THE_Ibrox_Preacher

I'd expect it to be a little more or a professional take than I presented. The point I was essentially getting at is that he's the one player who is match sharp, he can run box to box fending off midfielders with a lean of the shoulder and he can play ball,.....by default that makes him heart and soul of our midfield at present and we should utilize it to full effect after that showing on Saturday with so much at stake.

I'm torn as to what will happen tonight, will we come out looking an entirely different side and comfortable winners (e.g. 2 goals first half) OR will we again bewilder anyone with eyes make heavy weather of it and make a trip to Switzerland with a 0-0/narrow 1-0 lead?! There is an argument for not showing your hand when you have cut so many corners on the transfer business/coaching side of things that you need any advantage you can get to ensure we land the cash. So that adds fuel to the belief it'll be more turgid stuff with perhaps a single goal to the good at best. There is also good reason to believe that the 'play weak when your strong' tactics is giving our management far too much credit and it's purely the coping mechanism of fans watching us descend to mediocrity in a number of respects. The thing which I think needs to be recognized by our fans and the board is that for 2 full years Champions League money has been sitting there to be taken multiple times via different qualifications and we have been completely unprepared and ill-equipped to grab it despite knowing months in advance the task at hand. We did take one of those many chances but in honesty were unbelievably lucky to attain it via qualifying rounds last season. When you acknowledge those facts and our failure to cash in on investments at peak value it makes our signing policy/fees/seeming penny-pinching mentality utterly incomprehensible. For me our general approach to tonight should be Cifuentes and Danilo to start, Dessers to be a nuisance and keep the big defensive guns busy to allow Danilo to poach goals, everyone pass the ball to Cifuentes who has the mandate of box to box and bully everycunt. Drive the ball through the middle, 1-2's and cutbacks on the deck if coming from out wide, no fucking high-crossballs to this imaginary world class header of the ball we have been aiming to every week for years - the only guys in our team recognised for heading ability in any way are Goldson and Soutar so it's a nonsense and it has to stop, it's actually a recognized weakness of Dessers and the supposed CB Davies (digression - surely that means he's not a CB?! No one will be surprised though to see us to again churn out a bizarre team selection and turgid performance against "inferior" opposition that rules out ever making a profit on the broken toys we are signing for seemingly that express purpose. Blue tinted specs on, Beale does some version of what I've suggested and we win summit like 4-1, Danilo 2 goals over 90.

As others have stated, he had Kyogo snuffed when called upon to play on the right. Has contributed more than a host of names on the books, therefor a bit sad to see him go. Hopefully some of those that will never see a game for us are shifted on too, no point in having a massive squad if 16 players (for argument sake) are all that's trusted to play/fill; there was definitely points last season where I felt we were asking someone bang out of form/fitness to do something when we have a host of names at the club who wouldn't get a sniff, more generally I just feel that as the games rack up that's the whole point in having a squad, to rotate and avoid burning anyone out.

Anyone got a link for Ecuador VS Nigeria?

Erm not sure it solves that particular issue as Goldson and Souttar still need to learn to play the gether.

Good news that it's settled and we don't now have to find a replacement for him, despite the costly errors last season over the whole of the last couple of seasons it's difficult to overstate how important he's been both in performance and fitness.

The man has 2 Europa finals under his belt in our jersey, the only other is away as is hof the team by the looks of it! He offers continuity! No one, including him, expects him to play every week but he has the experience and technical ability to offer something from the bench and perhaps more importantly - to new players and younger ones being asked to step up and play. To have a player in the side for 1 season who can say 'I've made 2 Europa finals with this team, there's a benchmark for ye!' Is invaluable! It does not however mean we can just go again with whatever we have left from last year, we need quality realiable additions not filler and we all hope that is the mindset with the powers at the club.

Jeremy Clement!

I was on my tea at work, been a long day.

Fuck aye right enough,...Struggling to remember this Lionel then obviously but under LeGuen is as much as I can muster, we were shite in the league and decent in Europe but cannae even picture him for the mental image of a very short looking CB called Karl Svennson . Big Papac came good but.

I didn't remember him as being shite, I remember him as being first choice until he rattled his knee off a post and then #2 Stefan Klos took over and never looked back?! FFS Antti Niemi was 3rd choice if I remember right and he was far fae shite?!

Champs League - No, simply not good enough and put us under pressure for the whole season. League Cup - No but if you're gonna chuck something to focus on the others this is it. League - No but a perfect storm. Europa League - Yes by a big margin. Scottish Cup - Yes, we cannot play it down because it's the first in a long time (for us) and the manner in which it was won i.e. beating them enroute and playing days after huge sapping disappointment. Stopped them from an almost certain treble. Transfer business - Jury's out until this Summers business is concluded; We done well to basically keep the team together considering the talk of interest in several players, we could have had a fire sale after the Champs League exit but remained whole, we sold Patterson which while disappointing was understandable and seemingly a good deal for us, January seen us lose no one else of importance which is a positive but the strengthening was seemingly suspect and turned out to be exactly that which could be argued was incredibly costly. Managerial change - Yes, European final and everything close ran or won. The wheels could have came off entirely and we were looking and feeling stale prior to the change. It wasn't just a manager we lost, it was a top team around him too - all appointments had to be good. Players still seem to be developing despite the changes. All in all it's easy to see why it might not feel like a good season but any season where a club from a small country such as ours takes a European competition as far as anyone can without actually winning it, having spent what we have spent on that team, and despite having lost our manager midway, IS a superb season. Everything pales in comparison to that. To win the big domestic cup for the first time in almost as long as our gap between European finals means we have something in silver to show for it that only a couple of our players and manager have had before. By reaching the Europa final and taking it as far as one can, we should be able to argue from a position of strength on sales out of the club. The overall vision of the club of buy raw/cheap/young, develop them, challenge on all fronts and sell high for our long term preservation and success is seemingly working and quickly at that (bottom tier to Europa final, 2nd Europa final in 14 years). There is no reason why we cannot manage the season ahead and build upon what we have and we should be looking to do just that.

Tomorrow feels kind of hollow following the other night but it really shouldn't. It is an opportunity to get the domestic cup hoodoo off our back. It's the better of the 2 domestic cups. It's an opportunity to do something to relieve the pain of the other night rather than stew on it for months unable to play. It's an opportunity to end the season on a high. It's an opportunity to demonstrate things learned or picked up on from the other night almost immediately. It's an opportunity to give a winning send off to those who won't be with us next season. It's the only competition we can win this season now. It's merited on the basis of what the players, the fans, and the investors have achieved over the last however many seasons. I hope they can win it well against a Hearts side who are right up for it. I won't even attempt the line up as I could make a case for half a dozen. Failure to win would be an awful end to a season that simply hasn't merited it.

Bassey is my player of the year. When we started the season, in my opinion, we looked like a team stuck in first gear....this has continued to reappear with regularity throughout the season; by saying this I mean that in the previous season there was a solid defense, a high fast press, tight triangles in link up play, some really nice passing play strung together; this season in theory would have took that and built upon it, refined it, been better at it (especially with losing no players you'd expect they'd kick on with the mounting experience). It never felt like it though from the very start. Several of our stars seemed out of sorts for months if not more. Bassey from the very start of the season on the other hand looked like one of the few that had hit the ground running in terms of work rate and desire. Chucked in at CB he looked makeshift with a bomb-scare moment in him that would see us concede BUT look at what he's done over the course, from filling holes when asked with pure work rate, to battering fuck through left wing like a train clearing snow to cross for big goals on the left wing at the highest stage, looking more and more like a reliable starter somewhere at center/left. He's gave us something for the whole season and most simply haven't! To see him all but cap this season off with a top performance in a European final at 22 shows just how far he's come and where he's heading. He had a bomb-scare moment in that final and we watched him fall awkwardly with the ball, get back up, and chase down a frankfurt player who snatched and ran with the ball at full pelt the second he fell, an ending in an Amoruso-esque sliding challenge to snuff out the danger. He's been instrumental to taking us to a European final, looking stand-out in that final, and look at the number of games he's played not only in this season but in good European results since he started featuring. The boy has become a man and we either have to acknowledge this with a deal or get the right price for him. He's our highest value asset at this moment. A tank that can run like a train who has an end-ball, can do a job left of Center, defends well, and works hard all game and will try his damndest to make up for his short falls. Now he's even starting to snuff people out in the air. I could go round in circles here and miss little things but he has brought something to the table all season and looked bang on at the highest table we sat at in our 2nd to last game of the season (after 60 odd games). Player of the year! (I know some will think Tav but put it like this, I expect a Rangers Captain to be a top player and while he's stepped up in his time with us, he hasn't grown so rapidly nor does he have the same potential - he's been top but his limitations are more fixed and he's got a mile of experience more in the locker.)

I took the view that in the Summer we would have been confident of qualifying for the Champions League with the £30-odd-million that brings, crashing out has been made up for with the Europa run. Patterson's sale tided us over from failing to qualify for the Champs League and the semi-expected subsequent sell-off that never happened. In other words I think it's possible we needed a return on investment and we've basically took the season to pull in what we should have at near the start. I could be entirely wrong as I'm reading between the lines with no real knowledge as to our affairs but did anyone think it was a good idea to have Goldson as our number 1 CB at the start of the season knowing he would be out of contract this Summer? Did the Malmo game not then confirm we needed someone else? Did the failure at both stages to recruit not suggest that we weren't in a position to spend?! Having failed to qualify I thought a sell-off would happen to "balance the books" and it didn't happen, at that stage I thought 'maybe we're more secure financially than I thought' but we were linked with handy looking affordable types last Summer and January and nothing happened with them, instead we sold Patterson and bring in 2 injury prone loans, a Polish guy nobody knew in a position Patterson couldn't get a sniff in, and Sands - An American who appeared to be nothing we needed and average at it. The end result of that recruitment is that they offered nothing towards winning the league with a certain £30-odd million + bounty attached and contributed hee haw in our quest for the Europa. A substantial amount of money missed out on either by shocking recruitment or by financial constraints upon recruitment. Essentially we had last Summer and January to rework things for the better, we had extra impetuce to do so after coming up short against Malmo. Between that Malmo tie, the league and the Europa Final we've missed out on 3 opportunities to secure £30+ million in the 1 season; surely this indicates that we didn't have the money to do so?! As a side - I personally felt selling Aribo following malmo was possible and should have been done in January, he hadn't started where he left off last season, he would have commanded a good fee you'd imagine and we'd avoid a Goldson situation from happening again, it could have been used to strengthen us in January (up until that point I felt he was a shaddow of the player he was the season before). Not sure if you'd (or anyone else) would agree with any of this?!