Michael Gannon: Rangers ill-timed statement does a disservice to clubs...

[ian1964 10,471]

...who have thrived during their top-flight absence

 

MICHAEL reckons Scottish clubs have enjoyed their days in the Hampden sun since the Ibrox club have been absent from the Premiership.

 

FOOTBALL club statements are usually good for a chuckle. All is rosy in the garden, the future is bright and problems are nothing more than exciting challenges.

 

They also tend to have This weird Habit of having Capital letters in words for No apparent Reason.

 

The Club believes, the Manager says, the Board intends. There’s No Need.

 

No harm done though and likewise the Rangers release early this week which formed Dave King’s first anniversary address was pretty straight forward.

 

There the positive news the Ibrox club had slashed costs to a more manageable level, a mild promise of more investment in players while an admission more dough was needed to keep things ticking over.

 

It was nothing new really, but the club statement did have one line that probably stood out to rival fans in bold letters never mind capital ones.

 

Buried amid some of the bluster King said: “Many of the clubs in the Premiership will also be hoping Rangers is promoted because Scottish football has suffered on many levels since our club went down to the bottom division.”

 

Suffered.

 

Really? Hands up the clubs who agree.

 

Ask around the likes of Aberdeen, St Johnstone, Inverness, Hearts and Ross County. See what word they’d use to describe the last four years.

 

It won’t be suffered. It’ll be more like enjoyed.

 

The only thing that’s suffered in Scottish football terms has been the European coefficient. There’s no arguing that poor wee thing has taken a pounding.

 

Our league was 15th in 2011 and is now down to 25th. It was already on the slide before Rangers hit the skids but with the Ibrox club out of commission, it’s gone over the cliff.

 

We’d lost one Champions League spot by then but now the champions face three games to get in while the other two out of the three sides in Europe will start at the end of June this year and will need to get through four rounds to get to the Europa League.

 

Having two clubs in continental action until Christmas in either competition helped keep the numbers up in the previous years and no one outside Celtic have managed it since 2012.

 

But domestically it’s been a blast for most teams.

 

There’s been street parades and parties in Paisley, Perth, Aberdeen, and Inverness. There’s been top six finishes and cup runs elsewhere and crowds have increased at more than half of the top flight grounds.

 

Even the bank managers have been kept sweet. The old Armageddon line has been flogged to death but instead of going down the tubes, many clubs have cleared the decks.

 

Dundee United, Killie, the Dons and Hibs have wiped their debts, Hearts have escaped admin and are packing out Tynecastle every other week.

 

The Scottish football world has kept spinning despite folk queuing up to predict the end of days.

 

It was a scary world for them back in the summer of 2012 but does King think those clubs would swap a couple of extra thousand Rangers fans visiting twice a season for the experienced they’ve had these last four years?

 

No chance.

 

Peter Lawwell has admitted his club are the ones who’ve really been hit hardest from the aftershocks which followed the implosion across the city.

 

The Celtic chief will shudder when he thinks of the figures. He’s waved goodbye to £10m a year and been left with thousands of empty seats every fortnight.

 

Good luck finding a Hoops fan who’s ready to admit out loud they wouldn’t mind having Rangers - or Sevco, Newco or whatever they want to call them - in the top flight, just to brighten the place up a bit.

 

But as for the rest? Forget it.

 

They’ve been happily going along their merry way and a fair few of them will look back on these recent years as the glory days.

 

They couldn’t care less if Rangers are in the top flight or not. They didn’t expect to win the league before and won’t do in the future.

 

The Premiership will be commercially and competitively a better product with Rangers in it. As it would with Hibs and Dundee United.

 

But that’s not how it works.

 

Scottish football has struggled but it’s adjusted. It’s played with the cards it’s been dealt.

 

Read more at http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/michael-gannon-rangers-ill-timed-7526663#jL86xzuxivzkrjp2.99

[Bluedell 5,365]

SPL crowds are down, are they not?

[Frankie 8,187]

One sentence paragraphs are also crap...

 

Seriously, the game's profile up here is in freefall and demoting Rangers was just cutting folk's nose off to spite their face.

[ian1964 10,471]

I wonder if the rat who runs DUTD would agree Rangers were not missed?

[ian1964 10,471]

[Davie P 4]

What about the quality of football? Because clubs have had to right-size, the level of player has dropped sharply. Currently the Scottish Premier League may be on a par with the third tier of English football, on a good day! Obviously the article is designed to wind us up.

[der Berliner 3,310]

Had the Yahoos had any sort of decent manager, they would had run away with titles and cups galore. Had that happened, the tone would be slightly different ... and the author knows that. But the Yahoos failed miserably, as did every other Scottish team after securing a European jackpot ticket. TV deals are a joke, interest dropped to all time lows, but at least some clubs did something to their trophy cabinet. Huzzah! (Not that this didn't happen when we were there ...)

 

IMHO, the only teams (and places) who did not suffer from our absence where those whom we played in the lower leagues and who received some much needed income from the visiting Light Blue legions.

[Anchorman 0]

Just another journalistic opportunity (for those 'journalists' inclined) to stoke the anti-Rangers flames among the PL teams' fans. It's amazing that 4 years on , with us absent, and the hatred hasn't waned in the slightest.

I would love the hypothetical scenario where an option was available for us to go elsewhere for another 4 years if we chose to, so that we could pose the question "do you want us back or shall we go elsewhere for another 4 years?". I wonder what the response would be.

The more I read it the more myopic and immature it comes across.

[jhunter 0]

hearts enjoyed going through admin did they?

 

The Premiership will be commercially and competitively a better product with Rangers in it.

 

But that’s not how it works.

 

 

slavering cunt.

[calscot 0]

The guy makes no sense whatsoever, and I don't think he understands football at even a little bit.

 

Most fundimentally, he doesn't get that every year there are 12 clubs who finish in some order. Every year there are six clubs in the top six AND even in the last few years there are six clubs that don't. Saying such and such a club enjoyed a top six finish has no relevance to anything whatsoever. The only difference is that one more team can celebrate that each year - but how is that really so enjoyable when deep down, you know that you are in reality, one place lower. It's enjoyment of the delusional.

 

What kind of club enjoys effectively playing in a lower league as the standards have dropped so far without Rangers and without the blue pound - and all the extra money that Rangers bring in via TV and advertising? They are effectively relegated - you may as well say that Hibs are loving it in a lower division as they are fighting for second place instead for a top 6 place. So Hearts should deliberately get relegated to repeat a most enjoyable season of winning the league in storming fashion?

 

The debts have been wiped with downsizing and board members swapping loans for equity. Our debt is lower too, but that doesn't mean we haven't suffered and continue to do so.

 

His "couple of thousand fans" seems pretty ignorant - didn't we just take 12k to Kilmarnock? I think one unfortunate thing about the fan boycott last year is that without it, the second tier would have had an average attendance higher than the top one. It's still pretty close this year. How does that work with a couple of thousand? The fact is that the average attendance has gone from almost 14k in 2011 to almost 9k in 2014. Even if you add 40k of the Rangers home attendances into that mix, you get it back up to about 12.5k max, which means every club has lost about 1.5k on average for EVERY home game. That's about 30k a season and probably about 1m pounds each, before losing at least another million to commercial and TV income.

 

Income must be down at least 25% on average - but we are told they are surviving, but that doesn't mean they haven't suffered, which is obvious that they have.

 

So they wouldn't swap the experience of being in the most boring top tier league in the world, which has become below average standard in Europe (and think of all the lesser footballing countries) where they have NO say whatsoever about where the title goes, for having Rangers back in? Why, because they all finished one place higher, and not even on merit? Maybe we should be asking how much Dunfermline and St Mirren have enjoyed their experience - or Hearts and Hibs. And next season we can ask Dundee Utd, if they are having a great time without Rangers for an extended period.

 

The guy just doesn't get that there are a finite number of teams and for every winner you have a loser. It's the fundamental rule of sport.

 

The only thing he gets right is that there are definitely self centred people in clubs who would rather delude themselves that things are better because the standard of competition has been artificially lowered which falsely makes some of them look slightly better.

 

Maybe we're also enjoying not being in Europe because there's too much competition - just like Celtic much prefer the Europa league to the Champions League - not.

 

It's a horrible, negative, destructive attitude, and the sad thing is that it pervades Scottish football and so many fans - with the exception of us. Maybe that's why we are the people.