GaryStevens02

Stephane Chapuisat Hakan Yakin

I wouldn't worry about an independent Scotland, its not going to happen. Personally I think David Cameron has called we Ecks bluff. Bawheid wanted a two question referendum because if he is being honest with himself, he knows that the most likely outcome was a vote for "devolution max" as it was being labelled. Cameron knew this as well, so has embarrassed wee Eck into accepting a single question referendum leaving wee Eck to act smug and kid on its what he wanted but in reality he will lose big time and knows it. 1970s was the time if it was ever going to happen. Scotland had oil, manufacturing (IBM, Digital, National Semi-Conductor, Motorola, SCI) ship building, steel.....all long gone now except oil which is never going to be given up by the UK government. More concerned with getting out the 3rd Division to be honest..........

Ally McCoist will know himself that its not good enough and may even chose to step aside if things don't improve. You cannot fault the guys loyalty , but I don't see why its such a big surprise that he may not be that good at being a football manager. When Ally stopped playing he wanted to carve out a media career and was doing McCoist and MacCauley when others were doing their UEFA badges. He then went on to Question of Sport and split his marriage up in the process, acting in a less than dignified way may I add. Walter got him involved in the Scotland setup and that seemed to re-ignite his interest but you know what? For all Walters success his teams were diabolical to watch, negative and generally ended up with players being played out of position or cast aside to never be seen again. McCoist has only ever known Walter style management and that for me was always going to be a big negative when he was earmarked to take over. Sometimes ex players,especially top players who dont start with lower league teams and learn their style, just dont cut it....... John Greig, Roy Kean, Liam Brady, Tony Adams, Alan Shearer. I don't see him being a success unfortunately as nothing he has done to date has been anything other than a facsimile of what Walter might have done, only even less effective. No name calling, no outrage, no outpouring of vitriol, just thanks for everything but maybe it just isn't good enough. Results aren't great and the play is rank rotten. Top clubs like Real Madrid can cast aside a manger a year after winning the Champions league, I dont see why people get so wound up about it. Football may be a game but its also a business. Managers get compensated, they live charmed lives, its not like us mere mortals who would struggle to pay a mortgage or have to sell the car.

Here in Perth WA there's an Irish Pub called...............FENIANS So if thats what they call themselves where's the problem?

She really is lovely. I must try harder to like her music...........

In Dragons Den style "Its a NO from me " The massive debt burden is pure myth to me. We owed 18 Million to Lloyds and with the turnover we had, we should easily have been able to service that. Remember all this other non payment stuff is nonsense as well. Administration stopped that dead, thats what happens. We couldn't have payed St Etienne or Hearts even if had wanted to. (would love to know how much those leeches D&P took out the club) Something stinks somewhere and I hope it all comes out in the wash even if its too late now to be of any help to us. Any business needs cash and the THREAT of the unproven EBT tax claim was what was killing any line of credit. I think a lot of this could have been avoided with a bit more honesty on all sides. Its all well and good talking now about living within our means and not spending big on players etc, but even last summer this forum , fan phone-ins etc were full of howls of derision over the lack of money we were spending on new players and even the level of player we were looking at. If Murray had just been honest , laid out the facts, continued to cash in on the best players, McGregor etc we could have weathered the storm until a serious buyer emerged, not that knee jerk sale to that jerkoff Craig Whyte. If a positive could have emerged, it was the opportunity to seriously explore getting out of the Scottish league set up once and for all. We had no league, no association membership, nothing to hold us back, no 2 years notice period, divorced from the mhanks, and we didn't want to do it.

What I find really annoying is that all of us on this forum can all see, as plain as the nose on the end of your face, that this EBT nonsense if far from cut and dried as an an issue and may rule in favour of The Rangers anyway. But the lack of "getting the message out there" from our side is astonishing. I am in my 40s and have never know a time when Rangers have been so impotent in the media. We have sat back and let timmy and his chums spread any old guff, repeated often enough that it gets mistaken and taken as fact. How many times are we going to see this shit about owing £134M? Absolute bullshit,this is a totally made up figure thats went from 50 to 75 to 134 in six months! All this cheating shite as well? I seem to remember 11 players beating another 11 on the park. Would it have been less "cheating" if the club had just aquired more up front debt rather take steps to reduce tax, like Hearts for example are they not carrying £40M debt? Is Man United and their £750M debt cheating? Lets take the Champions league back eh? Thought not.... Another thing worth noting is that I just had a letter from the tax man myself. A benefit in kind that was not administered properly by my former employer resulted in under paid tax. (A few hundred quid) Who does HMRC go after? ....ME ! not my employer. It might have been their administrative error but its me that's being chased down to Oz for the money back. Is there a possibility that it is individuals rather than the PLC that would be liable anyway? Is that what HMRC meant when they made their statement about not wanting a CVA as it would predujice their right to pursue those individuals responsible? I also think its time those cunts Regan and Doncaster were spoken to by "The Establishment" Somebody really needs to put a hand on their shoulder and tell them enough is enough.

Hopefully he is away finalising a deal with the Northern Conference and FA to get us the fuck out of Scotland, at least it would lead to something worthwhile........ Or is that me on the Carlsberg........

Good Stuff, wish this sort of thing was coming from OUR BOARD

And the same will apply to Charles Green if there is a lastminute.com offer of a reinstatement to the SPL ?

Paysmith is a greedy wee tool. So diddums "Charles Green didn't get in touch I only got an e-mail"...maybe he had more pressing things to deal with like try and get a fucking league to play in and convince his investors not to fuck off after the CVA failed? The high earners would have gone anyway, for their escape clause fees, that's blatantly obvious and it would have been to the benefit of BOTH parties. That's right, remember the football team Steven? The one that payed you to lie on a treatment table for two thirds of the time? I take it when you "grew up supporting Rangers" you had an in depth knowledge of Lawrence Marlborough? Did you do "due diligence" before continuing to support the team when the PLC was sold to David Murray? Obviously you must have had an in depth knowledge of Craig Whyte and his commercial dealings for you to sign a new deal because obviously you couldn't have done that if "you knew nothing about him" or he was "just a stranger ".......Aye didn't think so Spare us the bollocks, greedy we shite, away and buy a Bentley and new hair with your signing on fee.

Kick off at 3:00 PM on a Saturday

I was TUPE'd to a new employer when the industry I work in was privatised in the 1990s. From what I remember, I received a letter telling me that I was going to be transfered to an new employer under the TUPE regulations and that my rate of pay, length of service etc would remain unchanged. I was certainly not offered the option to walk away without giving notice etc, then again, people in the real world don't generally want to walk away from a job that keeps a roof over their head and feeds them. TUPE is there to protect employees from being made redundant by new owners when a business or contract changes hands. In real life jobs, terms and conditions are protected "at time of transfer". After that, employers are free to try and renegotiate employees contracts to cut costs, improve productivity, introduce flexible working hours etc and can then serve redundancy if necessary. Obviously football is rather different. If we end up in the 3rd Division and couldn't pay the top earning players on their existing terms and conditons, not really sure what would happen then. Do we retain them and try and sell them for the "escape clause" transfer fee or do we make them redundant ? Maybe its just me, but I would have thought the players, if they had any feelings for the club, could have come to some sort of arrangement to leave for a fee and help the club's financial position. Even if the transfer fees are cut price and derisory, its better than getting nothing for players that cost the club millions.

As someone who has watched Rangers and Greenock Morton over the years, let me just tell you Division 3 = Shite. The income from Division 3 couldn't even cover the running costs of Ibrox stadium, lets get real here.

I seem to remember an article in a magazine in the mid to late 80s about Ally McCoist earning 2K a week and his car was an Austin Montego ! Changed days. I suppose in those days, with English clubs banned from Europe and no Sky TV, if you could fill the stadium , like Souness achieved, that was the maximum income you could generate. Europe wasn't a big cash cow like these days.

I'll wait and see what comes out in the wash. David Murray has his faults but I can't see that this mess is entirely and wilfully down to him alone. No-one was complaining when he was bringing Laudrup, Gazza Amo etc to the club. Remeber getting bored with winning the league every year, "we want to be a force in Europe" "Walter out.... we need a European manager to take us to the next level" . Remeber having a team of superstars that fell at the first hurdle on a regular basis wiping millions off our annual income ...Levski Sofia.... Murray said for years we needed more income, remember ENIC ..Joe Lewis etc? He stepped down as chairman and tried to sell the club, no one wanted it. The debt which had reached £85 Million from the Advocaat era, he tried to raise money with a share issue, no-one bought them. He later claimed to have bought £50M to reduce the debt. I think he may have moved it to another MIM company or something in real life, who knows. Also this idea we did not pay tax is rubbish. The tax case from the Murray era is nothing to do with PAYE VAT etc. It's about using legal tax loopholes to maximise players income by paying large sums into offshore trusts under the guise of image rights or similar. (A tax vehicle currently used by Wayne Rooney among others) Whether we failed to do it correctly under some technicality or other has yet to be established. Whyte is the one who has failed to pay the ongoing day to day tax, presumably as some sort of pre-planned strategy to bring the whole thing to a head. Evil Genuis, delusional Del Boy or just a stuipid crook? Remains to be seen doesn't it. Let's just stick together and wait. It's annoying ,embarrassing, and sticks in the throat having Timothy on the ascendancy but there's nothing anyone can do now but wait.

In answer to original question NO, we do not. A couple of reasions why? This "cheating" accustation is a total farce. Titles were not won by cheating they were won by having a better team with more points at the end of the season, as simple as that. How did we pay for that team? Well a combination of things, ENIC money , private investors sweet talked by Minty, more regular European football and in 2004 or something we were supposed to be £85M in debt. Murray announced a share option, that nobody wanted to buy remember, and declared he had wiped £50M off the debt from his own pocket. Did he really ? Maybe he moved debt around between his MIM companies, who knows, but basically the Advocaat era debt was mostly caught up in this. Extremely poor business decisions since then, remember making our own kit that wasn't available anywhere to buy etc? and wasteful purchases or high wage bosmans on duff players, J Rod ,Pierre Fan Fan, Emerson, James Beattie etc....... that wasn't cheap. So we cheated feck all .....end of. Buy high sell low or let walk away for feck all seemed to be the order of the day. This EBT thing is another farce,. I remember reading over a year ago in a national paper that had a headline to the effect of "Wayne Rooney pays less tax than a milkman" or something like that. The gist of the artice was that he gets paid a low wage by Man Utd and the rest goes to offshore trusts badged up as image rights and stuff. (because he's so handsome his image rights are worth a fortune presumably...lol) When he wants a house or a Wayne Rover, he takes a loan from this trust. Sound familar? Article was saying how it was immoral that he pays less tax, as a percentage, than the average Briton on a wage, and that this loophole needs looked at as it was rife in the English Premiership. No the real question is, why are we being singled out? Who wants this, Dr John Scum and his cronies for example?...... The club could go out of business and yet nothing has actually been proven one way or the other. How much retrospective creative accounting will be going on around the country while HMRC are focusing solely on us. Thats the real question for me...................and lets vow to remember them all, all the gloaters, all the cheshire cats...

We've had the usual post Europe exodus talk about the "state of Scottish Football" on TV and although I haven't really been paying attention I would hazard a guess that there's plenty of "grass roots overhaul" and "kids not playing football the way they used to" chat. Soon I expect the usual Rangers need to get out of the SPL debate as there is no money, the competition isn't good enough and we can't attract players even from Championship clubs. This got me thinking that we always seem to suggest that we would be looking to get voted into the English League, at whatever level, which is highly unlikely as some one else would have to forfeit their place. Now, things we know are................ Welsh clubs play in the English Premiership , Championship yet Wales still maintains a League Structure and home nation International Football team. We also know that clubs can re-badge and relocate. MK Dons for example. So my cunning plan would be, buy an English team in administration, re-badge it as Rangers and move it Scotland!

5 Year contracts are not necessarily a bad thing for the club, depending on the players right enough. It in no way means that players wont be going, it just means that we would be in a far stronger negotiating position. I always remember Stilian Petrov signing a long term deal then disappearing to Aston villa within months. It always looked to me as if it was a setup. Not so convinced anyone is looking to steal Whittaker right enough!

I like the idea of a summer season for a couple of reasons; 1) We would be far better going into these games match sharp, which is very different to just being fit. Let's face it we are a Northern European country after all. 2) Sky TV is shit over the summer. They struggle to fill schedules with tidly winks and pool competitions. I think SPL on during the summer would make it a more attractive and hence more financially viable proposition. Of course it might interfere with our participation in world cups etc, AYE RIGHT!

Can't remember who it was against but I seem to remember Peter Huistra having a great debut.

Walter Smith was assistant to Jim McLean at Dundee United and assisted Alex Ferguson at Mexico 1986. Souness brought him in as number 2 to be the experienced one, with Souness bringing the qudos, the charisma and personal experience of being a top European Footballer. Mate that with English clubs banned in Europe, no Sky telly, and the English Division 1 pretty much on a par with the Scottish Premier League of the day, it was never going to be that much of a gamble. The OP is spot on, in that Walter Smith had some howlers in his time in Europe when he became manager in his own right, and that was with some of the best footballing talent that SDMs money could buy. Remember Levski Sofia? Ally McCoist came from...........Question of Sport....McCoist and MacAuley .....and, until the time he joined the Scotland setup, had never shown any inclination to get involved in football management. You compare that to say Derek McInnes or Terry Butcher who were willing to start at a far lower level and for my money would have been far stronger candidates. Irrespective of the results in Europe, I personally have never fancied Ally McCoist as a manager purely on the basis that in most occupations, people who have come up through the ranks tend to be far more rounded and competent individuals. I hope he proves me wrong, you can't help but like the guy on a personal level, but I fear he may well end up another Roy Keane, Bryan Robson, Alan Shearer, Liam Brady or closer to home dare I suggest John Greig.

I couldn't agree more. Given the choice of going bust, because that's where would have ended up, I think a bit of stable financial reality is exactly what's needed. You don't get to be as wealthy as Mr Whyte by throwing good money after bad. He has business models based on turnover, projected sales etc and, to that, he is obviously adding his own sizeable contribution. He was never going to down the benign benefactor route. The sheer fact that Lloyds Bank are a distant memory is good enough for me. We can see for ourselves that we can hardly compete with wage structures in the Championship as this league generates no great income from television revenue etc, so the days of £4M players getting £30K a week in the SPL will never return. Personally I look forward to Mr Abramovich and Co getting bored with their toys because Chelsea, Man City, Paris St Germain, could all go exactly the same way as Gretna if that were to happen and I'd laugh my fucking head off. They've ruined football for me.

I completely agree with this. You can't give a player a couple of minutes here and there or bring them on at 89 mins gone and expect any kind of form or match fitness to emerge. I seem to remember in the 80s when McCoist was getting pelters for being shite and Colin West was supposed to the answer, Souness always changed the striking pair round about the hour mark. If we could only bring on Robert Fleck and John Spencer these days!