Jump to content

Thumper

Gold Members
  • Posts

    4,671
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Thumper

  1. STV suggests that this was something cooked up by Doncaster, Regan and Longmuir and simply dished out to the clubs today. No indication they were involved. This looks like a last-ditch offer. The only worrying thing here is the mention of Petrie, who is the last person who should be backing down.
  2. As Craigkillie has pointed out, in the event of an invitation being opened *someone* has to be voted in. Right now the biggest problem facing Those-That-Would-Be-Rangers is that Green may very well simply have no interest in trying, which means they may not have a ground. One is going to have a hard time convincing even the average Mirror Group reader that one is the rightful heir to The Biggest Trophy Haul of Them All if one does not actually play at Ibrox. But you can't imagine the SFL allowing the Third to go a team short. Spartans' position, so far as I know, is that they won't apply for an opening if "Rangers" do. But if this gets any worse, there may well be no "Rangers" applying at all. Should that happen, I dare say that P&B members would be well advised to rapidly invest in Ben & Jerry's, or failing that Iceland and Farmfoods.
  3. It surely has to be Gascoigne. Nothing says "the limit of absurdity has been reached" these days like the appearance of Gascoigne.
  4. It's relatively hard for anyone who doesn't post with his trousers around his ankles to get a negative karma around here. Folk with Rangers as their clubs aren't getting it especially hard on here. You're being fished.
  5. Not to put a dampener on things, but I'd be pretty cautious throwing around "Arab Spring" when it comes to all this. Libya, Egypt and Syria are not exactly peaceful and balanced right now, unless you're David Cameron. Should Rangers actually experience the true death (and there are certainly more overtones of the fall of Berlin today) everyone needs to rapidly get over the backslapping and get ready for a bumpy ride for quite some time.
  6. The most sensible solution would be to promote Dundee. What's the fucking point of bleating on about sporting integrity for two months and then not having a team in the SPL relegated (again)? Dunfermline are, by the rules of the organisations in question, already an SFL side. It's done. If the Dee are going up only to get rogered then so be it; they'd at least hopefully turn a profit given that they'd budgeted for the First.
  7. Local and national government, the police force, major industry. or so it goes.
  8. To be fair, even if it isn't strictly accurate it's the only concise way to make the point. "forced to reapply from scratch" would be edited out of even a broadsheet headline. Obviously it remains the Internet's duty to ensure that the actual state of affairs (reapplying from nothing, as opposed to the oldco merely being moved around) continues to be pointed out.
  9. You're forgetting that it is the stated policy of Kilmarnock FC to allocate 3/4 of Rugby Park to Rangers and Celtic these days. What with those seats never being otherwise filled, that's quite a significant additional gain, even ignoring that Sky inevitably shows these guaranteed 4+goal whitewashes stunners.
  10. At the same time, it's odd that Murdock's lot have been somewhat standoffish compared to the Mirror Group and the vast majority of those in-crowders emplyed by the BBC. But a significant factor in Murdock's success, as with any populist, is knowing which way the wind is blowing. One little-discussed effect of all the current mayhem is that it may result in the non-Murdock hacks getting kicked out of what has for decades been an entrenched position of power. Imagine what will happen if the league fails to implode (and indeed flourishes) but the Record remains steadfastly behind the old powers.
  11. Reports in the Daily Record. I got more insight from my four-month-old niece this morning. The one good thing about the staggering level of incompetence in the upper echelons of the sport's administrative bodies is that there isn't the remotest possibility of them being able to carry out such a restructuring in time. They can't even produce their own fixture lists ffs, and I dare say that whoever they outsource that to isn't going to meekly comply with demands to get the new ones out in ten days at the end of July.
  12. That's an absolutely fucking terrible scenario. Literally everyone loses. The comparatively well-run SFL loses all its best teams; the TV deal is further diluted, especially two sessions down the line when the permanent top two is restored; the phoenix club gets to appropriate titles and history it didn't earn; and as "punishment", it spends a year playing exhibitions every week to packed crowds (likely under an independent TV deal) before stomping through a diddy SPL 2. Absolute horror show.
  13. I'm strongly opposed to a general attitude that private entities should be able to extricate themselves from the jurisdiction of the state on their say-so. On the other hand, this isn't actually possible, and football recognises that by typically taking a "discourage, warn, move" approach to compliance. They have to: these entities exist at the whim of the state in the end. There seem to be very few cases of parties suffering *unduly* for taking matters to the courts. My understanding was that the tribunal was ostensibly independent of the SFA. Furthermore, I haven't seen any indication that appealing to CAS is off-limits. That's precisely what it's there for.
  14. That was the angle Paul McBride came from over Lennon's two dugout bans. The difference was that it was pursued through the SFA's own channels. The aforementioned dugout ban appeal seemed to suggest that the SFA could be made accountable without having to resort to the courts. Rangers entered that private club in full knowledge that their contract forbade them from pursuing internal matters of compliance through the courts. It's not like they just ticked a license box on a website to get in. That said, there is no fixed penalty for pursuing matters outside of court, and that is presumably precisely because it is occasionally the right thing to do. On this occasion it was outright counterproductive given the strong indication from the tribunal that the transfer ban was a novel attempt to come up with a severe punishment that fell short of yanking Rangers' membership entirely.
  15. Because sport by necessity operates on a set of rules above and beyond that of common law, enforced by contract. This is why, for instance, players don't get to sue referees for loss of earnings if they get sent off. Look, I don't think anyone disagrees that the sports authorities occasionally overstep the line between "we must regulate this in order for the sport to work" and "we are above the rule of sovereign nations". Forcing the Brazilian government to sell beer in stadia so as to not piss off beer sponsors, for instance. And there are obviously specific cases where the law has to intervene in matters that the footballing authorities would rather deal with themselves (for instance, human rights issues regarding players: Bosman has fucked shit up for club football, especially smaller teams, in a big way, but it simply had to be done). But in terms of how the competition itself is actually run, it isn't at all difficult to understand why allowing local courts to make decisions which would override those laid down in the contracts that clubs sign would cause chaos. For all this talk of "mickey mouse courts" and whatever, Rangers broke a contract. If they were a normal business, you'd suppose that the courts would consider such a breach to be grounds for the SPL / SFA to summarily tear up their membership.
  16. You're an idiot. Anyway, yeah, Mark Allen. The sooner football does this the better.
  17. The Chelsea managed by Terry, Drogba and Lampard?
  18. Compared to some of the fuds you get on a football pitch, at any level, O'Sullivan is like Jesus.
  19. He's right. I'm not best pleased about the dartsification aspects (whooping idiots in Arsenal shirts)* but it makes the sport money and gets it column inches, and if I had my way everyone would still have a fag during breaks** and a whisky at the table. And there'd be terraces. * Though, to be fair, I've a well-heeled friend who went to the darts for a few days down south recently and fucking loved it ** Although I am the world's biggest supporter of the smoking ban
  20. This is fucking brutal all of a sudden.
  21. The alternative is what? Refuse to put in seating and expect that a group of SPL chairmen whose clubs mostly paid huge sums to install their own seating will make an exception in the interests of football?
×
×
  • Create New...