Bill

I might take some satisfaction from this if I thought for a moment that they would be embarrassed by the revelation but we all know they're far too important to have to care what ordinary people think of them. They are, after all, the appointed guardians of the planet.

The thing in all this that I'd like to understand is the role that was played by the SNP government in these "malicious" prosecutions and exactly what their objectives were. So many people were charged or prosecuted and they all resulted in cases being dropped, often with damages being awarded. Who decided to pursue these prosecutions and why? I find it impossible to believe it was the police acting of their own accord.

A few years ago I had season tickets for the Club Deck. Other than oxygen issues reaching the summit of those stairs, it was depressing to see buckets set out to collect rainwater leaking through the roof and black mould everywhere. I then moved downstairs to the main stand front and again the physical structure of the building was appalling. Improvements in the last couple of years have come as such a relief.

I can’t be arsed reading stuff like this.

It's just cringeworthy. An embarrassment that's entirely in line with just about everything else in this sad little country. I still don't understand how anyone with a modicum of intelligence could have appointed a third rate nobody like Maxwell to a position of authority.

Advocaat's 3rd season was a bizarre shambles. The capitulation to O'Neil and the inability to transition the squad in the face of tighter finances convinced me that Advocaat was really just a good-time manager, something he went on to reinforce wherever he went. In my opinion, although McLeish undoubtedly benefited from inheriting many of Advocaat's signings, what he achieved in the face of severe financial stringency was actually far more of an achievement than anything Advocaat did.

Villareal on penalties

I see a clear difference between Advocaat the coach and the performances of the teams he managed. Given the money he had at his disposal he would have had to be completely useless not to put a decent team together. In fact many of the players he signed went on to provide Alex McLeish with much of the success he achieved as manager. However, while there's no doubt Advocaat was a decent manager, I never felt he got the best out of the money he spent. I thought his man management was always on the brink of conflict and there's little doubt his Dutch community created deep divisions in the dressing room and the way he treated players like Amoruso, Amato, etc was deeply regrettable. Rangers achieved some good things with Advocaat at the helm but nowhere near what we could and should have.

Looks like a squad of good players. Whether Southgate can make a winning team out of them is another thing altogether

I read a couple of months ago that Walter Smith had been in hospital for an operation. Does anyone know how serious this was and what progress he's making in his recovery?

Gerrard/Wilson need to be so careful to preserve dressing room cohesion next season. This would definitely help.

It's the usual format for deciding football allegiance - what school did his father and mother go to, then grandparents, etc until a clear schooling lineage can be established.

But you don't say what school he went to.

It's good but it's never going to be big enough.

I take a different view. I hope other Scottish clubs earn coefficient points but I absolutely refuse to support any of them.

There have been reassuring signs of wiser heads taking decisions at the club in recent times.

What is the club supposed to do? There are universal howls of criticism from fans when Rangers does nothing or makes a toothless statement. Now that the board have instigated legal proceedings we have fans questioning the wisdom and cost. Make up your fucking minds.

Any manager who picks players for a tournament final just to give them experience is either a complete twat or has more world class players than he knows what to do with.

Two goals are imprinted on my brain. 1. Jorg Albertz thunderbolt free kick against Celtic at Ibrox, January 1997 2. Derek Johnstone, League Cup Final 1970

And I thought it was just that Weegies lacked a certain breeding ?

For fucks' sake, how to ruin the day.

It's a fair point @compo but I think experience tells us that a small number would have behaved badly anyway. I prefer the positive that so many Rangers fans behaved impeccably.

You've went too far this time. Where has all this linguistic superiority came from?

The exit poll suggests a clear victory for a very deserving winner.

There's a spurious belief that society should be built on equality and some mysterious concept called "fairness". Unfortunately, actual equality doesn't exist in nature and nor should it because if it did then evolution and social progress would be impossible. Inequality is therefore a necessary and natural function of life. Fairness is really just an arbitrary description of our emotional compensation for inequality. Why is all this relevant here? The point is rightly made that it is foolish and frustrating to expect all fans to embrace the majority compliance with current standards of behaviour, either intellectually or emotionally, and it's worth considering why that's indeed the case. In fact, it's a useful basis for dealing with people in all aspects of social life. The graph shows a normal distribution curve, which is known to describe the distribution of intellectual ability across a human population. It shows that over 95%of all people fall within two standard deviation of mean intelligence. In a broad sense, while the top and bottom ends of this spread will be quite different, this majority generally share a common interpretation of the world and communicate effectively with each other. Where things tend to come unglued is at the extreme ends of this spectrum, with profound difficulties interpreting the world and complying with what most of us would call normal behaviour. Hence perhaps @MacK1950's neighbouring spectator. The corollary of this is that appealing to the better judgement of someone who is effectively a different intellectual species is inevitably a complete waste of time and usually leads to confrontation. Beyond the natural diversity of intelligence, and the divergence of understanding that it leads to, overlies the absolute minefield of emotional stability. Combine the two and it's hardly rocket science to see that in any random group of people there will almost always be a few who act differently and frequently at odds with the mainstream. No matter the efforts made to achieve universal standards of behaviour among people (in this case Rangers fans) there will always be a minority who find compliance impossible and this has to be borne in mind when setting expectations and strategies. Inevitably, exclusion is the most effective response but, since people don't wear signs of their foreheads, there will inevitably continue to be an influx of similarly non-compliant individuals.