Squonk

Dear Official Statement Writer, Ibrox Park, Glasgow, Dundee Football Club notes the contents of your statement earlier today and our flabber was gasted at your use of the words ‘negligence’ and ‘unprofessionalism’ in the context of an event precipitated to a large extent by the weather. It seems to us that words such as negligence and unprofessionalism should instead be used sparingly to describe truly seismic events such as standing by watching your 140 year old football club plunge into liquidation and become defunct. Dundee FC has had its own flirtations with insolvency over the years, but we’ve always managed to stop short of falling into the abyss that is death by liquidation, unlike your predecessor. Negligence and unprofessionalism could also be used to describe reliance on a governing body to concoct a secretive five way agreement document, laden with non-disclosure clauses, that pretended liquidation somehow hadn’t affected your original football club, despite everyone with an IQ higher than a dung beetle knowing otherwise. While the comedy value of those events to the rest of Scottish football might be immense, Rangers Football Club, old and new, are and were a permanent embarrassment and an occasional disgrace, and that’s before we even consider the behaviour of the knuckle-dragging sectarian ‘minority’ that follow follows your club, or your club’s need to make money from them. Negligence and unprofessionalism might also describe a football club that cheated its competitors on an industrial scale for more than a decade and hid details of players’ earnings from the governing body, events that warranted title stripping or even expulsion from Scottish football, but which barely gave rise to a slap on the wrist. Against that magnitude of negligence and unprofessionalism, it would be entirely unfair for the authorities to punish Dundee FC for the vagaries of Scotland’s weather. Finally, I will be issuing Rangers* with an invoice in respect of the man hours spent by our staff this afternoon picking up the toys thrown out of your pram. Fondest regards, Nelmsy, Dundee FC.

You're only feeling superior because of your retractable roof and hover pitch. Oh no, wait a minute..........

Imagine trying to defend the indefensible armed only with semantics.

Surely the biggest question that should be asked by Celtic fans isn't about penalties, but what the f*ck has Rodgers done to utterly demolish the good work done by Ange Postecoglou? The dismantling of an impressively sleek machine into a disjointed mish-mash of ineptitude is borderline criminal. Kyogo looks a pale shadow of himself, which is hardly surprising since Rodgers has contrived to turn him into a bit part player rather than being the first name on the team sheet.

Dehydration does that to you.

It is related to football. The SPFL came into being in 2013, more than a decade ago. Some people wrongly call it the SPL, even now.

I think people wrongly conflate two separate issues here. It is simply factually inaccurate to call the existing league setup 'the SPL.' That is an undeniable fact, regardless of what your personal preference might be regarding the wording of the organisation's title. It annoys me in the same way as the younger generation's usage of words and phrases such as 'could of' and 'should of.' 'Of' and 'have' are different words with entirely different meanings. Don't get me started with the butchering of the English language, predominantly in various counties across England-shire, where abominations such as 'he were' and 'they was' are acceptable dialect variations. This, despite grammar being taught extensively and uniformly throughout childhood across the nation! I get that language evolves over time and that new words and phrases will constantly be added, but I have to question the point of having formal education if we are simply going to resort to pandering to the misspelt crayon scribblings of the poorly educated. Let's encourage stupidity by accepting and even rewarding it!

I agree, as it clearly hit Sima's shoulder. Making a big deal of it would be as futile as demanding a penalty for a handball, despite knowing an offside would rule the penalty out. If only clubs operating companies didn't have to assuage their rabid and entitled fans.

If Phillipe Clement has anything about him, he'll have studied what Brendan Rodgers has done to Kyogo and some of his team-mates in the past few weeks, then do the polar opposite with his own players. What Rodgers has done to Ange Postecoglou's fine work is borderline criminal.

In that same game, Celtic's Polish keeper Lukasz Zaluska swung a punch at the ball, missed, and nearly decapitated an ICT player in the penalty area. It's difficult to imagine a more stonewall penalty, yet play was allowed to continue. This inconvenient fact gets airbrushed out by Celtic fans keen to promote the handball narrative.

Thanks. I had you down as a harder nutcase to crack.

In a nutshell, that Charles Green's newco would be treated as if it was the old deceased cheating club, including the transfer of SFA membership, so long as he accepted certain conditions, such as the payment of the old club's football debts. The final version of the five way agreement was much less onerous than the first draft, which had included the stripping of five EBT-tainted titles, a title stripping condition that Green later made reference to, thereby confirming its existence. The agreement was mostly couched in legalise jargon in a futile attempt to convey authority, with the wording attempting to suggest that the football club had merely experienced a routine change of ownership, rather than succumbing to a fatal insolvency. Green would later tie himself in knots when trying to slither out of being held responsible for the sins of the old club, while simultaneously claiming to be the owner of that old club. To be fair, old 'big hands' won far more concessions from the football authorities than he might reasonably have expected, armed with the threat that he could spell the end of Rangers in any form if he didn't get his way. I haven't seen any drafts of the five way agreement on the internet for years now, which ties in with the cleansing of any material referencing the demise of Rangers in the ongoing quest to rewrite history.

Clyde have a long, varied and interesting history but we may see them end up in the relative wilderness of the seaside leagues soon. I hope not. Since their move from Shawfield all those years ago, they've been like a hermit crab shuffling along the shoreline checking shells that are either already inhabited or out of their price range. For no good reason, I like them, Dumbarton and Morton, which probably makes me some kind of jakey. It goes without saying that Glasgow's gruesome twosome are boring.

Talking of so-called journalists performing a massive u-turn, have you heard the one about ace hack James Traynor and the club that was certified dead before its corpse was propped up on a mortuary slab and 'brought back to life' via smoke, mirrors and a not very secretive secret five way agreement?

I wasn't specifically targeting you in my previous post (as much as an annoying bear of the groundhopping variety), but your reply nonetheless partially illustrates why fan problems persist; because we keep ruling out the only measures that actually provide a solution. It's utter madness! Exactly why shouldn't we abandon a match after a large scale and potentially dangerous pyro display like last night's, or at least issue a sanction as a disincentive? Because it would mostly inconvenience the bigger clubs, so you and the rest of your support deem it disproportionate? Well maybe, just maybe, the fabled lunatic 'minority' would be forced to behave if their club was regularly docked points or was made to play their home games with reduced capacity, or even behind closed doors. The same applies to singing proscribed songs and chants, and forcing open gates to allow more fans in, leading to overcrowding. This applies to all clubs, so I'm not just picking on Rangers* here. Yes, I know there's no appetite in Scottish football for strict liabilty, but as far as I'm aware, for good reason, outside football in a courtroom, the judiciary doesn't offer an offender the option of taking the softest and least inconvenient sanction from a lengthy list of otherwise meaningful punishments that would likely provide a deterrent. If the clubs aren't going to accept responsibility, then they should be forced to do so by the powers that be. How many more months/years/decades/centuries of talking about fan behaviour, without acting on it, is it going to take? UEFA aren't so soft and rightly don't give a flying f*ck about dishing out fines and closing grounds for poor fan behaviour, so there's no valid legal reason why our suits can't do the same, or be forced to do so by government intervention. Finally, I wasn't aware about an accident on the road holding up Rangers*' arrival last night. I hope everyone involved is ok.

It must be quite time consuming defending criticism aimed at the current club playing out of Ibrox. Last night's match alone had three major controversial incidents. Firstly we had a lengthy delay before kick off caused by the club company not following its own advice regarding allowing sufficient time for travel to Dens Park. Can anyone genuinely see any action being taken over this matter? Then we had a stoppage because sufficient numbers of selfish morons in the stand created a potential health and safety issue just because their fun is deemed more important than abiding by mere laws of the land aimed at keeping fans safe. Again, any punishment likely? Finally, though not of Rangers*' making, the match referee, however inadvertently, broke up a Dundee attack, leading directly to a Rangers* goal. Nobody's claiming any of these incidents ultimately affected the outcome of the game, but to find they are laughed aside with "move along diddies, nothing to see here" must be particularly galling for the Dundee fans.

I guess Goldson's unpunished bear hug on Duk in the penalty area a few weeks ago was just another of those pesky anomalies.

I didn't see the full game. Watching the whole match would have generated all the excitement of a one-sided 'contest' between financially doped Man City and potless Luton Town or Sheffield United. Also, regarding your attempted whataboutery, you do realise that if Devlin was guilty of something, that fact doesn't exonerate Kyogo from criticism, but instead both of them would be guilty?

Since its inception, football has been a contact sport. Contact does not automatically equate to foul, something that has been largely forgotten in the modern age, particularly by soft or gullible match officials, not to mention Celtic fans. Now we have players such as Kyogo taking advantage by simulating or exaggerating the effect of minimal or no contact. There is no way that Cochrane's brush against Kyogo's leg forced him to the ground and it is highly unlikely that Hearts would've been awarded a penalty if that incident had occurred at the other end. Kyogo cheated every bit as much as Villa's Zaniola with his non-existent head injury forcing a stoppage in yesterday's EPL match against West Ham. It annoys the f*** out of me why such an otherwise talented player feels compelled to throw himself to the ground so often. That penalty incident may not have affected the outcome, but some of the comments on here amply demonstrate that Celtic fans simply can't comprehend that they and their ugly sister from Govan benefit from totally different refereeing than that applied to the diddy clubs.

When our much loved golden retriever died, we considered replacing her with another golden retriever, this time a puppy. It would look the same, live in the same place and would soon be loved and admired just as much as its deceased predecessor. It would categorically not be the same entity though, no matter how much bullsh!t was concocted to the contrary.

Not sure why the Hibs fans aren't concentrating more on the fact their team has just soundly beaten their city rivals by two goals to two and leapfrogged over them into the top six and a European slot, with the three points they gained against the odds. Oh no, wait....

It's been a long time since I've heard the saying, "Lovelace has gone down."

While it’s fair to acknowledge that most clubs have a minority of neanderthal fans, there’s a danger of conflating that matter with a football club actively encouraging sectarianism as a tool for increasing or maintaining commercial revenue. By falling into that trap, we're effectively letting Rangers* as a club off the hook by diluting its culpability. Orange kits and employing David Graham are just two recent examples of the club appealing to the bigots. No other football club I know of deliberately operates a policy of pandering to bigots in order to retain their physical attendance and financial support. Limited progress has been made since the days when the old club employed a strict non-Catholic signing policy, but the current franchise playing out of Ibrox is still guilty of dragging its feet past the 17th century, despite the lip-service it occasionally feels obliged to pay. Sectarianism and anti-Catholic/Irish bigotry is a money spinner for a club steeped in Protestant unionism, and as others have said, if the Catholic/Irish were instead black, Muslim, Jewish or homosexual, there would be serious consequences, including the threat of stadium closures, or even league expulsion. AJF and bennet (and probably others) should rightly be commended for their condemnation of the behaviour of fellow fans and their club, but @VincentGuerin is absolutely right to question why any right-thinking person wouldn’t walk away from such a vile ‘institution,’ regardless of how much affinity that person might have built up purely from the on-field stuff. It’s a bit like admiring Hitler for his love of his pet dogs.

Then I guess you don't do sarcasm, humour or self-deprecation.