their first goal came from an unfortunate and lucky ball through Cuellar's legs. Hopefully we can build on the experience and with some new faces, can go on and give another good account of ourselves next season. We've played 19 Euro games in one seasonwhich used to take us about 4 or 5 years for players to get that kind of experience. Let's hope it improves our younger players.

The annoying thing about Advocaat is how come he couldn't win it with us? He couldn't get past the last 16 even after beating top teams like Parma and Bayer Leverkusen. Twice we couldn't defend a lead in Germany... Walter has still probably done relatively better in this years competition when you consider the timescales and budgets.

I think both Mols and Durrant had plenty of chances for Rangers post injury - and Rangers stuck by Durrant 100% through his operations and recovery. They both played for at least a year or two post recovery but neither was as good as he'd previously been and both started to look not quite good enough to get into the Rangers team. Durrant played a big part in the '92/93 season so, I can't see how he didn't get a chance.

We don't want it - the last time we got it, Kilmarnock entered Europe as our fourth team. They lost both games and so added nothing to the coefficient. Not only that all point the three other teams accumulated were then divided by 4 instead of 3. So we'd have been better off if Kilmarnock had not been in Europe at all. Scottish teams outside the OF have an incredibly poor record in Europe in the last twenty years with Hearts being about the only club that can maybe just about scrape a pass mark. Without the Old Firm our coefficient would be well below Ireland's and the likes of Latvia which is shocking. Then the ironic thing is that instead of teams entering the Intertoto cup and getting some European experience, most years, our lesser teams have thought themselves too good for a tournament, where the likes of Newcastle pragmatically enter as a route to the UEFA cup.

Doesn't know much either, what happened to the Cup winners cup finals with teams led by George Graham and Bruce Rioch?

http://www.itv-football.co.uk/schedule/

I too was confused by IVT4 not having it but it's networked throughout the UK on ITV1 - as it in hindsight it would have been even with two foreign teams. So if you're in Scotland and don't want STV you'll probably need Sky and look in the 900's channels for your alternative ITV. Mine is London, so I'll probably be watching that and hoping for different pundits and commentators.