calscot

Part of the explanation for my opinion is that under current finances - under 3M we're a buying club, 3M or over then we're a selling club.

PS Unless Walter doesn't want him.

Once it gets to 3M it starts to look tempting. Less than that and we may as well keep him.

A pleasing aspect about the current squad is that there are few players that we are clamouring to find surplus to reqirement a la Fan Fan etc. Ehiogu and Faye seem to be the only two who no-one wants in the team and most would not be disappointed if these players could be released from their contracts. Cousin isn’t the most popular but is playing at a decent enough level which avoids vilification and should bring in a substantial transfer fee if he leaves in the current or next window. Boyd is unpopular with some, but even his detractors would want to hold out for a multimillion pound fee. Burke was less popular than Boyd due to holding out for what many seen as an undeserved contract offer and then hardly played a decent game for the club for a long time due to poor form, illness or injury. However, he has played himself onto the good side of most fans opinions in recent games and again a large transfer fee would be needed to compensate for his moving on. Hemdani has been rumoured have been courted by other clubs but few would want to see the reliable, skilful and tenacious holding midfielder leave – unless an unfeasibly large offer came in. Whether Weir retires in the summer is probably a very open question, and although most fans would like to see a younger man take his place for next season’s challenge, few would want to tinker with a very successful central defensive partnership at this crucial juncture of the season. Gow and Broadfoot have hardly feature but I suspect most fans are happy with the quality of these squad fillers who while on a substantial wage will not be draining the finances at too alarming a rate. Nacho Novo has deservedly been given a two year extension to his contract and while most bears are not blind to his limitations, his attitude, work-rate and recent level of performances make him a very popular player. Our reserve goal-keepers have been an irrelevance with MacGregor playing so consistently as well as fortunately avoiding injury and illness. So the parting of ways with Roy Carroll will hardly register on the radar. While you couldn’t call the rest of the squad, “World Class”, it contains few who could be labelled duds, and that’s what makes it a strong squad for domestic matches and less than embarrassing one in Europe. It is a squad we can now choose to enhance with the keen eye of a sniper, meaning we can put away the machine gun we’ve been using for the last few seasons. We can use any funds to hunt down high quality prey rather than following the heard looking for easy meat.

Seeing as it wasn't written by Spiers or Gibbons, I'll take that as a compliment...

Is it on the telly?

I would say we don't have the luxury of keeping an 8M right back but we might just have the luxury of keeping a 3M striker who is a goal machine even when coming off the bench. I think Boyd is suffering from our arguably quite successful formation which he just doesn't fit in and his starting place has been ultimately been usurped by Naismith who unlike Boyd, Lovenkrands, Arveladze, Buffel and a few others, seems to have the all round skill and versatility to play more than one role, including the left wing. From that evidence, I think Naismith will be our next 9M player and as such we can possibly allow Boyd leave if the offer is good enough. On other notes, in the past two seasons we haven’t had the luxury to give an average at best looking striker a run in the team. Only players who have hit the ground running have been given regular place – and that included Boyd who started very well. If anyone is qualified to judge Sebo, it is Walter Smith using evidence from the few games he started, his subs appearances, his performances in training and dossiers from reserve games. His conclusion was obvious, and I’ve seen absolutely nothing myself with which to argue with our esteemed manager. I’m hoping he thinks the same of Faye and gets rid quickly, as again, we we’re not the kind of club that can afford to let players be rubbish for game after game on the possibility they might get better. Amdy is the poorest player I’ve seen play for Rangers since Walter returned, and possibly the poorest for years - as highly contested as that ignominious award is.

Gribz, we only have ourselves to blame. There have been good reasons for all the postponements, and they have suited us as Scotland fans, Rangers fans, respectful fans and fans of football being played in proper conditions. It's just the way the cookie crumbles.

The trouble with 70,000 over 60,000 is that the cost increases exponentially with number of seats. Adding twice the number of seats could cost say four times as much.

I think a winter shutdown and playing into the summer would improve the standard of football in the league, attract more players from abroad, reduce injuries and increase attendances. It can rain in June but it is still likelier to be better conditions than January. With the choice between the two months it's a no brainer.

I think every club is a selling club at the right price; Rangers have been offered about 17% of their turnover for a player - there is no way we can raise that kind of cash as a matter of course. It's similar to Man U being offered about 50M for a player, except that the richer you are the more disposable income you have - Man U made a huge profit last year, whereas we made a loss and then borrowed a quarter of our turnover to spend on players. We need to pay that money back, and hopefuly the CL money, and maybe winning a title, will eat into some of the growing debt. However, it's obvious: we can't spend like that again for a second year and then a third, without risking the huge and dangerous levels of debt from the Advocaat days. I believe downsizing to be a complete myth: all we have done is to stop overspending. The reason we have less money for transfers than in Smiths previous tenure, is that wages are far, far higher, while our income has not grown at the same rate - basically down to Bosman and Sky. We cannot sustain spending more than we earn - unless we have a benefactor who is willing to throw his own money away to get a better Rangers team in return. We have no right to expect Sir David to assume that role. Murray made big mistakes and continues to make smaller ones, but give him credit for using his own money to put Rangers back on a finantial footing where the debt to be serviced is no longer damaging to the playing staff budget. However, from now on, keeping the debt managable to me shows plenty ambition for the future, not lack of it. None of us wants Rangers to go down the same road as Leeds Utd. The long term future of the club demands the board be prudent with our money. I'm not sure what the Mint will do with the Hutton money (if it ever comes), but I think he has learned that being overly parsimonious can actually damage the finances. You have to keep the team at a certain quality in order to be successful - which results in more income. With that in mind, in his shoes I'd be budgeting for repayment of the debt from the normal course of business turnover, and allow extra-ordinary items like the cash from players, to be reinvested in the playing staff when required. However, unlike the Boumsong affair, there is no immediate need to invest all the money at once this time. One player now, and two or three in the summer would make more sense.

PS I'm not looking for detailed information, just something like, "Gersnet is experiencing problems but expect to be back on line by 3rd of January."

An alternative place to post sounds good... As for the providing the information if a site is down I was thinking along the lines of something like the RST having a section on all the Rangers forums and if one is down, the information that there is a problem and when it is likely to be solved could be put there. So if the gersnet site is down I can go straight to the RST to find out what's going on. Of course gersnet could reciprocate and give information if the RST site is down... When you just get a 404, it means you have no way of getting information from the site, and you don't know if it's gone for good.

In today's financial disparity with English teams and the other top 5 countries, we need all the money we can bring in. I'd rather have say a Pepsi stadium while competing reasonably in the transfer market than to have a cheap team like we've had in the last few years while keeping it Ibrox. However, I think the compromise could be the likes of the "Pepsi Ibrox Stadium". When you think about it, the official name can be irrelevant to the fans: we've been calling Celtic Park, "Parkhead" (and many other soubriquets) for generations.

True, but for the site to be successful I have one constructive criticism. When the site goes down, could we have somewhere to look for news about what's happening and when it's back up? When the site is down for a while with no news you get tempted to defect to another forum! And then you get out of the habit of checking up on gersnet...

PS The last season I'm thinking about that we had a good squad is when we won the league on the last day with Arteta etc in the team.

By the summer we may have Webster and Smith fit for those positions. Buffel and Darcheville are also getting fitter and Novo is back. If Beasley recoverves by the start of next season, we could have a pretty strong squad and I can see why Walter will be only really looking for first choice players. The way we're playing at the moment we don't really have too many weak areas to panic buy for. The team are starting to gel and with the competition for places, many players seem to be coming on to some form. Seems to be the best squad we've had in about 5 seasons.

The leak of this is not a story of concrete plans, it's a case of scenario planning and the preliminaries of looking into all the alternatives. They will look at a load of different ways of expanding, and see which ones are the more economically viable. That will be from lowering the pitch to a full rebuild and everything in between. It's just modelling all the scenarios and seeing which is best. How many fans Ibrox should accommodate is a good question. 70,000 seats would presumably be far more expensive than 60,000 so would the extra revenue from some games be worth it? What would the average gate be at different capacities? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered. 70k may seem too big but would bring in 1M a game in the CL which could be 4M a year plus another 1.5M for the Celtic games, So even if rarely used to capacity it could still possibly bring in an extra 6 or 7M a year. If that was the forecast then a cost of say 30M for the extra 10k seats could be justified. However the most likely scenario may be a cheap option that expands the stadium to say 57K which only requires 6k more seats, most of which could probably be easily filled by new season ticket holders. 6k seats at �£500 each is 3M a year plus Euro and cup game income so say maybe 5-6M a year. So 25-30M to achieve this could make it feasible.

One thing it doesn't take an expert to see is that we need to give our players training in how to kick a stationary ball. Time and again the delivery from set pieces was worse than your average Sunday league player - without exageration. I still think it's strange that footballers are not taught a pre-kick routine here. Golfers have known for centuries that one of the most important parts of winning in a sport where you hit a stationary ball is the preperation before you hit it - ie relaxation techniques, visualising the shot you want adjusting your stance etc. Rugby kickers have adopted this too for the last couple of decades - and they should probably be the model to follow. I'd like to see a free kick/corner taker for Rangers go through a similar routine to Chris Paterson - a guy who rarely misses the target. That should at least get them to consistently get the right direction, elevation and pace. For the top sport with the most money at stake, football still hasn't switched on to modern thinking in some aspects.

Most of the protests have come from Tims, your average bear couldn't really give a toss.

Thinking back on the game, I had an ominous feeling we might lose which just wouldn't have been there a couple of months ago. It wasn't the biggest surprise we were beaten when before I couldn't see us losing at home to anyone - including Barca. Back at the first quarter of the season we were very hard to score against and hence to beat and were racking up clean sheet after clean sheet. That quality has all but disappeared lately and the defence has be making shocking mistakes - at least 10 against Lyon. I think we have to get back to basics again and remember what we were doing so right before. The games against Red Star were highly professional, and I miss those tediously boring games where we never looked like losing a goal.

We could replace all three players in the first choice team but keep them in the squad...

And you could add McFadden's 80th minute miss against Italy. Tight at the back and taking your chances has been the keystone of Rangers and Scotland's recent acheivements.

I'm starting to think that we have a good squad, but could move ourselves a step forward by replacing Weir, Papac and Ferguson, with superior, less one dimensional, more consistent players for their positions. A right midfielder is also a must, although I must admit I thought Novo was doing a great job there this season and think we really missed him against Lyon.

To be honest, I'm not sure what everyone's talking out. You can't have watched the same games as me. We didn't lose to Lyon with 4-5-1, we ultimately lost with a very attacking 3-4-3. It was the latter formation where we didn't have the players to impliment it. Our success in Europe was playing the 4-5-1 very well while being tight at the back and in central midfield. Playing this way we lost 2 legit goals and one handball goal in eight games. In the last two games we shipped an embarrassing 6 goals - but we were in no way sticking to our previous conservative game plans and were a lot more gung ho while making shocking errors at the back. Ironically, while our first 8 games were relatively boring, the last two games have been excellent for the neutral. I think what we've seen is that 4-5-1 works when the defence is disciplined and playing well together along with a midfield sweeper (Hemdani) playing really well and a lone striker who is winning a lot of balls and holding it up. That happened for 7 games, then we struggled but did ok against a Barcelona team at the top of their game. After that we lost our shape, discipline and form and paid the consequences. When you do that as well as the spine of your team (Weir, Cuellar, Hemdani, Ferguson and Cousin) all having a poor game at the same time, then you've no chance. If nothing else, this has taught me that 4-5-1 IS our best formation - when we do it properly. When we don't adhere to it, we get stuffed. The type of football that people are advocating here, is the very football that got our arses kicked. 4-5-1 may be negative but it works - it was the positive play that was our undoing as well as school boy errors.