If you’ve been here for 12 years you’ll know that Celtic Quick News started because there was a great untold financial story going on in Scottish football. Celtic were castigated by many, including a large portion of their own support, as “prudent”, while Rangers, then under the majority ownership of Sir David Murray, were lauded for their willingness to ambitiously push the boat out.
But there was a problem. Celtic were losing millions every year. Rangers were losing a lot more, £35m in one season alone. David Murray’s company, Murray International Holdings (MIH), were ½ a billion in debt to Bank of Scotland, and rising.
By this stage MIH’s steel business was dwarfed in significance by its property portfolio. They borrowed from the bank and, perhaps with an eye on the fantasy Ibrox Super Casino, gambled that the market would rise inextricably.
For a few years the debt kept rising. “What’s the problem?” many said, if the Bank are prepared to lend MIH and Rangers, their strategy must be sound. These were difficult times to be preaching financial responsibility in Scottish football, but the reality was written in mile-high font for many of us. “They’re going to crash and burn”, seemed inevitable.
Today we read the news that MIH are, like Rangers before them, finally liquidated. Ignore the reported £200m that Lloyds Banking Group (now owners of Bank of Scotland) lost, that’s just the loose change. The Bank had swapped debt for shares in MIH as clouds gathered. The true financial cost to Lloyds (significantly owned by UK taxpayers) is vastly higher.
Much of the story of David Murray will never be told, not while he’s alive, anyway, as it took place well away from verifiable sources. This might change after he’s dead. The one redeeming positive he brought to football was to end the sectarian signing policy at Rangers in 1989. For that he should be lauded, many before him had the chance to do the same but chose not to.
That aside, the influence of Murray and MIH was poisonous to his club. He sold out for £1 to a liquidation expert in May 2011, against the wishes of his own board’s advisory committee, as his club claimed its last ever league title. The rest, is poetic history.
As luck would have it, tonight I’ll be with some Celtic supporter friends. We’ll raise a glass to Sir David and his legacy. Thanks for all you achieved, David, it could never have happened without you.
Erik Sviatchenko is a lesson in the difference good players make to a team. He’s started 11 games since joining in January, we’ve lost four goals over that period. In our previous 11 games we lost 12 goals. His impact on team performance has been phenomenal.
We’ll miss him tomorrow – so should make tactical changes to accommodate the perceived risk.
Motherwell are on fire. Less than two months ago they were in the play-off spot. Now they need just one point to guarantee a top six finish. They will battle every second for that point. If we are going to win tomorrow’s game, we will need to put in our of our best shifts of the season.
Time to get it together, Celtic.
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Bourne
Best ignored amigo.
Lifted from the JohnJames site today – he might not be wrong?
“To alleviate boredom during the build-up, will Ronny Deila organise a sweepstake as to the identity of the player who will be sent off? Will CFC achieve a treble that seems to have eluded them with three successive semi-finals playing with ten men? Referee Craig Thomson averages two yellow cards against CFC in every game in which he officiates. He has also brandished the red card at those in hoops on three occasions in his last twenty-three games. With forty-six yellow cards and three reds Mr Thomson might play a more prominent role in the semi-final than some might expect. Those expecting a comfortable CFC victory should curb their enthusiasm.”
Oh Ruby, you’ve done it again
We all stand with Auldheid.
Some know no other way.
Lovely tone to the blog today.
Says much for the posters, as it does for those not polluting, ( yet), today.
Peaceful by the pool, what’s not to like?
Eurochamps67
And God’s own wins at 10’s
I’m always baffled that the sleekits have so much time to sow their dissent on the board.
The latest incarnation must devote hours to composing his drivel that surely most must scroll by anyway.
Who really has that sort of time in life?
The only two possible answers are a retired person, or he/she is in someone’s employ.
Ol’ •-:¦:-•** -:¦:-Bournesoupe:¦:-•**• -:¦:-•
Has Lost His MOJO..
——————————————————
Has Bournesouprecipe run away with Sparkle Girl?
Is this their combined Coat of Arms?
What, taken her lurve to town?
DBBIA/CrazyAsianWarCSC
It wasn’t me that started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore
And yes, it’s true that I’m not the man I used to be
Oh, Ruby,
I still need some company
It’s hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralyzed
And the wants and needs of a woman your age, Ruby, I realized
But it won’t be long I’ve heard them say until I’m not around
BOBBY MURDOCH’S CURLED-UP WINKLEPICKERS,
In my mind, a very, very senior person(s) in the British establishment wants this to go away.
Árd Macha
Floridabhoy can I ask are you driving all the way on your adventure? Looking for some ideas for a road trip for Mrs Hebcelt and I , not necessarily in the US. Thanks H H Hebcelt
BOBBY MURDOCH’S CURLED-UP WINKLEPICKERS on 8TH APRIL 2016 3:23 PM
No, silly…….that’s the similarity quiz……that’s next week.
Anyone who spotted the subtle differences in tone, wins this weeks prize , a signed photo of Roddy Forsyth.
‘the wants and needs of a woman’
Aye, good luck pickin’ the ole knots out of that ole conundrum
Gordon
Ambrose
Boyata
Mulgrew
Tierney
Brown
Bitton
Johansen
Roberts
GMS
Griffiths Offside
..but a woman’s needs are many fold, and Sue she married Ted
DBBIA/22 Linley Lane CSC
Floridabhoy: I was in Phoenix 2 weeks ago and drove all the way through Sedona then to Flagstaff and on to the Grand Canyon. Amazing countryside and how it changes going North
Talking of Ruby…
I’ve just returned from Shabaaz in Aberdeen with my oldest son- highly recommend if you ever visit the silver City and fancy a Chick Murray.
My wife and youngest are in the Big Apple ( where my wife is researching digital media education) and I’m supposed to be ensuring oldest lad is buckling down for his impending Highers exams. All work and no play…so a wee curry was in the cards – saves ‘asking dinner tonight:-)
Will rustle something up to watch AFC v Jambos .. Predicting a 1-1 draw
DONTBRATTBAKKINANGER on 8TH APRIL 2016 3:49 PM
‘the wants and needs of a woman’
Aye, good luck pickin’ the ole knots out of that ole conundrum
****
“A woman’s needs are many fold
And soon she married Ted”
#ernie
BSR,
But it won’t be long I’ve heard them say until I’m not around
” So dupe me, I’m selling for a pound”
#dupeddave
Ernie.
One of Call me Dave’s choons of choice on Desert Island Discs .
Just read Roddy Forsyth’s piece on Sevco. The latest in a long line of soul sellers.
If we could line them all up (Doncaster, Reagan, msm etc) in front of a High Court judge who asks the question.. ‘Are Rangers a new club, Yes or No? Bearing in mind the wrong answer gets you a year in jail, how do you answer?’
Apart from the clueless DJ every single one of them would say yes of course.
Uncle Tom Keevins would probably do the time with his pal, so that his job’s still there when he gets out.
A bit off topic folks, I’ve been going to Celtic Park for the best part of 40 years now. Someone out of the “blue” asked me who owns CP. I didn’y know. Answer please ?
Lots of good stuff on Blog today. Saddened but not surprised at Auldhields threats – but as pointed out, not sure why Huns feel need to be involved, it’s about SFA not them ( aye, right! ).
I keep having people saying to me why cant I just move on and accept newco as oldco. This is what I think them and SMSM want and why it is very important to make sure we don’t let it happen.
Jungle VIP – you’re supposed to be on holiday!
Tomthethim – see a therapist about premature posting.
Bashi
My friends in Celtic,
Good to hear that one of our greats Tommy Gemmell is on the mend and will be out and about tonight.
Legend is a term too often branded about, but we have legends and Tommy most certainly fits that tag.
If you asked any person interested in the history of great footballers, the name Malcolm MacDonald would conjour up a player from the NE of England playing in black and white.
However we have a player of that name who some reckon was the greatest ever Celtic player. Yet go into a Celtic pub and very few will have heard of him, never mind know how good he was.
I only know what I have read on the Celtic Wiki, but I have mentioned it in conversation and received blank stares.
Not just on the park but off it too. Very few modern players would say ” Celtic is not just a club, its a heritage” and ” I just want to be remembered as Malky MacDonald of Celtic”.
More of us should be aware of this man; I don’t know if CQN has done an article, but if not over to you Winning Captains.
Hail, Hail.
good story Paul
GREENPINATA on 8TH APRIL 2016 4:27 PM
As with a few on here, my father claimed Malky as his all time favourite and his active Celtic watching career spanned 1925- 1978.
I have posted on here before of the night that I saw McDonald play, (what age is this guy,ed).
It was at Lochburn Park, home of Maryhill juniors, cue the Green Man.
Malky was playing in a Old Crocks Celtic team against the home team’s legends.
One incident has stayed with me for over sixty years.
Our hero was trapped, tight, at the corner flag by two opponents.
With one wiggle and a shimmy, he was gone along the bye line, with the two guys staring at the corner flag.
Rangers were just one of the companies within this portfolio & suffered as a consequence,most famously with the quote,”for every £5 Celtic spend, we’ll spend £10″…….For the avoidance of doubt, Ian Fraser is an award winning financial journalist & not connected to any Scottish football team
The Fall of the House of Murray
As tycoon David Murray’s once-thriving business empire folds with a barely audible whimper, Ian Fraser picks apart the disastrous sequence of seemingly limitless borrowing and bad decisions that precipitated the downfall
Sunday 18 January 2015
Sir David Murray’s metals-to-property conglomerate Murray International Holdings (MIH) died last week, going out not with a bang but a whimper.
MIH and eight subsidiary companies – Premier Property Group, PPG Land, Premier Burrell, GM Mining, Murray Group Holdings, Murray Group Management, Murray Outsourcing and MMH NSS – are to be liquidated by Deloitte.
The insolvency practitioners will be seeking to retrieve as much cash as they can from the firms’ assets and debtors before shutting down the companies for good.
Since the credit crisis blew a massive hole in Murray’s business plans six years ago, his bank, Lloyds – which completed its disastrous acquisition of HBOS in January 2009 – appears to have treated him with kid gloves.
It had few qualms about pulling the plug on other HBOS customers who had built up massive debts with HBOS, such as John Kennedy’s Kenmore, Jonathon Milne’s FM Developments and Ken Ross’s Elphinstone Group.
But Lloyds was prepared to give Murray five-and-a-half years to disentangle and dismantle as much as he could of his business empire, as well allowing Murray Capital, a new private concern of Murray and his son, David junior, to cherry-pick some of his most cherished assets.
The reason for this unusual leniency from Lloyds was ascribed to Murray’s tough negotiation skills, and highlighting the number of dependent Scots employees in a diverse group.
In his pomp in the 1990s and early 2000s, David Murray was viewed as one of Scotland’s most successful entrepreneurs. He caught the eye of Bank of Scotland’s former treasurer and managing director Gavin Masterton, and the bank first lent Murray money in 1981.
Bank of Scotland went on to lend him the entire £6 million he needed to buy Rangers FC in 1988. By 2008, as part of HBOS, it had provided him with £900 million of debt to bankroll his wide-ranging business operations, which once encompassed commercial property, coal mining, metals trading and football. This was despite the fact that, even at its peak, the turnover of Murray’s group holding company never exceeded £550m.
HBOS senior bankers including chief executive of corporate banking Peter Cummings and the late Ian Robertson, managing director of corporate banking, gave Murray what amounted to an open cheque book.
Together, Murray and HBOS formed a complex web of joint-venture companies into which hundreds of millions of pounds of the bank’s money were poured. In most of these property deals, the bank was effectively lending up to 40% of the money to itself.
Robertson, nicknamed “Robbo”, was infamous for “Robbo rollovers” – deals by which the bank rolled over existing loans into newly created special purpose vehicles, effectively making bad debts disappear in a puff of smoke.
One banking analyst said: “Property assets that ought to have gone into insolvency, or into HBOS’s intensive-care unit – which would have required the bank to book a provision for bad debt – were instead rolled over.”
The roll-overs are said to have compounded Murray’s situation after the credit markets crashed, complicating his business empire’s problems. However, one of Murray’s more astute moves in the past decade was to sell his Murray International Metals business for £119m in 2005.
From the mid-2000s onwards, having witnessed the success that the likes of Sir Tom Hunter were having in commercial property, Murray massively boosted his group’s exposure to commercial real estate, snapping up provincial shopping centres and office buildings from Edinburgh to London.
The number of deals accelerated after Robbo’s successor, Ray Robertson, former head of real estate at Bank of Scotland Corporate, assumed day-to-day responsibility for his affairs at the bank. Both Robertsons had such faith in Murray and his Premier Property Group they seemed willing to lend millions with few questions asked, though it was the worst of times to be investing in and developing commercial properties.
Things started to go badly awry when Murray moved away from calculated risk-taking and started using HBOS’s loans for what looked more like reckless gambling. This coincided from 2005 onwards with the adoption of what HBOS insiders call “kamikaze lending to the great and the good” as it sought to grow its corporate loan book by some 20% per annum to compensate for a slowdown in other aspects of its business.
Even after property markets weakened, Murray seemed impervious to the risk of a property crash. One month after the global financial crisis started in August 2007, PPG had some £500m of development projects under way, including a 175,000sqft speculative office development in Glasgow’s Bothwell Street.
MIH was going to be able to defy economic gravity thanks to what Murray described in the 2008 annual report as “the breadth and depth of the group’s diversified portfolio and management team”.
When HBOS collapsed under the weight of massive bad debts and a short-sighted funding model, and the bank succumbed to Lloyds TSB in September 2008, the game was up for Murray.
He and other tycoons had been used to picking up the phone to HBOS and receiving hundreds of millions of pounds within hours. That all changed after Murray’s accounts were transferred to Lloyds’s non-core business support unit (BSU), whose goal is to maximise value from distressed borrowers.
One of the BSU’s first goals was to persuade Murray to offload Rangers, partly because the club was such an obvious drain on resources and partly as it was seen as a distraction for the hands-on Murray.
One ex-bank insider said Lloyds simply wanted out of football clubs: “Rangers was just soaking up cash. You can’t build a football business on overdrafts and borrowing, but that is what Murray seemed to be doing.”
Two-and-a-half years after ceasing to be Rangers’ chairman in October 2009, Murray sold his 85.3% equity stake in Rangers Football Club to Craig Whyte for £1. The club subsequently collapsed into chaos that continues to this day.
Lloyds continued to allow Murray to do two massive debt-for-equity swaps which, given the fact that MIH’s equity was by now as good as worthless, were essentially free gifts. The first, in April 2010, saw Lloyds write off £150m of debt in exchange for an additional 12% stake in the company.
Conditions included that Murray must liquidate three-quarters of MIH’s commercial property portfolio by 2015; introduce greater transparency into his business dealings; and stop using cross-guarantees, by which healthy and profitable parts of his empire were used to support more anaemic parts like Rangers. Such cross-support makes it more difficult to hive off businesses to third-party buyers.
A string of disposals, including that of oil and gas business Premier Hytemp and three shopping centres (sold for less than half their purchase price), followed. Unusually, in what seems to have been a sweetheart deal, the bank allowed Murray to personally buy back his private equity business Charlotte Ventures, partly because the assets within it, which included a stake in bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis, were seen as too high risk for the bank.
Murray said the purchase of the unit, later renamed Murray Capital, was “done arm’s length, at market value”. A second £118m debt-for-equity swap followed in March 2012, the negotiations for which are said to have been extended and heated.
Murray claimed the deal – which took the amount of debt that had effectively been written off by Lloyds to £268.5m – did not dilute the Murray family’s 70% voting power over MIH.
Talking about the winding-down of MIH, Murray said: “This has been a consensual approach with the bank, and it has been an orderly, managed process. It’s not been easy – it could have been easier to walk away and not do it – but it was decided with the lender that we would work this out, and we have.”
There are major assets which remain unsold, including Response, the call-centre business. It lost a contract with BSkyB, but has since won one for Scottish Power. In another unusual move, Lloyds let Murray and his family, through Murray Capital, buy Murray Estates, which owns about 1200 acres of prime development sites across Scotland’s central belt for just £13.9m. In addition to Murray Estates, Murray Capital also snapped up other unwanted MIH assets.
The Murray Estates portfolio includes a 13-acre site at Ratho Station on the western edge of Edinburgh, a 26-acre site near Edinburgh Airport, a 300-acre site at Torrance Park in North Lanarkshire, the 135-acre Kingdom Park site in Kirkcaldy and the 675-acre Garden District on greenbelt land adjacent to the Edinburgh City Bypass near Gogarburn.
The latter offers scope for a £1 billion development of 3500 homes, a showcase garden project called Calyx and a new community stadium. For many years Murray has been piecing together so-called “ransom strips” to the east of Edinburgh Airport’s approach road, with a view to galvanising a wider development project called the International Business Gateway.
Things are already moving fast for the some of Murray Estates’ development sites. In November, Fife Council granted planning permission for the construction of a £500m residential district at Kingdom Park over 20 years. The same month, pre-construction work got under way on a £60m mixed-use development for phase one of Torrance Park in Holytown.
In its 2013 annual report, MIH said funding difficulties meant it was unable to develop the Murray Estates sites itself. MIH added it had considered selling the land in a piecemeal fashion to other developers but then “received an unsolicited approach from the Murray family in spring 2013 to acquire the majority of assets in the portfolio of Murray Estates”.
A spokesman for Lloyds said the Murray Estates deal included an “anti-embarrassment clause” which enables the bank to secure a share of the upside should Murray Estates’ projects come good, but declined to give details.
The MIH 2013 accounts noted: “The transaction completed after protracted negotiations and was supported by advice from two independent firms of chartered surveyors … plus significant potential additional consideration based on profits realised over 10 years.”
Intriguingly, even though Murray Capital (formerly known as Charlotte Ventures) also banks with Lloyds, Murray made clear Lloyds did not fund the £13.9m acquisition. He added that the non-embarrassment clause is geared to enable the bank to get a bigger share of gains if projects are sold or developed quickly, saying: “It was put in place to stop us flipping things for a quick gain.”
Overall, Murray has been shown far greater leniency than other failed property tycoons after Lloyds/HBOS was bailed out and commercial property prices crashed. One ex-HBOS insider has suggested that it was because he was “one of the great and good, like Tom Farmer and Tom Hunter”.
All three have been knighted, with Murray receiving his – for services to business in Scotland – in June 2007. The source added: “Sir David never had the great fall, the humiliation that some of the other over-leveraged property tycoons were made to feel.”
His businesses’ outstanding debt to Lloyds stands at up to £346.7m, and the bank has, to date, written off £268.5m through debt-for-equity swaps, which suggests that the collapse of his business has left a £615m hole in Lloyds’s accounts, and that two-thirds of the money Murray’s businesses borrowed has been lost.
And because of the 2008 bailouts, it is effectively taxpayers who are picking up the tab. Meanwhile, he has walked away from the wreckage of his failed group with some of its most promising assets under his belt.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Murray presents the winding-up of his erstwhile business empire as a sort of triumph. Writing in the MIH 2013 accounts, he said: “In the prevailing economic conditions since 2009, the delivery of the numerous asset disposals and debt-reduction programme represents a significant achievement and a very credible performance.”
He said: “It’s not been without some casualties but we’ve done the best we could. The proceeds from the disposals have been optimised, enabling us to secure continued employment for more than 95% of the group’s 2008 workforce and minimising losses to other stakeholders and creditors. One of the reasons we have come through this as well as we have is that we had some prime assets and some good trading businesses. All the small creditors have been paid in full and everyone’s been paid their redundancy.”
Lloyds refused to comment “on the grounds of customer confidentiality”, but others might see Murray, along with bonus-crazed bankers in rescued banks, as the ultimate pet of the sugar daddy state.
Murray
poison indeed.
but owner of the cancer that killed the cheat
HH
HEBCELT what about north Spain, San Sebastián for a drive, the food and scenery would be very very fine. Lo siento can’t help with routes etc.
MARADOMINIC
We are never going to hear the BBC, SFA, OldCo, NewCO etc say they died, it’s not in their interest to do so, we cannot force them to do so. There are others who have stated such, Graham Spiers, Jim Spence being two examples.
Importantly we cannot allow this to eat us up, we are Celtic supporters, we are here to be pro Celtic no one else matters.
I’m waiting for the big tax case ultimate decision and the outcome on Res 12 before I finalise a view on our board actions.
COOLMORE MAFIA on 8TH APRIL 2016 2:53 PM
KILL ULTRA on 8TH APRIL 2016 1:45 PM
I asked on last thread, what happened to Auldheid?
“COOLMORE MAFIA on 8TH APRIL 2016 10:14 AM
Was someone on here not demanding to know the identities of everyone involved in resolution 12 a few days ago?
Go to the Police at the slightest threat Auldheid. Catalogue everything with screen shots etc. There is always a trail electronically”
>>>>>>>>>
Are you referring to me?
If so, where did I demand to know the identities of everyone involved?
>>>>>>>>>
I was referring to you actually, but probably not in the way you think. I don’t for a moment think you have any malevolent feelings towards any celtic fans, but you did say:
I was referring to you actually, but probably not in the way you think. I don’t for a moment think you have any malevolent feelings towards any celtic fans, but you did say:
a) I don’t want names or details of other subscribers, but surely it’s reasonable to know the name of professionals involved, and for a breakdown of the expenditure incurred to date for legal services, commissioning reports, etc.
b) I am prepared to pay personally at a commercial rate for such documentation as described above. Names could be redacted, so protecting the anonymity of individual donors.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
– So, as you say (and apologies for my mistake in saying ‘everyone’) you’d like the names of the professionals involved.
Isn’t this slightly naive? Any company involved would be subjected to intimidation, slurs etc. Once a company is pinpointed, it is easier to access individuals identities also via many methods.
auldheid’s experience just underlines this.
So to recap, not having a go at you – just a horrible coincidence the intimidation of Auldheid within a day or two of your post.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Coolmore Mafia. Thanks for the well-reasoned reply, and for publishing my earlier, related post.
I’m aware of the ad hoc nature of much of the dealings of the requisitioners of Resolution 12 in relation to the source of funding for legal services, reports, etc. I believe though, that no matter how loosely constituted the organisation there should be some form of transparency and accountability. The fact that there isn’t does not inspire confidence in the people I trusted initially to represent me. The recent contradictory versions on this blog between Canamalar (flippant) and Auldheid (evasive) on how funding was sourced for the legal work has strengthened this conviction.
On a related issue, I find it quite disingenuous that posters on here have compared my plea for normal fiscal probity to one of a bloodlust demand to name names. I will stress again that I have not at any time asked for names to be made public.
Platforms like CQN thrive on robust debate, as well as, at times, being an invaluable source of informed opinion. It provides a relatively harmless platform for bloggers using noms de plume to release genuine frustrations and pent-up emotions even if it is through trading insults anonymously.
While abuse and vitriol, laced with a certain pathological hatred is not uncommon, it becomes an altogether more serious issue when the name and address of the object of that abuse (me) is known to the perpetrator. I am not anonymous to Canamalar, (he has my name and address), nor to the other requisitioners, possibly. I gave freely of my identity when I signed up to Resolution 12.
Finally, what did happen to Auldheid?
This is part of a recent exchange from SFM, between the site moderator, Trisidium and one of the posters.
For me, it represents the crux of the matter.
Read on.
***TRISIDIUM
APRIL 8, 2016 at 16:20
2 0 Rate This
CASTOFTHOUSANDS
APRIL 8, 2016 at 14:10
Trisdium
“If our view that sporting integrity has been killed off by those in charge of the game is correct, we lose nothing by embarking on a season ticket boycott.”
————————————
I’d be concerned about this approach for two reasons.
1. We can’t be sure sporting integrity has been killed off despite the symptoms the patient is showing of atrophy. There might still be signs of life within the organisation that would themselves be killed off if such a boycott were successful.
2. If the boycott doesn’t materialise significantly then you lose credibility.
Individuals will make up their own minds.
Trisdium
“If our view that sporting integrity has been killed off by those in charge of the game is correct, we lose nothing by embarking on a season ticket boycott.”
————————————
I’d be concerned about this approach for two reasons.
1. We can’t be sure sporting integrity has been killed off despite the symptoms the patient is showing of atrophy. There might still be signs of life within the organisation that would themselves be killed off if such a boycott were successful.
2. If the boycott doesn’t materialise significantly then you lose credibility.
Individuals will make up their own minds.
I don’t think that Sporting integrity can be a little alive any more than you can be a little pregnant. Integrity needs to be demonstrated 100% of the time. If not, then by definition it breaks down.
And if clubs turn a blind eye to what went on in 2011 with respect to the UEFA licence, then there is no sporting integrity – it is already gone.
As for signs of life (or even a resurrection), they are doing a good job of concealing themselves.
As far as our credibility is concerned, there is none of that at all if we don’t practice what we preach. If we recant on the advice to boycott, with no other solution to offer, we don’t have any credibility left.
People will make their own choice, but our credibility won’t suffer because other people choose not to fight corruption.
As long as we are right – and we are – history will be kinder to us than it will be to the people in boardrooms and press-rooms all over the country who sneer at us and mock our values.
The question I ask myself is this; “Is football in Scotland run on sporting principles first and foremost”?
Since the answer is an unequivocal “No!”, I simply refuse to support it – and I urge others to the same, because there is no other way of convincing the clubs how important sporting integrity is.
Why can’t we just move on and accept newco as oldco?
Because it isn’t true, and what would you think of someone who accepted a lie for the sake of a quiet life.
Shades of the Scopes Monkey Trial when people who should have known better and some who did know better, including the judge, went along with the lie for just that reason.
I see that some people are now referring to sevco as ” Rangers ” in print, inverted commas included.
I myself have now decided to use the inverted commas gesture of both hands raised, with index and middlle fingers flexing ironically, when talking about them in the presence of sevconians.
WDH thanks for your suggestion, will store it for future consideration. H H Hebcelt
RAY WINSTONE’S BIG DISEMBODIED HEID on 8TH APRIL 2016 5:10 PM
That’s exactly what I say!
Bashi
Thank you Bashi. Interesting nom de blog by the way.
I’ve been thinking of changing mine since you no longer see my big heid on its own anymore on the Bet 365 adverts.