Statement On BBC

[sannybear 0]

I do wonder what it takes for the club to get into motion, for Traynor et al to open their mouths.

 

"No matter how Charles Green attempts to dress it up, a newco equals a new club. When the CVA was thrown out Rangers as we know them died."

Jim Traynor -http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/james-traynor-spl-will-not-be-able-1129166

 

You needn`t expect Traynor to open his mouth anytime soon .

[der Berliner 3,250]

Yeah, such rash statements haunt people more than many a sane comment before and afterwards.

[Super Cooper 0]

"No matter how Charles Green attempts to dress it up, a newco equals a new club. When the CVA was thrown out Rangers as we know them died."

Jim Traynor -http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/james-traynor-spl-will-not-be-able-1129166

 

You needn`t expect Traynor to open his mouth anytime soon .

 

 

Has he not since retracted that an said after he read more about it he was wrong?

[Calgacus 8]

people are entitled to change their mind on a subject,once they receive more information. He was writing long before Lord Nimmo Smith's decision.

[Juancornetto 1]

people are entitled to change their mind on a subject,once they receive more information. He was writing long before Lord Nimmo Smith's decision.

 

...and was working for both the BBC and Alan Rennie at the time. Who knows what kind of propaganda was flying around in both of those organisations?

[amms 0]

(This started off as a reply to the thread but turned into a rant. If you want to use it as a piece on the site feel free, but if it's just self-indulgent rubbish leave it where it is to be eviscerated by my fellow posters. Either works for me.)

 

 

I'll be honest and say that when the CVA failed I too felt the 'club' had died. Something was lost, the unbroken line dating back to Glasgow Green had broken and things would never be the same again. It is hard for me to articulate why I felt that way now, disappointment, embarrassment, the impotence felt at what was going on perhaps all contributed to it. Even though it became clear very quickly after that there would still be a side wearing blue, playing at Ibrox and called Rangers I was still unsure they would be my 'Rangers' and that I'd feel the same way about them.

 

It didn't take long for me to realise those old feelings hadn't gone though and a big part of that was the continuance of the reality of a football club. People talk about corporate bodies, ownership vehicles, limited companies, holding companies and corporate shells like they actually mean something in this whole saga; they don't, they really don't. To try and define Rangers as a limited liability company is like describing last night's Bruce Springsteen concert as a licence to hold public entertainment; it might be factually correct, but only if you don't possess a soul. To try and define a football club in those terms is to demonstrate how little you understand about football and that indeed might be part of the problem here. The gradual gentrification of football is far more firmly embedded in England than in Scotland, however it does still exist here. There was a time, not that long ago, when a certain type of person in Scotland could openly admit to not following football, indeed to actively disliking it. The social dividing line was often drawn at sport, rugby was the sport of choice for the private, fee paying schools and their alumni wore that badge with pride. Football, whilst far more popular was something to be avoided, firmly embedded in the worst of working class culture.

 

Something changed though. Perhaps it was Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, perhaps Sky’s millions, perhaps the implications to stadia of the Taylor Report, perhaps Skinner, Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds perhaps a mixture of all of them, but something changed. Suddenly all sorts of figures from popular culture were openly flaunting their football allegiances, from politicians to pop stars to the Footlights of Oxbridge everyone had a tale of the terracing and an anecdote to beguile a gullible public. To my cynical eyes some of them seemed fanciful and reeked of bandwagonism, but that’s popular culture for you and it became de rigueur to swear very public loyalty to a club side.

 

Most of us who really follow football were introduced to it by a friend or relative; a father, a brother or an uncle perhaps. It could have been peer pressure or the apparent brilliance of a player that led to our choice of club, for most of us it was a decision taken at such a young age as to make analysis of it worthless. But if you get to choose your side as an adult, if your choice of club to follow is done as a badge of fashion and informed over glasses of Pinot Grigio in Ashton Lane then other factors come into play.

There are few organisations as arriviste as BBC Scotland. Scores of the expensively educated metropolitan elite struggle manfully to fill the schedules in the hope someone in London will notice them whilst bilingual Gaels build empires to protect their budgets, it really isn’t what Lord Reith had in mind. Rangers don’t fit well into that mindset. Sure they’re a bunch of bigots, aren’t they? Thugs too, as well as being the establishment, and there is nothing the actual establishment likes less than the perceived establishment, how can you be a Byres Road Che Guevara if you’re sporting red, white and blue?

 

So the squeals from BBC Scotland over the BBC Trust pronouncement simply enforced my view that ignorance is the main problem here. They simply don’t get it. It isn’t surprising though, if you’ve chosen your allegiance because you think they are footballing equivalent of the Sandinista movement or Teenage Fanclub you are so far out of touch with genuine football as to be almost irrelevant.

 

To understand why Rangers didn’t die, aren’t a new club and are very much directly connected to the teenagers who founded the club 140 years ago requires an understanding of why football matters to so many people, and not on a superficial level. I’d argue that no club in Britain draws its support from a more disenfranchised, disempowered and unrepresented part of the population than Rangers do. For some the club is their only real source of cultural identity left, did you really think that would die so easily? Do BBC Scotland think Dynamo Kiev aren’t the same club founded in 1927 because they had to change their name and disband during WW2?

It’s probably trite to say this but a football club like Rangers is built on passion, on love, on memory and shared experience. Which is why when Ally McCoist in particular stood on the touchline and fielded the first Rangers side of season 2012/13 I knew Rangers hadn’t changed, my Rangers were still there, it was familiar, it was welcoming, it was home.

 

Quote me passages from Scot’s Law and explain corporate semantics all you want you’ll never know what I know, you’ll never feel what I feel and you’ll never understand why it matters to me. You only underline your arrogance and how distant you are from your audience, quite how that fits into the public service remit I’m not sure.

[Guest DietofWorms]

Brilliant post amms.

[Frankie 8,151]

Now on the main site AMMS - an excellent bit of writing as always!

 

http://www.gersnet.co.uk/index.php/latest-news/142-rangers-fc-v-bbc-scotland-a-public-service-announcement

[der Berliner 3,250]

The discredited one rears his head again ... and as usual, it is rubbish. To spare his employers any clicks ...

 

Spiers on Sport: Rangers, new club or old, and the BBC

 

Wednesday 19 June 2013

 

The acrimonious debate continues about whether Rangers FC is a new club or not.

 

BBC Scotland is just the latest to feel the hot wrath of some angry Rangers fans railing at its editorial stance.

 

In fact, those Rangers fans have scored a notable victory in having a complaint to the Editorial Standards Committee about BBC Scotland upheld.

 

At least two supporters objected to the BBC in Glasgow occasionally referring to Rangers in terms of "old club" and "new club", and their complaint was upheld.

 

What was thrown out was the daft accusation, frequently cited among some Rangers cyber zealots, that the BBC was biased against the club.

 

My point here is not to defend BBC Scotland. In this complex Rangers saga, it has become obvious to me, speaking to various insolvency practitioners, that "new club" or "same club" Rangers is a highly subjective issue. I've heard the entire gamut of interpretations on it.

 

Where Rangers struggle to be angry or insulted by the suggestion that their organisation is a "new club" is in this context: at least four Rangers principals, men who have been lauded by supporters, have expressed just such a view of Rangers as a new club.

 

First, Charles Green. Prior to Rangers' descent into liquidation last year, Green was aghast at the attitude of Dave King, a long-standing Rangers director, who had urged that a CVA be voted down by the club's 276 creditors.

 

Incredulous at this, Green went on television and said: "What he [King] is suggesting is that, rather than get a CVA through that retains all the history and tradition, that instead we should vote against it and go down the newco route. I mean…why would a true Rangers fan suggest that?"

 

In this, the view of Green, the man to whom many Rangers fans swooned, appears none too different to that of BBC Scotland and others.

 

Arguably, no Rangers figure in this debate finds himself in a more excruciating position than James Traynor, the club's Director of Communication.

 

Time and space here doesn't allow for the sheer number of times that Traynor, in his previous role as a journalist, emphatically pronounced Rangers to be a new club once liquidation became a reality. Yet he has the temerity now to argue the complete opposite.

 

Of the numerous times Traynor weighed in on this subject, just two quotes here will have to suffice.

 

With liquidation looming, Traynor wrote in the Daily Record: "Some Rangers fans believe the club's history, which would end with liquidation, must be protected. But any newco should make it clear that a new beginning means exactly that: a new club open to all from the very beginning."

 

Later on, with the Rangers CVA being rejected, Traynor wrote: "Rangers FC as we know them are dead." Caustically, he added: "No matter how Charles Green attempts to dress it up, a newco equals a new club. When the CVA was thrown out, Rangers as we know them died."

 

Reading this type of stuff, I would urge Rangers to exercise supreme caution in railing against anyone who dares to call their club a new club; none other than their own Director of Communication has made his view perfectly clear on the subject.

 

Many a Rangers fan expressed the view that the club died with the descent into liquidation. Typical of this was Ibrox debenture holder Stewart Boal who, having stumbled out of the CVA meeting of June 2012, was quoted by Richard Wilson in The Herald as saying: "We're in shock. The club is gone. We've got to start again and move on."

 

Wilson, a fine reporter, himself wrote of that nine-minute creditors' meeting where the CVA was rejected: "In those few minutes 140 years of history had been rubbed out."

 

I could go on and on here. Richard Gough, one of Rangers' greatest ever captains, wrote in a newspaper column: "The club I gave blood, sweat and tears for is dead."

 

Walter Smith, one of the greatest figures in Rangers' history, and now the club's chairman, said of Green's consortium taking over: "I wish the new Rangers Football Club every good fortune."

 

This is a painful subject. Many Rangers fans are agonised at the thought of their club being new - they simply rule it out. "It's the company, not the club," became the mantra. Other Rangers observers - like me - find it hard to escape the view that the current club is a new club.

 

Rangers FC itself should think twice about laying into BBC Scotland or anyone else over this old club/new club debate. The more so when its own oral history on the subject is so weak.

 

The Herald

 

Can I openly ask Rangers to ban this troll sine die from Ibrox et al?

[der Berliner 3,250]

Commented on that as follow (wonder whether it will make the "cut" ) ...

 

The author should help himself to Dave Twydell's two books "The Rejected F.C. of Scotland - Volume I & II". There he will find clubs who died for various circumstances. None of these circumstances applied to Rangers FC. The SFA, the SFL and essentially the SPL too, various legal and official bodies recognize the club being one and the same. It is time for the BBC Scotland department and quite a few Scottish journalists to accept that or at least put the "new" remark into context.

 

It is obvious that some rival football fans will keep this cynical "new club banter" up for some time. But reporters are not football fans and should be default report impartial and accurate ... by their own standards. It was for that reason that BBC Scotland was reprimanded.