Danny

Walter lost to Kaunas. Even the master has made errors. Effectively yes, but it was due to losing his best player. I will admit he didn't find another solution, but with the threadbare squad we ended up with, I'm not sure who would have. Waiting and seeing is pretty much the fairest way to go about it.

That's not true at all, you have to judge the entire season. No, what made the difference, football wise till we went into admin, purely and simply, was the loss of our best player Naismith. I can't speak for anyone else but I have a huge amount of respect for Ally's conduct this entire season, under incredibly trying circumstances - such circumstances that it's hard to judge at all if he's a good or bad manager. As such doesn't he deserve a clean second season to hopefully build his own first team and see how he goes? If he fails to challenge Celtic, ok, we move on, but he at least deserves the chance. So, if anyone else here is calling him a good manager, I guess it's up to them to justify why. Just like I feel you should explain why he's a bad manager.

I've seen mostly positive comments about them, but quite a substantial number who slagged Wylde in particular for 'walking away'. I found such views absurd. One hoped the door didn't smack him on his exit.

Were you saying this when we were top of the league and hadn't conceded a single goal away from home? Yes, Ally has made some errors as a manager, no one is denying that. But to castigate a rookie manager under the circumstances he's had to contend with this whole season is grossly unfair.

Entirely true - yes, they get paid shitloads in the first place, and being on 25% of 25K a week is still a pretty good wage, but at the end of the day they've willing sacrificed thousands of pounds to keep the club running. And they've saved dozens, maybe hundreds of jobs inside the club. My only worry is the fickle fan, who maybe will 'forget' this sacrifice in a month or two and slate the players for a poor display and defeat.

He spent 7M of the club's own money. And that's my point. He had very little to play with - the money which came in (Bar Boumsong) didn't go to buying new players. The Eck era is infamous for just how little he had to spend - and how well he did under those circumstances until the wheels came off and we ended up struggling.

I've also heard no player redundancies either. Pay cuts agreed across the board. If all this is true it's fantastic.

Even if it's true, aren't they just a company Whyte shafted? If so, and they want to own part of us, is that so bad?

You put it slightly more bluntly than I did

The pay cut is, imo, only a partial saving of cash. I still expect some redundancies and cost cutting elsewhere. If we need to save a million a month, I can't see how the wage bill covers that.

But we hate each other mutually?!

Hugh McDonald of the Herald claims the reason this wasn't done prior to his appointment is it takes time and is very expensive. Sorry, I don't really buy that. Whyte had been linked for months so there was plenty of time to investigate him and other interested parties. And there is no way it's taken 10 months to establish his 'credentials'. No, SFA just once again prove their incompetence, and do something in 'hindsight' when they should have done it prior to the takeover. Abysmally run outfit.

Coming from the club this has a little more credibility than the saverangers piffle. An actual tangible place to physically donate money, held by bears we can trust like Walter and Ally. I'm not wealthy right now but I will donate what I can, when it's possible to do so.

Sky reported the same quotes.

I agree, I am absolutely not absolving SDM of anything - but if your bleeding edge manager says 'I want these top stars whatever the cost' then without going as far as to say he's holding you to ransom, he certainly holds all the aces and the chairman would want to satisfy his demands or risk losing him. That actually suggests it was the second period under Walter that caused the debt. That signings like Thomson, Naismith, Cuellar et al is how we ended up with this mountainous debt. Because Eck sure had no budget bar the money he received for Boumsong.

Just been reported that Naismith, Whittaker, Shagger and Davis have agreed the big cut. Now this is from 'Sky Sources' who also told us 3 other players had asked to be released from their contracts, and no one else ever did leave, but if this is true today, then it's very positive and hopefully other alleged top earners like Papac, Lafferty et al will agree these cuts.

I'm not exactly sure he worked within his budget, that's what I'm saying. So where does the current 18M debt arise from?

Unfortunately it sells far more papers.

I don't think Advocaat is blameless. £12M for Flo suggests he overspent. We spent about £72M under him - while SDM had to sanction the signings, Advocaat took advantage of the chairman's ambition and imho acted irresponsibly with a blank cheque book. Did this guy really believe a backwater league like Scotland could support spending on that scale? No matter what your chairman says, there is no way Advocaat could have truly believed spending this kind of money wouldn't ever have repercussions. He also wasted a lot of that money - he beat 2 shit Celtic managers, Barnes then Venglos, and crapped out against MON completely. He also failed to do with a much better squad what Eck managed with an abysmal one - last 16 of the CL. No, I am not saying Dick is the cause of our current financial plight, but I don't think he is a total innocent - he's one of the many contributing factors.

The one issue with playing down south is it would quite possibly be many years before we ever get our hand on any trophy again. I'd actually be surprised if we even got to the EPL in my lifetime. Even more shocked if we won any silverware at that level.

Unfortunately with David Taylor at the helm of Uefa, I doubt he'd give his blessing to us playing in England given he wasn't interested in dispensation to aid us playing in Europe next season. Not that we have any major right to dispensation, just that if he isn't willing to bend on that one, I can't see us being allowed to compete in England either. But I really want to.

The problem with McCoist is he was never given a chance to truly rebuild his squad with quality players. He was given 3p budget and had to make do with signing some really substandard players - he did bring in Aluko, Goian, Boca and Wallace who did well, but that hardly patches up the whole squad. We did poorly to start with, then the Naismith period kicked in and we looked unstoppable - soon as he got injured it's been a house of cards collapsing. And we didn't have anything like the team to compensate for losing him. We were imperious with him in the team, without him we've been pretty gash bar the odd exception when we played well. Add to that it being Ally's first season, add to that the restrictions placed on him, and now this chaotic period and I ain't sure it's fair to judge him on any level this year. Regarding the Maribor comment, in 2008 we beat teams who were leagues better than us - Lyon, Stuttgart, Fiorentina, Bremen, Sporting - all superior but we got the results. Poorer teams can beat better teams on the day. Plus the Maribor question wouldn't exist had Jelavic scored that sitter in Sweden to put us into the CL.

I don't hate Scotland as a country, my comments were purely focused on the game here. What we've seen over the past 3 weeks is almost every anti Rangers agenda surfacing and it appears trying to crucify every part of us. Why this agenda exists I am not sure, but while Portsmouth get financial help from their SFA, ours condemns us further and tries to rub arsenic, lemon and iodine into the wound along with salt.

The last 3 things I've seen you post on have been amazingly pious, astonishingly hostile, and quite arrogantly smug to the most insane degrees. The first, incredibly, I agreed with, was your judgement of 'foolishness and gullibility' on the part of fans signing up for the Save Rangers campaign. The second was you asking me who the fuck I was to judge Rangers fans when I condemned certain recent acts I considered poor taste (a tad ironic)...and now this. You don't seem to be able to disagree with respect.

Didn't see that. But if we're a new company, why not? I don't want rangers to be part of this setup any more.