Celtic prepare for the People’s League Title

A year ago Scottish football was gripped in debate over the audacious plan by Craig Whyte to liquidate Rangers and ask the SPL to parachute a phoenix club into the top flight.  No one had ever previously made such a suggestion but Whyte found common ground with many around the game, who had good reason to adopt his strategy as their own.

I remember St Johnstone manager, Steve Lomas, telling radio listeners, “For financial reasons our club just wants Rangers [sic]back in the league as soon as possible”.  St Johnstone were not alone, every club were forced to recalculate cash-flow projections and discuss consequences.  The same was true in the media.  Journalists, advertising sales people and everyone else working for a commercial media company, to some extent, can relate their job security to interest levels in the Scottish game.

The people had their say.

No to Newco was the rallying call, first at Celtic but then across the Scottish game.  Many Rangers fans (perhaps even most) wanted no part of Whyte’s plan and wanted the phoenix to start at the bottom and work their way up, although for some the outcome was a denial of their God given rights.

It always amuses me when people leave ‘only in Scotland’ comments on CQN.  Football is notoriously corrupt across the globe and has been for most of its existence, but there can be few league titles anywhere decided so democratically.  The people said “no” and denied the generals running our game, some of whom believed some less-competent generals winning control was an “Arab Spring”.  Much to their dismay, they soon found out what Scottish football’s Arab Spring looks like, and it didn’t involve a tin-pot chairman re-writing the rule book.

I have loved every second of this league.  It will go down in my memory along with 1988 (when far fewer of us attended Celtic Park), 2001 and 2008.  When the league title is won, fans of every club who ensured rules were not re-written deserve a moment of satisfaction.

NEW SERVERS ARE LIVE AND READY TO ROLL

The current CQN server was commissioned in June 2011.  When we approached the annual renewal time last year, like a lot of the media companies mentioned above, I thought, with no Rangers, interest will fade, there’s no point increasing infrastructure.

The traffic peak we endured in May 2012, when the server played its part in some major issues, hasn’t been matched since, but server resources continue to be stressed.  Last week I bought three new servers (we now have three physical and one virtual) and shortly after full time at Tannadice tonight, our man Andrew in Belfast will bring the system down and start the migration process.  We will be offline for a few hours.

After we’re back your existing user accounts will remain active.  The domain name (celticquicknews.co.uk) will point to a new server (IP) address but it can take hours (or days) for each internet service provider to update their records.  As a result, celticquicknews.co.uk might not find the new server immediately.

Once we are live I will let you know the server IP address (a series of numbers you can type into your address bar), which will enable you to get onto CQN before your ISP has updated their records.  Check Twitter (twitter.com/cqn)  or Facebook (CQN-Magazine) for the address.

Let’s hope it goes smoothly…….
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