flyingrodent

Is this the first run out for the best Celtic first eleven? Have to be confident, given a worse Celtic team were pretty unlucky to lose the last game at Ibrox.

This is some hilarious irony, right here. The Rangers fans' idiotic insistence that the Oldco didn't benefit from multi-million pound cheating is actually taking most of the heat off Dave King for the Newco's financially catastrophic European exit. That is, their desperation to retain the trophies they scammed in the past is actively helping to prevent them from winning any competitions in the future. it's Darwinism in action, right here on the football forum.

I don't think anyone in Scotland really believes that's true, not even you. To be fair though, everyone in Scotland readily accepts that the Newco has no sporting advantage.

If it's so obvious that Rangers didn't cheat, you'd think their fans would want some kind of overarching inquiry, if only to confirm that they didn't cheat once and for all. But they're not keen on the idea, for some strange reason. Very odd, that.

Is the The Kincardine who is repeatedly insisting that LNS found Rangers guilty the same The Kincardine who responded to the LNS verdict by repeatedly insisting LNS had only found Rangers guilty of "administrative errors"? I'll say this for the "moon howlers": you get the same exaggeration and over-excitement you do on most online forums, but their position has been fairly consistent since the Rangers cheating story broke. The Newco fans though, they've been all over the place for years, desperate flailing. The only consistent position they've held is their utter refusal to look reality in the eye.

God, check out the excitement on the Rangers fans. They never learn. Going by the glaring tactical ineptitude of last season's performances, it's clear that giving Pedro a better team is like giving a gorilla a knife and fork.

So to sum up, the Rangers fans really, really don't like being reminded that their new club is a new club. Fascinating information, I'm sure nobody will use this knowledge to wind them up in future, on a daily or hourly basis.

Not sure how upset Dundee fans are going to be about an insolvency event from almost 120 years ago m8

Of course there was a media frenzy, ya daftie. That's what tends to happen when people learn that one of the largest clubs in the country's most popular sport has spent ten years cheating; has deliberately covered it up and is about to go bankrupt & die. Exactly the same thing would happen if it was Celtic or Chelsea or Real Madrid. The point is that the media sensation is a reaction, not the action itself. Most people don't have to be instructed to be angry about being scammed, because they can see it for themselves. If you crap on my rug, I don't need the Daily Record to tell me whether it stinks.

It's a strange world that the Rangers fans live in, really. Maybe there are people who, without encouragement from the press, would look at what happened at Ibrox and think: Perhaps that was all perfectly legit. I do like the idea that the papers and the evil bloggers "whipped people into a frenzy", as if less sensational reporting would've meant everyone would've been quite happy to learn Rangers had been cheating for ten years and were attempting to walk away from their bad debts. As if everyone would've looked at the liquidation of the club and the sale of its assets and said, Yes, that is a club that is alive and kicking and is in no way defunct. It's a bit like that mental Vangaurd Bears piece the other day, in which the author watched Celtic stroll to three easy wins against Rangers and concluded that it was the media's fault, for being overly nationalist and irish.

Very much enjoying the new season of The Rangers Saga. I thought the writers lost it a bit last year - a bit so-so and humdrum - but that explosive finale at Hampden, this year's comedy performances and the whole Barton sub-plot has proven that there's years of hilarity left in the show.

It's naive to assume that Rangers have lost the head here. As mental as their statement is, it was written by professional public relations hacks. They know exactly what they're doing.

Cynically, if I was on Rangers' PR team and I was quite shameless, I'd be saying anything to get "We are the victims" onto the front pages before the cops and the SFA start reviewing videos and handing out fines. It puts pressure on the authorities to make an example of Hibs and to go easy on Rangers, regardless of what the evidence actually shows. When the beaks hand down thumping fines to both teams, as they will surely have to after looking at the videos of who was attacking whom, then the fun will really start.

That's quite an impressively mental way of looking at it, mate. No doubt loads of them are hypocritical posturers, but not everything that happens in the Parliament is a maniacal quest to annoy the Scottish National Party.

The fact that there's broad agreement right across the political spectrum suggests quite strongly that there's a problem with the law, and a need to make changes. I'm not even slightly surprised to discover that quite a lot of people have immediately assumed that it's some kind of malicious, conspiratorial attack on the SNP.

Because the clubs - almost all of them, not just the ones that you'd expect - are strongly against any suggestion that they should face more penalties for their supporters' bad behaviour.

If it was good, effective law, the conviction rate wouldn't be so far below rates for similar offences. If it was working as intended, it'd be politically impossible to ask for its repeal. It's been given every chance to work - the police and the Crown have both made it a major priority - and now the results are plain to see. It doesn't work, it's expensive and it's weirdly discriminatory against football fans as opposed to people at any other public events. And that's why it's probably going to be repealed, not because it'll e.g. make some thick Celtic fans happy.

Going by the prevalence of crowds singing nasty and stupid songs this season, I'd say that we've also learned that you can't change the behaviour of tens of thousands of people by arresting one or two of them per week. We've also learned that if the government wants to "send a message" to the populace, then TV or billboards are more effective than policemen and handcuffs.

It was just bad law, in the end - implemented to get good headlines, I suspect, but badly out of touch with the systems that were meant to enforce it. That's why the conviction rate was so poor, and it's why the sheriffs were lining up to say bad things about it. The quick summary: if you're sending people to jail for singing offensive songs, and you're not Saudi Arabia, you have messed up somewhere along the line. The whole incident has taught us some fairly valuable lessons, I think. The good news is that it shows that people can have bad laws repealed, if they get organised. The bad news is that a large section of the populace plainly has no problem with gesture politics if they think they won't be personally affected and, worse, that football fans and others are willing to put themselves at risk of arrest, if they think a new law will punish people that they don't like.

Full credit to Kincardine here though - "calumnies" is a great word. I also wouldn't try to wrap my gums around "concomitantly" in conversation, and I'm a massive smartarse. "Damascene", no less.

Aye, that's pretty much what Chick Young was saying, too.

On an unrelated note, I see that there's an interview with Graeme Souness on Radio Scotland soon. I wonder whether anyone will ask him why, when he was Newcastle manager, he chose to buy a player for eight million quid - a player that he could've picked up for free just a few months earlier - from another club that was paying him a secret retainer fee? Always thought that was a bit of a strange one, myself. Update: Nope, no chance - just Chick Young delivering an embarrassing, Dyson-strength suck-job, much like the rest of the press does whenever they're in Souness's presence. Updated update: Not only that, but then one of the pundits announces that "You have to separate the Souness years at Rangers from the EBT years". This, while said pundit is fully aware that Souness himself had a once-secret EBT from Rangers while he was managing another club. Awesome skillz.

There's no tick-box on my paycheque marked "Would you like to pay tax on your income, Yes/No". No reason why there should be for rich-as-hell footballers, either. I say Go Get 'Em, Hector. Get the lot of them.

I suggest that Walter Smith and Graeme Souness are both pretty bothered about the Apply-To-The-Third-Or-Get-a-Boost-To-The-Top-Tier issue. After all, they've both made categorical public statements explicitly stating that they're a bit upset about it, just in the last few days. I mean, fair play though. Maybe the rest of you are really intensely relaxed about it, and it's only your most famous living managers who are in any way annoyed.