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Reformation Bear

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Everything posted by Reformation Bear

  1. What price ambition from the Board in this special season of all seasons? A custard cream choice of unproven non-trophy winners who becomes the fall guy to blame if nothing is won? Or a manager (and staff is needed) where winning is the absolute ethos and a sufficiently good track record to go with it? Its not a season for just making do and hoping that in 3 or 4 years trophy success will appear. The need is this season. The need is now. The need is for a manager that knows how to manage a big team with a huge support that demands success this season and every season. A manager that get games won under any circumstances and who knows how to drill a squad to achieve that. We'll presumably see what ambition the Board has and how capable it is in talking a top qualified winning mentality coach into taking the job. Does the Board want to go through this season with a materially increased risk of not winning a trophy and of it not being a successful season? If not, then that shortlist Ross talks about had better be a list where each name is clearly outstanding and where each has enough know-how in leading teams to win trophies and not just aiming off to some unspecified time in the future.
  2. Champions!! 55 achieved in real and undefeated style. Well done to the players, SG and the coaching staff and well done to the Board for backing them. Spare a thought for all the Bears who very sadly have passed away in recent times and were not able to witness this great day but who had to endure the years and suffering following our last title win. They too would be so proud today. Enjoy the party Bears. Everyone deserves to party like never before.
  3. Sacking him might be a route they go down. But imo its not enough. To end the culture of racism in football, imo, need a thorough cancelling job done and for that to happen. In my view that would mean either clubs themselves or national football authorities or Uefa to urgently change their mindsets and state that immediate lifetime bans will be applied and not just bans against playing but bans against any association whatsoever with coaching, managing or other roles in football. Do that and it will most likely stop altogether or radically reduce. Either that or cancel the elitist football authorities and offending clubs by dismantling them and starting again with leaders and officials who will not tolerate racism. Maybe a 'defund UEFA' campaign is needed. If their flow of money stops or is materially reduced then maybe then we might see real and beneficial reform. Short of that its a case of waiting for the next case, then the next, then the next.
  4. Does a 10 match ban act as a powerful enough deterrent to bring racism to a halt in football? I doubt it. I wonder if the majority of responsible decent folks in Europe would think that it is a powerful enough deterrent. Being banned from the game - now that would be a lot more powerful as a deterrent. Sometimes you do need a sledgehammer to crack nuts. Racism is arguably a case in point. If it were known that the punishment was complete removal from the game then I think the players, coaches, Boards etc would respond far more seriously to cancel the culture of racism. As it stands a 10 match ban amounts to a form of catch and release.......release to offend again after a short holiday. If offenders were removed from the game completely including banned from coaching or management or anything whatsoever to do with clubs and players ie entirely isolated from participating in the game then the racism problem would most likely be dramatically reduced. Why does UEFA not do this? Why is Rangers not pressing for that sort of sanction? Why is the SFA silent on this? Is it because in their worlds this is just another incident that has its time in the media spotlight and in the news cycle then as always it fades away until another incident happens. And another. And another. How long before UEFA and national football authorities start to be accused of some form of supremacism for their failure to take sufficiently decisive corrective action to eliminate racism?
  5. Its 2021. The age of cancel culture. The age of get your accusations in hard and fast and often and persist with them. Drown out the opposition. Belittle the opposition. Brow beat the opposition. Protest your innocence and along with it your wounds. Demand justice. Demand that those you accuse are cancelled by the authorities. Attack on multiple fronts. Its 2021. One side in this case knows how to play the cancel culture 'we are the injured party and we demand justice'. The other party works in a different era and convinces itself it is class and that rightful justice will prevail. Quite a collision of cultures. Will be interesting to see who wins for there must surely be a winner.
  6. Aberdeen vs Hibs on 05 Oct. I see it reported that before he scored the Aberdeen equalizer Cosgrove was lucky to escape a 2nd booking which would of course have seen him sent off. I understand the offence was kicking out at Middleton. Now apart from the controversy of Cosgrove then going on to grab an equalizing goal when he should have been sent off...…...will the compliance officer have noted the incident and will there be retrospective punishment applied? If not then surely questions would need to be raised about the impartiality of the compliance officer and on how effective that person is in discharging their duty. After all, it was clear enough last season that Rangers was often enough on the receiving end of' vigorous' compliance officer judgements. Surely Aberdeen are not going to get away with it. Are they?
  7. It'lll be interesting to see how all this shifts from ideas into reality......and how soon (bearing in mind 150th anniversary is on the near horizon and you'd think they's want some sort of landmark showcase for then...…….and of course some league titles / cups before then so that the reality of actually winning stuff is restored). Money. Where is the money for all of this coming from? On artifacts for a museum from inside Ibrox and somebody hired to collate and catalogue stuff then presumably - more than that hopefully - his/her task is made easier because there must surely be an asset register maintained by the Club. A lot of material (if not all of it) would presumably be insured so must already be registered. If some of it is uninsurable because its so unique / valuable then you'd think its already catalogued. Point being it should really be an easy enough task for whoever is doing this to identify material that could go into a museum. Actually displaying it in an interesting way is another matter altogether and you'd think the Club would need to hire relevant expertise for that. On funding it I wonder if the Club will look to some sort of joint venture with (say) Club 1872 or maybe with corporate entities so that the costs and rewards are shared. Or maybe King and other directors or wealthy former players might put in sizeable donations in return for some recognition of their contributions. Point being to keep the actual costs for Rangers down as low as possible by seeking partners in the venture. The current reality is - imo - that as much money as can be assembled is needed to get the right quality of player needed to actually start winning trophies again. Dilution of available funds into wider 'projects' is just that......a dilution away from the increasing the opportunity to win trophies. As much of the operation as possible should be contracted out with the market tested frequently to establish which outfits are best place to run the enterprise. Oh wait...….Rangers and well structured, well competed, well run commercial contracts aren't exactly what this Board or its senior execs are anywhere near good at...….as all the court cases evidence. Nevertheless, will be interested to see what actually transpires, and when. Talk by a Board is all well and good, as are leaks about plans, but its what is actually done, the quality of it, and when that really count
  8. I think Gerrard has just about stopped just short of calling a spade a fucking shit shovel. His use of the word 'careless' (in relation to the treatment of Jack by the SFA) just stays this side of a damning outright accusation of blatant professional malpractice. Then again maybe what he says is exactly that. It's clear enough to me that he has zero acceptance or respect for the way that Clarke and his SFA coaches have gone about treating a top flight footballer. The question that comes to mind after hearing Gerrard's seething condemnation is whether this really was just carelessness or was it wilful on the part of Clarke and the SFA coaches. Either way they clearly lack the competence needed to properly manage international football players. They have manifestly failed to take all reasonable and proper duty of care when the player was under their management. They should be punished accordingly. I'm not buying into any excuses they come up with. The damage - quite literally - is done. You just knew that when it became known that Jack was withdrawn at Rangers request something very bad had happened during his stint with the Scotland squad. Gerrard has every right to be angry. Would this sort of fucked-up training nonsense be happening in an England squad, or a Welsh squad, or an NI squad. I doubt it. But here in Scotland is looks like a bunch of SFA dinosaur training goons from are running a training asylum regime led by a manager who clearly knows fuck all about how to properly manage top athletes.
  9. I think its a good enough approach to have a series of short range 'must achieve' targets which build over a season to accomplish whatever the season-long targets are for the league, Europe, SC and league cup. You'd like to think that by now, after a full season of SPFL experience and having had yet another squad revamp in summer (this time shaped entirely by Gerrard and Allen with very few legacy players now left), the targets for the season must surely be a league title win and winning at least one of the cups plus a bonus of qualifying out of the group stage in Europe. Would anything less than that really be acceptable to Gerrard, King and his Board, the players, the Support in general? If the manager and Board are prepared to settle for less and just jolly along with sentiments at the end of the season of 'progressing', 'improving', 'competing well' but still not having won the title or any of the cups with a bonus of qualifying out of the group stages in Europe then what would that really be saying about the ambition of Rangers, and the ability of a very large squad where there are at least 2 players of reasonably decent quality competing for each starting position. They presumably haven't invested in acquiring such a big squad to have another season of being also-rans and a season peppered by failures in games that matter - must win games (like the recent OF game). It's one thing having a big squad with at least 2 players for every position (although I still think we are one short in terms of a decent experienced goal scoring striker). Its another thing altogether when it comes to picking a team and reserves for each game that gets that game won. As Gerrard was reminded about yet again in the OF game. Point is, there is as much resting on Gerrard's ability to learn more quickly and adapt more responsively and quickly and as a result to field teams that win on such a consistent basis that a league title and cup trophies appear this season as a result. Having all the ammunition for all the bases does not mean that those leading have sufficiently perfected the art of turning that firepower into winning games. The thing is though, if Gerrard maintains his rotation approach (sometimes with a lot of players being changed from game to game) then the lack of a sufficiently settled high-performing, high-win achieving team might yet be beyond him as he wrestles with how to pick the right team for each game. We'll see.
  10. Familiar poor quality games played by (in general) familiar poor quality players with (outside Rangers) deadbeat donkeys of managers with games officiated by taig-leaning familiar referees under a football association which is a serial cap-doffer to the taig team who think themselves the only team that matters in Scotland. A backward football country going backwards ever faster where the traditional life and blood of the game is being drained out of it by those who run it and perform in it. Yeah, makes for prime financial investment with the potential for booming sales and world class football entertainment. If we could, if there was enough of a will and a clear way, then we'd be far better off out of it. But there isn't. Even the latest reform talks for European games have collapsed with everyone seeming to say Plan A (whatever it was) now needs to be replaced by a Plan B (which nobody has). The end result will be the EPL and the other big European leagues will continue to get richer and top clubs will be able to afford players we could never hope to attract whether financially or because the game here was so outstanding (because its not). How about league reform in Scotland to try to improve the quality? For a start get back to playing teams twice a season in league games and ban plastic pitches. Keep on the same pathway the game is Scotland is currently on and imo all it is doing is travelling to a perpetual dark age of turgid hoofer and hacker type of football so far removed from the technical and entertaining excellence served up elsewhere by top clubs as to make the gap utterly unbridgeable. The game here needs to reform for the better or if not it withers and finds its place settled as bottom dwellers of the European football heap. And compared to the top performing leagues and clubs, only a few financial scraps off the table as far as TV money goes.
  11. Probably. And even then one of those sort of afterthought questions at the end of the Q&A where Gerrard sort of scratches his head and looks up as if trying to pull from his memory the details of those injuries he's prepared to talk about. I'm still waiting to see it reported that Clarke and a senior person from the SFA have called Gerrard and Jack to apologise for creating Scotland training circumstances in which a Rangers player gets mysteriously injured - so injured that (seemingly) its Rangers who had to call him out of the Scotland squad. Will be waiting forever for an apology from Clarke and the SFA though. Their line will be it was just one of these things that happen to Rangers players while on Scotland duty, or - more likely - that it was Jack's own fault. Silence from Ibrox about it is deafening though.
  12. Has anyone explained exactly what happened to cause Jack's knee to be swollen? The lack of detail about this mysterious injury which seems to have flared up out of nowhere to one of our more influential players this season so far sort of begs some follow-on questions which will of course never be answered by the Club or by the goons who run the Scotland national team. Was it just one of these things (not something I'm readily prepared to accept when it comes to all things relating to Rangers players and their time with the Scotland national team)? Was it a training injury and if so what were the circumstances eg bad / naughty / exuberant tackle on him or was he being asked to over exert himself because of some sub-standard training routine? The injury presumably did not just happen all by itself. Is there to be no explanation of how the injury arose? And is it yet again to be a case of Rangers just taking the news on the chin and saying nothing?
  13. I think its only right that they are welcomed to Rangers. Whatever the views the fact is they will be playing football representing Rangers and I hope they are proud to do so. Their relatives and friends might also be encouraged to come and see the Famous Glasgow Rangers - whether its the womans team or the first team male team - and that means more supporters, more opportunity for the Club to earn revenue from ticket and merchandise sales and more football goodwill in times where there is far too much anti-Rangers sentiment in the game here in Scotland. I hope they have a successful football career at Rangers.
  14. Assuming, at least for now, that he does have an injury then how and when did it happen? Has this injury been picked up when he was training with the Scotland squad and if so what were the circumstances of the knee being injured. The real point I'm testing is whether he was on the wrong end of some sort of 'exuberant' challenge made on him in training or due to some sort of exuberant (or maybe poor quality) training regime laid out by a manager whose only recent approach has been to train players to be as negative as possible to avoid losing games and on plastic pitches. Not that I'm a little bit suspicious of the circumstances of his injury, more a case of very suspicious. I don't trust anything whatsoever to do with the way the SFA and its officials, and other players in the Scotland squad treat Rangers players.
  15. Thanks for sharing this info. That helps to explain.
  16. I'm not following the reasoning behind this list. Why no Polster or Docherty (or Jones for that matter unless the injury really is going to keep him out of the European games), but it includes Flanagan who I'd understood was also injured again and undergone an op. There looks to be a lot of 15-17 year olds included who are never ever in their wildest imagination going to see any first team football this season never mind in European games. It seems to be an odd list to have published. And I thought Zak Rudden is now at Plymouth so how can he be listed.
  17. Murphy is listed in the first team squad as published on the Rangers website today. The Club obviously updated the first team squad list today as they've been ultra quick to add Kent's name to it. No mention of Grezda in it though...……….
  18. Looks to me like the Club has updated its website today with a listing of the first team squad. They've been ultra quick to add Kent to the list of forwards. Interesting that they've kept Murphy's name in the first team squad. That'd imply he might yet make a contribution this season. No mention of Grezda though. Is he now firmly rooted in the netherworld of development team football where as an international player he can only now get a game with the youngsters and those over-age players who can be selected for these games. That's going to do his international career a whole power of good, and introduce a bit of a risk of a dissatisfied player in the development squad. Looks like its been left to Murty to pick up the Grezda pieces. Some piece of work from Allen too where it looks like he couldn't organise either a transfer or a loan deal for the player. An expensive asset who is no longer an asset but an expensive liability - on the books until somehow, someday his contract can be ended or a transfer organised. Nobody's winning out of this unsatisfactory arrangement - unless that is Grezda is just happy to take the money and do the minimum for it for as long as the Rangers money keeps rolling in.
  19. The main point of the thread was about Board investment. Some have made the point that Gerrard has been backed to the hilt. Some have made the point that having been backed to the hilt its time to deliver. Even if there are only 2 main strikers the risk has now been accepted by Gerrard and the Club that if one or the other gets injured, loses goal scoring / goal creating form, or is suspended for key games then the other will just have to get the job done, or others in the squad will - unlike last season - need to step up to the plate and contribute with enough match winning goals. As I recall it we went through some spells last season when Morelos was absent due to sendings off / bookings where we were relying on contributions for goals from the rest of the team. Contributions which were not sufficient. In the end we won nothing. The proof of the investment pudding for this season will be if we have won trophies. Clearly that can only be judged at the end of the season so let's see if all this enthusiasm about the level of investment turns out to have led us to the land of trophies won. The amount of input investment is one thing...….its the outputs that count. Outputs in the form of trophies won. If that does not happen then maybe this thread should be revisited at the end of the season and the questions can begin again for next season. If trophies are won then the thread can be revisited and the benefit of hindsight can be enjoyed from the vantage point of trophies won. If Gerrard can't organise and lead the team to winning trophies having been given the investment in players he's had this summer then its not just the Board that might be asking questions next May. He's got all the players the Club were able to get for him and he has a big squad as a result. I hope he can go on to deliver some trophies as a result.
  20. It might be a bit harsh but should Docherty not be included in the list now that King has been signed on loan? Latterty was released. Not sure I'd class Dodoo as a senior player but maybe that is his status these days. On a different note I see from press reports that Pedro has been sacked.
  21. You'd think that behind the scenes Helander and Edmundson will be pressing Gerrard hard for first team game time after yesterday. Its not good enough for far too many players - Goldson included and as deputy captain at that - to have games (very important games) where the don't turn up to anywhere near the required level. There are 2 other central defenders who are pressing for first team games and if Goldson (and Katic) are not sufficiently motivated on a constant game by game basis by that then they should expect to be relieved of their starting positions and required to keep a bench warm while the other 2 get more of a chance to show their worth. Helander was our most expensive summer buy ffs and he's barely getting any game time...…….ostensibly because of the form of Goldson and Katic. Well the form has shifted after yesterday.
  22. Wonder how many insurance contracts have got clauses which allow the insurer to escape payment or liability to pay if the action of the player which caused or contributed to the insurance claim being triggered was down to the players wilful negligence or wilful stupidity. I wonder if the insurance contracts draw a distinction between injuries which are patently accidental or cause by third party circumstances eg playing on plastic pitches or being hit by a missile thrown from the stand, and wilful stupidity and wilful rashness where the actions of the player himself are the primary cause of the injury.
  23. Wind the clock forward to August / Sept 2020. News on final day of transfer window...…...contract terminated by mutual consent. Either that or he follows the path trodden by Murphy and who the fuck knows if he will ever play for Rangers again. What a waste of a transfer and what a waste of wages brought to nought by sheer stupidity.
  24. Your line in trying to put a positive message is admirable. But it was a big loss though. Not just in terms of losing or scoreline. So many did not perform as needed against a team where they needed to perform to their highest ability. Manager included. An inescapable issue is - if that's the best they are prepared or able to do in a vital game then its not good enough. Not by a long chalk. I think Gerrard has admitted as much. It's my belief that to win the title enough OF games across the season need to be won. Losing a home game like this gives the other lot quite an advantage imo. An advantage that relies on being wiped out if other teams take enough points off them, and we have no more stinkers like yesterday. Yesterday severely limits room for any more errors. Gerrard must surely know that. Maybe the eye-opener is more a case of the supposed improvement in quality of player added in the summer transfer window is more illusory than real. Sure its the case that quantity has been added but the essential message from Gerrard and Allen back in May was that it was quality that was needed. Whilst there is some improvement in quality the evidence from yesterday suggests its nowhere near good enough. Nor is it good enough from a managerial or coaching perspective for so many to have a collective stinker all in the same vital game. Nowhere near good enough imo.
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