gronaldo

We will probably come back into it at some point, if it stays 1-0 and we get over the deer in the headlights mess of a start here who knows.

Incredible stuff from Murray, I honestly thought he was going to get hammered in straight sets. It's still a tough ask to win from here but who knows.

I'm not really concerned at the panic bit. Lost of teams panic when going down to ten men, no matter how much they train to deal with it and we still won the game. The way we played in the first half though was completely unacceptable - whether that's not showing the opposition enough respect as this quote suggests or not I don't know, but we can't afford to take that attitude into the second leg.

I have no time for the vigilante social media thing of wanting to destroy people's lives, but there's an obvious bigger picture with this stuff. You might see it as harmless stupidity but if you have Asian parents and you're growing up in Scotland you'll get this all through school, you'll get it when you go out for a drink on a Friday/Saturday night, you'll get it if you play football at any level, etc. It's easy to say it's not a big problem when you don't have to deal with it your whole life. For me, I don't really care about Furuhashi himself. He probably expected it the minute he arrived in Scotland and isn't even that bothered. But Rangers isn't just a football team, it's the centre of a community as far as I'm concerned and if we just shrugged it off as no big deal in the way you're suggesting then it would send a pretty abysmal message. The club got it spot on in my opinion.

I was in Iceland last year and saw Robbie Crawford playing for Hafnarfjordur. He actually looked quite decent at that level. Steven Lennon (another blast from the past) was playing for them as well. The weather was absolutely horrific admittedly so I left with a good half hour left.

The quality of the squad is definitely better and I think we'll finish with more points than last year. It's hard to argue we haven't progressed at all. A better question would be whether we've progressed enough given the investments we've made.

The thing about the "is Paquiao done" stuff is that all he's really suffered is a loss to a guy who was always a terrible matchup for him. The Bradley loss was a ridiculous decision, so it basically comes down to him struggling against Marquez in a couple of fights - just as he struggled against Marquez when he fought him 9 years ago as a 25 year old. He was brutally knocked out, but if you fight a guy who's a bad matchup for you four times you're bound to lose one of them. I still think Pacquiao has a lot to give and he showed that last night against Rios - who's by no means a great fighter, but has such an advantage in terms of size that it was always going to be a tough fight. Pacquiao wouldn't beat Mayweather, but I never at any stage believed he would do that anyway. He could definitely beat Bradley, though.

He did tie Froch up, the referee broke them up then Groves staggered back and got hit with at least five unanswered shots while backed up on the ropes. Saying it's equally feasible he would have survived that round is a serious stretch as far as I'm concerned - you could tell he was gone at the break, long before the final flurry of punches from Froch. Short of catching him with a blind shot out of nothing I don't honestly see any way he was going to survive that.

I can't think of anyone who's fought fight after fight against top level opponents the way Froch has - Pascal, Taylor, Dirrell, Kessler, Abraham, Ward, Bute were all world level opponents when Froch fought them. He's beaten all of them except Ward, who's light years ahead of everyone. The only person in that division he hasn't fought who's of any standing is Stieglitz and maybe Oosthuizen. For someone with fairly limited talent to do what Froch has done is special in my book. Never turns a fight down and manages to beat better fighters through grit and determination alone. Tonight was exactly the same and I don't have any doubt he was winning that regardless of whether the ref had let it go a bit longer or not.

To be honest, this stuff doesn't have anything to do with football for me. Celtic fan, troll, or whatever, anyone that tries to take the p**s out of someone for having a serious illness is just scum. Doesn't matter who they do or don't support, when we're talking about someone's life football is a complete irrelevance.

This is being a bit literal. Even if he wanted to attack the manager/squad he wouldn't come out in the press and berate them directly. Personally I don't think there was any malice intended in these particular comments, but I can see why Ally took offence to it - it basically set him up for a fall. Whether that was the intention or not, everyone knows the pressures of the job and you absolutely don't need someone coming out in the press right before a game implying that your job is under threat if you lose - doesn't matter how true it is, it doesn't help and I can't think of a single high ranking club that behaves in that way. As for Green's right to voice his opinion, he's perfectly entitled to do so. I think a worrying number of our fans are hopelessly naive when it comes to reading between the lines though. Unlike Ally he has no history with Rangers and has basically used a series of crude PR techniques to whip up personal support - i.e. bashing the SPL/SFA at every opportunity and latching on to any perceived grievance voiced by our fans. I don't rate Ally as a manager, but I at least believe the sincerity of what he says - Green would more or less say anything in the press if it helps feather his own nest and the fact that so many people can't see through that is depressing.

I'm not sold on 18 team leagues for any of the divisions to be honest. For a league to be competitive you need to have some sort of similar standard between the bottom and the top - i.e. in the Premier League QPR and Reading might be worse than Man United and Man City, but on their day they can still compete. In Scotland we don't have enough teams of a reasonable size to sustain that. That goes for both the SPL and the lower leagues - whatever you do there's going to be a big chunk of teams at the bottom completely cut off from the teams at the top.

That's more an argument between them and Dundee to be fair. Anyway at least they don't have to worry about anyone stripping them of their titles...

I was one of those who never rated him when he was with us. Even at his peak he was deemed such a liability that we regularly didn't play him in supposedly "challenging" SPL games, far less Old Firm/Champions League games. At the time some people threw their hands up into the air and said that anyone who scored that amount of goals should be the first name on the team sheet (even ahead of far superior players from that period such as Cousin), but his play outside of the box was so abysmal that he was a waste of space against half decent opposition. It doesn't surprise me in the least that he's failed since he left Scotland and only the fact we're temporarily in the lower leagues could convince me it's a good idea to bring him back.

I'm not doubting your loyalty as a fan - I went along with the boycott just as you did. The point is that if some of our fans are going along with the boycott and others aren't then we have a divided support. You just need to look at some of the vitriol directed at those who went to the game yesterday to see how deep the feelings over this run. Like I say, it's fine when we're only talking about a few hundred people turning up, but what if it was 50-50 and we had half our support advocating a future boycott and the other half going against it? Those sort of debates drive a wedge between us - it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. Our fans sticking together is the biggest priority, not whether non-entities like Dundee United get a bit of money or not. I actually couldn't care less what the rest of the SPL get up to - if we sort ourselves out they won't be anywhere near us.