Lifted from �£�£ , but agree with just about all of it

[rbr 1,247]

Given all this negative rubbish about Walter in Europe since he returned, here are the true facts:

 

Played - 40

Won - 9

Drawn - 17

Lost - 14

 

Goals for - 33

Goals against - 40

 

This includes double headers against Barcelona, Manchester Utd, Lyon, Werder Bremen, Fiorentina, Valencia, Seville, Stuttgart (twice) and Sporting Lisbon (twice).

 

Away from home our record is:

 

Played - 20

Won - 3

Drawn - 9

Lost - 8

 

Goals for - 16

Goals against - 22

 

That's away from home, in Europe, aqainst on the whole quality teams as mentioned above, with 9 games in a tournament where the mhanks haven't won a game away in 25 years. We've won in Lyon and Lisbon, and got draws in Manchester, Stuttgart, Eindhoven, Lisbon, Florence and Athens.

 

By any stretch of the imagination that away record is fantastic for a club in our position!! We're not playing diddy teams in the qualifying rounds, we're talking of competitions proper against Europe's elite.

 

And for those of you reading that rubbish about 1 win in 20, that same run has seen us draw 11 of those games, 7 out of 10 which have been away from home. In this god awful run we've picked up 4 times as many away points in the Champions League than the mhanks have achieved in their entire history!!

 

I'll quite happily take another 5 draws if it takes us to Dublin!!

 

Okay, we could have done better at home at times under Walter, but in the last 4 years we've been to the last sixteen of the Europa League three times, including the final, and this season's not over!!

 

So well done Walter!! You're an absolute legend. I don't agree with your tactics all the time, but most of the time you get results and i'll always remember you as the greatest Rangers manager of my lifetime.

[CumbernauldGers 0]

Once again the smith lovers use selective info. Yes lets list the big teams we have played but not the wee crap ones that he has made no effort to try and win against.

 

9 wins out of 40 games are people really happy with that?

 

Plus, his pre record was alt worst but lets not let the facts get in the way of a pro smith love in.

[Gazza_8 233]

Smiths european record is below average. We've had some famous performances in europe but as CumbernauldGers says we've also had some utter shockers too. Getting beaten off the likes of Gothenburg, AEK Athens, Levski Sofia, Grasshoppers, Kaunas and Urinea amongst others is embarrassing considering the amount of money we had spent and the players we had against Gothenburg and Levski Sofia.

 

Let's not kid ourselves, for the money Smith has spent, he should've done better.

 

On that Gothenburg fiasco, WS spent approximately �£14m in the summer and still got embarrassed by a Gothenburg side who were tactically superior to us in both legs.

Edited March 16, 2011 by Gazza_8

[calscot 0]

So you really think it is somehow cool to be a "snivelling Smith whinger"? And to be someone who supposedly supports a team but all you do is find and twist things to slag it off?

 

Maybe you've never heard the song, "We love you Rangers" or maybe you don't know what love involves.

 

But when you take positive and negative emotion out of it and get down to cold hard facts, name one manager in the whole of Scotland, bar Jock Stein, in the last 50 years, who has had a better overall record than Walter Smith. Ferguson and MacLean did fantastically for provincial teams but that's still a handful and at a time when Scotland had a lot more talent than it does now.

 

When you start to factor in the poverty of resources we've had both financially and in terms of Scottish talent, not even Stein can compete with Walter's second spell.

 

Even the manager who spent the most in Scottish history could not compete with either the domestic or European success of Walter's second spell.

 

9 wins in 40 games might not sound great at first glance, but just who could do better with a team from Scotland with less than a fifth of the budget of top European teams? Which country do you think you are in? Just who are you comparing our club with? It certainly can't be any other team in Scotland seeing as the team that has been single handedly keeping Scotland's coefficient respectable in the last five years, is managed by the man you hate.

 

9 wins and 17 draws in 40 games is a fantastic achievement for a club in a financial crisis in one of the smallest and relatively poorest footballing countries in Europe.

 

Yes there are people who like and hugely respect Smith, and with his achievements just why wouldn't they? Try supporting another Scottish team and see where the grass is greener...

[Gazza_8 233]

So you really think it is somehow cool to be a "snivelling Smith whinger"? And to be someone who supposedly supports a team but all you do is find and twist things to slag it off?

 

Maybe you've never heard the song, "We love you Rangers" or maybe you don't know what love involves.

 

FFS, just because you support a football team doesn't mean you can't slag them off. I find it strange that you see absolutely nothing wrong with the way Walter Smith manages our club.

[Frankie 8,150]

I think it's fair to say that he should have done better in same games (as well as his players) but generally speaking that is a reasonable record all things considered.

 

However, there's no doubt Smith did not do well enough in the 90s (92/93 aside) considering the resources he did have. Same goes for Souness and Advocaat. Expectations were rightly higher during those periods but may not be so high now.

[calscot 0]

Smiths european record is below average. We've had some famous performances in europe but as CumbernauldGers says we've also had some utter shockers too. Getting beaten off the likes of Gothenburg, AEK Athens, Levski Sofia, Grasshoppers, Kaunas and Urinea amongst others is embarrassing considering the amount of money we had spent and the players we had against Gothenburg and Levski Sofia.

 

Let's not kid ourselves, for the money Smith has spent, he should've done better.

 

It's very difficult to compare the stats of now with the six games of CL compared to yesteryear when we played an average of about 4 games and probably won a couple and lost a couple, going out - giving a 50% record.

 

You used to just need to win two ties to get to a quarter-final - and we rarely did.

 

The only time we have been consistently decent in Europe was in the sixties and early seventies, when Scottish footballers were among the best in Europe, if not the world. Celtic won the EC with a team of Scots and also reached another final. Around that time is when a Scottish team humiliated the newly crowned world champions in their own stadium.

 

It's also around that time we were in three CWC finals and won one but it was a time when we couldn't win the league and indeed didn't even win the Scottish Cup to qualify for the tournament we won. We were there as runners up.

 

Maybe some want to hark back to a time before I was born when Celtic was the dominant team in Scotland and pretty consistently good in the European cup while we were a good side, but perpetually finished runners up then did quite well in a lesser tournament.

 

I don't, and it's not going to happen in any case. Scotland doesn't have those world class players any more.

 

We also can't go back to the Advocaat days where we spent as much as the biggest clubs in Europe, put ourselves 78M in debt and stilled achieved less than we have in the last 4 years.

 

Rangers have has some great moments, and coming from a small country, they are going to be few and far between. You can't let peaks in Scottish talent or short periods of relative richness be the yard sticks of the rest of your club's history. Their shadows are too great and completely unfair.

 

The measure of a great club is not just how it does when there is a very fair wind blowing, it's how it copes in the leanest and hardest of storms - and in that sense, we've been doing fantastically. The sad thing is that many just don't appreciate that and will likely never be happy with their chosen club again.

[calscot 0]

FFS, just because you support a football team doesn't mean you can't slag them off. I find it strange that you see absolutely nothing wrong with the way Walter Smith manages our club.

 

No but maybe it's like children, girlfriends or wives - if you are slagging them off all the time and also twisting things and making some stuff up to slag them off with, then maybe you need to look at yourself.

 

Much of the slaggings are not realistic nor objective, nor even taking circumstances into account. Look up the word "support" and you won't see "perpetual unfounded criticism" there.

[calscot 0]

I think it's fair to say that he should have done better in same games (as well as his players) but generally speaking that is a reasonable record all things considered.

 

However, there's no doubt Smith did not do well enough in the 90s (92/93 aside) considering the resources he did have. Same goes for Souness and Advocaat. Expectations were rightly higher during those periods but may not be so high now.

 

But in his second spell, aren't many of the games where we should have done better been balanced by the countless games where we should have done worse? Or even where we did fantastically well but were not rewarded? Just this season, the best club in Europe could only score a soft penalty against us in two games. A few years ago we drew with Barcelona and then they could only beat us by blatantly cheating by scoring with an arm. Shouldn't we have been massacred in those games?

 

Even the draw with Valencia and the results against Bursaspor, Sporting and PSV were far better than we "should" have done. If it's about "should", I think in our predicament and spending we "should" have lost all those games. We "should" have lost almost every tie we had in our cup final year.

 

We should have beaten Kaunas, and possibly the Romanian champions - although the latter could just be ignorant snobbery...

 

Apart from those two we didn't lose or draw to anyone where we were the favourites, or from a country ranked below Scotland.

[Frankie 8,150]

Calm down - I'm agreeing with you for the most part...

 

Like I say, it's a reasonable record all things considered while there is always room for (fair) criticism and improvement.