calscot

Cammy, I think that's to do with most people's ages. We remember the players we have seen. I assume we've had tons of great players over our 134 odd years of illustrious history, but who remembers them enough to compare them? There's also the theory that even a mediocre team today is full of players far fitter, faster, technically adept and better organised than great players of yesteryear. The likes of Jay Jay Okocha are doing stuff with the ball now that make some world players of the year in the past look ordinary and what's he ever won? But I think we mostly remember the players we've seen from our teenage years onwards and especially during successful periods. We also tend to get misty eyed over players who move on to do big things like Gattuso and Van Bronkhurst.

So, should we get rid of Boyd for 1.5M and get another Sebo in for 1.8M? No matter what, we can't afford to sell off our top goal scorer for the price of a bargain basement, unproven player. I think that is very short sighted. To me and many others the obvious thing is to try him with a proper centre forward - Hateley seems to be the usual template. And the great thing to me is that our "say it as it is" manager, is saying that that is exactly what he wants to do and is looking for exactly such a player. If nothing else the guy is worth more as a squad player than any 1.5M replacement. A lot of people seem to have the attitude that only the radical will work - but it's risky and usually fails, I much prefer the tried and tested. Let's not do anything daft just for the sake of it.

Ok but my point is that I think people expect far more "obedience" and "nose to the grindstone" from footballers than they would put up with at work themselves. Just because they are on high wages doesn't mean that you can treat them any old way and expect they will respond with full dedication. They are people after all. I have agreed that that is fair enough but it is also up to the manager to keep a happy ship. Look what happened to Captain Bligh and his draconian methods... In fact that's probably a pretty good analogy. You need discipline on a ship but a good captain keeps his crew relaxed and content. I think this is pure speculation and may be over simplification. We blamed injuries on not having proper training facilities, now we have them with proper medical equipment and staff, yet we still get lots of injuries. Sometimes I think we're just cursed... Firstly, it's debatable whether the mentality is backwards and also highly debatable whether any of PLG's methods were forward at all, and with the stories that come out I'm far from convinced. None of it correlates with modern day thinking on motivation and leadership. It obviously wasn't working and that includes about 13 non-Scottish players that Le Guen brought in, with not one of his recruits considered a first team choice now. Anyway, if he was to change a backward mentality, then yes he would need time, yet it seems to me that HE was the one who wasn't patient. It takes time to change attitudes and going about it with a big stick is not the way. Ultimately he didn't even have the stomach or the patience himself for the job. I think a revolution at a football club has to be done slowly and carefully. You try to mould and convince your players to do things your way while carefully weeding out those who will never follow you and bit by bit bring fill the squad with good players who are 100% behind you. It's impossible to convince people your methods work when they players you bring in who do it your way are complete pants and worse than those already there. You need good examples to convince people not rubbish ones. PLG failed on so many levels that his tenure was like a car crash. But no-one has said they didn't. But in the end you can only push people so far - especially in their private life. You can't expect to control them 24/7. If my boss told me to cancel a Christmas party when it wouldn't interfere in any way with work, I'd be telling him where to stick it. Bad, bad, BACKWARD man management. The only way it makes any sense is either a huge ego or the "working his ticket" theory. They had a chance alright and blew it completely. Managers know what type of results are unacceptable and there is no way our results were Le Guen's grand scheme going to plan. His methods were clearly not getting even minimum, bottom line results and he was unable to change this at any stage. It a nutshell, he got it well wrong and he knows it. When you have one chance at something you can't afford to get it that badly wrong. No company is going to give you time if you are sinking it further than it was before after you've told them you can turn it around. You have to work above the minimum parameters and PLG failed to do so. Eh? I'm sorry, what results are you looking at? Under WS we've had a run of results that would have won the league any year if projected over a season. We are the BEST team in Scotland under Smith. I think you and I have different criteria over what makes a successful manager. Dropping 30 points in 23 games is not going a better place than dropping 4 points in 11 games. I really, really don't understand your logic. To be honest it feels like some people are fantasising about us being a big European player under Le Guen and it's such a nice dream they just don't want to let it go, even though reality has crashed around them. Le Guen ended up being a nightmare and we've woken up to a reality that from where I sit isn't as bad as you seem to think. Yes we've had a bad season but PLG has been its architect, not WS.

Three years is a short managerial career. Many managers have had success at one club and failed at the next. To be a great manager you have to be able to do it where-ever you go. Just because you train up one derby winner does not mean you can apply the exact same techniques with a different horse - especially a hurdler instead of a flat racer. There is a different method to taking a championship winning team in France and keep them winning with plenty of money to spend on tweaking the squad than taking a giant of a club in Scotland who have their worst squad in over twenty years and overturning the leaders in a two horse race with little money to spend - especially when you don't spend all of it and what you do spend is done badly. Sometimes is easier to be successful when you are proving yourself and building a reputation, when you are highly lauded it is easy to believe your own hype and forget that you had to look for answers instead of just thinking you know them all. Perhaps, but it's not a given that you have to be silent and if you want players to happily follow your instructions is it not best to have a rapport? There is no need to be draconian - and it's pretty well proven that that doesn't work. We learned that from DA's last two seasons. That's a bit contrived, but like I say, it's up to him to people manage the players and get a rapport going. The one thing I remember that he kept going on about is "respect" but he seems not to have learned that respect is earned and doesn't come automatically. Great leaders instantly earn respect and they rid themselves of those who then don't respect them before they can do any damage. It is stressed in football all the time that you have to have the dressing room behind you. It's not an assumption, it's the results of research. The conclusions of the research may not be fact, but you have to base your concepts on something and peer reviewed research is about as tangible as it gets. Money is not a motivator and if you're being paid a lot to do something, then your job becomes worse, the same wage as before is no compensation - ever. You will find it nigh on impossible to get me out of bed for a run at 6am and I'd resent you for trying. However, try and stop me playing footie or tennis or squash or touch rugby at lunchtimes. Which will get me fitter in the long term? If I suddenly had to get to work at 7am I'd be looking for a new job, especially if I could easily get one where I have to be in at 9:30 and get paid the same. One of the troubles here is that continental Europe tend to get up earlier than the UK - but funnily enough it is reckoned that people in the UK work harder and longer... In Spain they have siestas - that doesn't mean a Spanish manager should try and introduce that here... Taking a step backwards at an already backwards Rangers will NEVER be acceptable. Who is to say that PLG after taking about 10 steps backwards in 7 months would ever take us the 20 steps forwards that we then needed. There was no light at the end of the tunnel from where I was standing. There is another saying, "when you realise you are digging a huge hole, you have to stop digging", or "great progress on the wrong road will take you nowhere", or paraphrasing Gordon Ramsay, "when your recipe isn't working, you can't continually try to fix it, you have to start all over again." How about, "if you keep doing the same thing, you will likely get the same results" and "You cannot change what you don't acknowledge". So my answer is, you never know how far backward we could have gone without ever going forward...

That may be the case, but no-one has said that any of the players did not follow instructions. What is said is that players didn't enjoy certain aspects of their work that they used to. Like I said if you had a new boss who came in and set the start time 2 hours earlier and home time 2 hours later and then banned chatting etc would you be happy? Would you not slag him off after he's been sacked? Especially if your companies performance took a nose dive and the atmosphere at work became horrible. Say then a new boss comes along who relaxes things, makes everything fun and enjoyable, and your company coincidentally has the best run of results for years - would you still not slag your old boss off? Professionalism is not all about being serious and silent, in fact most would say it's the total opposite hence the popularity of team building events. I think you are taking the old fashioned view of professionalism, but I put it to you that the Rangers team have been far more professional on the park since the manager change. How do you explain this with your theory that there is now a reduction professionalism? Your thinking may seem to make sense to you from old fashioned values but it just doesn't agree with the results. I would also ask in what way PLG was being professional? I thought his press conferences and interviews were about the most unprofessional I've seen from a Rangers manager - ever. They were shocking and I won't take language as an excuse. If he'd taken my advice and brought in the likes of Richard Gough as number 2 or 3, he could have delegated some of the communications responsibilities - just as Hearts have now learned to do. Is it professional to slag off your top scorer to the media - especially when striker thrive on confidence? Is it professional to leak to the press that as a manager you are being undermined or is it more professional to actually deal with it in house? The thing is, I think we differ on the semantics of "professionalism". I also want to know why that Le Guen brought in 13 players of his own choosing, more than a team, yet these players did not flourish under his new "professional" regime? In fact they were worse than the players you are having a go at? How is that explained? I'm sorry but the facts just don't support this "professionalism" theory and it seems to be people just looking for a reason why such a highly acclaimed manager could have possibly failed - without blaming him. To me the proof is in the pudding and WS has clearly shown that the players were not unworkable - and that the previous manager clearly failed to get anywhere near the best out of them. Players don't work like machines, they are people with personalities and people like Smith realise that you have to do a lot of people management to get the best out of them. PLG simply had not yet learned this.

A top manager will try to get the players to do what is effective while trying to keep things as enjoyable as possible. If the experts think that silence is best then the manager should explain this carefully to the players, with the reasons, then ask them to be silent for the ten minutes of stretching and tell them they are free to laugh and joke afterwards. He needs to build a rapport which from all accounts it seems that he was unable to do this. Football is after all a game, and it generally considered most players play better when they enjoy themselves on the pitch. I still think he should have done something like bring in Ally McCoist or Richard Gough to help with training and build that rapport. Aloofness rarely works long term in football and even Alex Ferguson doesn't seem to come across as someone who doesn't generally get on with his players. The ones he tends to fall out with are either way under performing or have over inflated egos. There is also the factor where it's well known that you need to manage change in a workforce's environment and working practices. It's very naive to think you can go in somewhere and make sweeping changes without huge resistance from present employees. I also don't get this early start thing. It may be the culture in France but that doesn't mean it works universally. Again it's well known that most people's physical performance peaks and troughs with their body temperature which is low in the morning and at it's highest in the late afternoon. Most people aren't up to speed at anything until mid morning. So why was Le Guen not optimising training to fit your average person's peak performing times? The thing is, the more more I hear about Le Guen's methods the more he seems like a throw back to ignorant times, rather than in keeping with most progressive thinking. I really can't see HOW he could have taken us forward... If anyone is going to take us forward it will be a forward thinking man, Le Guen was not that man at that time and it painfully showed. To be honest, I'm so much happier with a man who tells it as it is and sees things that seem obvious to almost everyone. Only the other night a pundit was saying that Walter identified that the defence needed shoring up but that was plain for everyone to see. Everyone except Le Guen that is. I don't know what happened to such a previously successful manager but a lot of it points to his ego over inflating and blinding him to the bleeding obvious. He pigheadedly stuck to his route down the wrong path when it makes sense that a manager has to be flexible and adapt to his conditions.

I think you have to look at the context. I would say 2nd best is reasonably acceptable up to 50% of the time. Also I think second best for Walter Smith is very acceptable after he took over 17 points behind and embroiled in a second place battle. Also Walter Smith has shown he is number 1 during his second spell here. What do you want, an attitude that if we can be number one all the time, we may as well give up? When you have blown first place, then you have to make sure of second. What is obvious is that we have be spoiled during the NIAR years by competing against a very poorly funded and managed Celtic. We have no right to be first we have to earn it. Celtic have taken the lead in recent years and it's up to Rangers to catch up and equal them or better them but we have to learn to do it against opposition who don't just give the league away. If we can get ourselves sorted then the two horse race will be run pretty close for a long time to come. Second will be inevitable on many occasions.

Yes, under Eck they were 20pts behind after a season, under Le Guen they were 17pts behind after HALF a season. Great step forward that was. Who says they were enjoying the training under Eck anyway? And who says they didn't do what PLG asked? All that has been said is they didn't enjoy the training. No-one said they refused to do it.

PS Can I ask if Sionko, Sebo, N'Daiye and Papac were happily following Le Guen's instructions. It really worked for them didn't it? They really outshone the rebel players and showed them how unprofessional they were, didn't they? In fact how come Papac has IMPROVED since Smith came and Sebo had his best games under Smith too? How come that with Smith allowing the players to be unprofessional, we are now experiencing one of the best runs of results of any team in the history of the SPL? What evidence is everyone basing these unprofessional claims on? I think 9 wins and 2 draws in 11 games is pretty professional for a Rangers team. Walter Smith has so categorically shown that although Le Guen had a good record, he had a lot to learn to be a truly great manager who can go anywhere and be successful. Le Guen's weaknesses as a manager have been exposed for the first time and if he wants to be a great manager he will have to learn a huge lesson from his time at Rangers - not least in humility.

To me that paints PLG as an complete amateur as a manager. Perhaps he should take a course in motivation and team building. You don't get the best out of anyone by driving the too hard or upsetting them. People are not robots. Imagine your boss came in and started throwing his weight around, telling you you had to be in a 7am and leave at 7pm. You workload gets doubled and your deadlines halved. Talking, private emails and Internet are banned. Would you all be more professional, would you do a better job? It might work for a couple of months but then you'd either try to get rid of the manager or look for another job. I think the ones slagging the players off about professionalism should look themselves in the mirror and decide if you trully follow those incrdibly strict ideals yourself... The fact you spend any time at all on here suggests that you are talking garbage. You may not be at work but I bet you could spend the time thinking about problems at work or learning something to improve your work. I smell the stench of hypocrisy.

I suppose that with the strop being replaced every season, if you don't like a new one you won't have long to wait till a different one comes along that you might like... With people calling it a rip off to replace them every season I think there needs to be a bit of education whereby we get rid of the notion that you MUST by the new strip EVERY year. If you HAVE to buy a new strip every year at FULL price, then it's entirely you're own fault if you're skint.

There are proposals to introduce two 3 week international football windows when the qualifiers for the big tournaments are played. I'm not sure of the details but I think this sounds like an excellent idea. For the viewer it means they can get really involved in the games and competitions in way they can't with a game every few months. It's like a mini tournament where you get to see your country play 4 or 5 games in a row. If you think how differently people get involved in the qualifiers compared to the finals, this could really get us involved in games that can be a bit ignored. For the managers and players it means they can get together for a reasonable time with a stable squad and fix things when they go wrong or emphasise what went right and take it straight into the next game. For club managers it means less disruption of their players and team plans. For TV companies they can get package deals and focus on the games like they do on the finals. I think it's winners all round.

Usual guff given to the press to drive the price up.

Well I did nomate a guy called "John Brown"...

Boyd's got a bit of double chin there... He's going to be a porker when he's older... Strips are always a waste of money unless you get them in the sales - but then Rangers need the dosh...

I'd love to swap Buffel for Koevermans (plus cash), the guy just hasn't done it for us and I'd hate to see him run down his contract when he's one of the few players we could get something for. If he's a good bargaining point for Koevermans then that's great news and gives us an advantage.

Chris Woods Andy Goram Stephan Klos Sandy Jardine Richard Gough John Brown Terry Butcher Arthur Numan Brian Laudrup Trevor Steven Bobby Russell Paul Gascoigne Struart McCall Jorg Albertz Giovanni Van Bronkhurst Ian Durrant Davie Cooper Mark Hateley Ally McCoist Derek Johnstone Rod Wallace (very unsung) Dado Prso It's funny we've had many good defences but I can't think of too many defenders who are legends. Grieg hung up his boots just before I started really following the games. Amoruso, Porrini, Moore, MacPherson, Roberson, Stevens, Wright etc, were good but not quite legends.

While all the players mentioned have been reasonable, I think it shows how bad a season we've had. Hemdani, while being unerringly consistent has hardly had a remarkable season and sometimes I think he gets plaudits for not making blatant mistakes rather than doing anything positive. I think if he'd played as a player of the year should, we'd have had a much better season. Fergie has been really excellent in some games and rank in others, MacGregor has been good but is no Goram or Klos yet and Hutton had a slow start and has been outshone by Smith until his injury. Adam has been OK but perhaps has had too much responsibility on his shoulders at such a young age, and he doesn't look bound to put Albertz or Gio in the shade. A pretty average crop giving a pretty average player of the year.

I thought it was his knee a la Dado. He wanted to play less often at a lower level in warm weather, while raking in the cash. His brother, Frank, promised to go with him otherwise we could have had the centre half for a further season or two.

Should be free.

Yeah that's the problem, it's not easy to even think of a player to bring in as captain...

When you think about it there aren't many overly successful managers in foreign countries from their own who haven't had a shed load of money to spend.

Who do you have in mind that we can afford and who would want to come to Rangers?

I'm not going to get in a slagging match about Rangers managers. I agree the reason Walter left is that although he won the league every season till his last, he couldn't emulate the 92/93 season in the CL which raised expectations. But under PLG it looked pretty dodgy that we'd even qualify for the qualifier... I must say I'd rather win the league almost every year and have one pop at almost winning the CL every seven years than finish 3rd in the league and do not bad against pretty average UEFA competitors. However, I think Smith has improved as a manager in European terms given his record for Scotland. He still hasn't got his own team at Rangers and you can't really compare the games against Osasuna in the latter stages with the teams we played in league stage. The Spaniards made pretty quick work of Leverkusen to get to the semi's, none of the previous teams we met are there. PLG had a good run but it wasn't against the standard of the CL so praise where it's due but let's not get carried away. If PLG failed to get the team on his side then that failure is his. That is one of the most important jobs as a manager. DA lost the dressing room due to trying to control the players private lives too much and suffered the consequences and it only took Eck to come in to get a massive improvement. Eck didn't demotivate players like DA although he was pants at bringing in his own squad and wasted a few players by playing them out of position. PLG banning parties and alcohol? Do you really think the players would respect him for that? There is nothing wrong with having a drink and enjoying yourself at appropriate times and although Walters team "drank together" if you ask the likes of Butcher and Gough they will tell you it wasn't before a game and in fact was usually after, and they didn't get blootered either. You can't treat adults like kids and expect them to respect you - maybe in France, but not in Scotland. His only way to get away with it was to bring in his own players - he brought in about 13, but how many were better than the players already there? He failed again in that respect. If he brought in players who could do a job and get them doing it, winning games and challenging for the league, it would have been easy for him to drop Barry and sell him in January. But Le Guen was in a fantasy world where the defence was fine and Letizi was a goalkeeper rather than a clown, where he could do without our top scorer and use Sebo instead. A strange place where he didn't need to bring in anyone in January. The thing is to get time and patience as a manager you have to look like you know what you're doing and your average granny could see Rangers were crying out for a couple of decent centre halves and that one up front against Dunfermline just doesn't work. I've said it before, if you have strange methods and succeed you look like a genius, if you have strange methods and fail, then you look like a fool. And boy has Walter made PLG look foolish. PLG may yet be a great manager but when he came to Rangers he left his common sense behind in France. It's too valuable a commodity to leave behind.

I think it will be difficult to appoint another captain while Barry is at the club. And even then we need to bring in a captain of high repute and there isn't anyone in our price bracket of the right nationality to do it. I think we need someone British but how can you top the captain of Scotland on our budget? Our only hope would have been to sign Pressley but we missed out there. But while Fergie is at the club it would be suicidal to the team spirit to try and replace him with someone younger and less successful and experienced.