Tannadice was so packed out this afternoon it looked like a Rangers creditors’ meeting and the Scottish Cup tie on show didn’t disappoint. Dundee United had the better of the opening period but four second half goals from an irresistible Celtic decided outcome.
Jon Daly headed wide early on after a Willo Flood cross early on but the first great chance of the game fell to Johnny Russell on 25 minutes. Gary Mackay-Steven got free on the left and crossed for Russell who mishit his shot, allowing Fraser Forster to make an incredible save and claw the ball away.
With Dundee United clearly on top defender Robbie Neilson received a straight red card for a forearm smash into the face of Georgios Samaras.
It took Celtic 36 minutes to make an attempt on goal. Joe Ledley’s shot from a corner was blocked and James Forrest shot over from a corner seconds later.
Celtic stepped up the pace after halftime. Charlie Mulgrew jinked to create space on the left side of the United box but Ledley couldn’t reach his cross. 8 minutes after halftime the visitors were ahead after the best move of the game.
Adam Matthews passed back to Fraser Forster who played the ball out to Joe Ledley. Ledley moved forward after playing the ball onto Samaras, who passed to Mulgrew before the ball moved onto Stokes. Anthony Stokes fired a low cross into the box which Gary Hooper dummied for Ledley, who never stopped running. The midfielder won the ball by nipping in front of his marker and shot home from 7 yards.
Samaras shot over before a Stokes shot after 64 minutes from 25 yards was saved by Pernis, the first save the keeper made in the game.
United had a great chance to draw level when substitute Milos Lacny latched onto a long through ball but his shot from 16 yards was weak and off target.
Georgios Samaras made it 0-2 when he got on the end of a Mulgew free kick to bullet a header into the top right corner of the net.
Two minutes later Johnny Russell had a great chance to pull a goal back but his shot from 15 yards flew narrowly over.
Stokes should have tied the game up 11 minutes from time when James Forrest combined with Hooper before Forrest cut the ball back to Stokes, who contrived to hit the crossbar with his shot with an empty net waiting.
Samaras and Forrest both had chances to add to the scoring before Ledley threaded a pass through the middle of the United defence for Stokes to clip past Pernis into the net.
With a minute of the game remaining Samaras beat Dillon, who pulled the Greek international down inside the box. Scott Brown rolled the resultant penalty into the net to make if 0-4.
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I think the semi final draw is after sheeps game
oglach
5:45 on Sky Sports.
Neil Lennon @OfficialNeil Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
Cam you believe the BBC asked to film live myself and Trish Godman giving evidence in court this week
Family guy better than any stupid cop show
the long wait is over on 11 March, 2012 at 15:36 said:
Terrific second half performance. We’d have beaten if they’d been given an extra player never mind had one sent off.
PS. Anyone else notice wee Craig Broon giving the Fir Park door man the old Masonic handshake when he arrived? Unmissable one hour and nineteen minutes from the sort of Sky’s broadcast.
________________________
Noticed that myself,but what do expect in this
masonic driven country?
looks like a decent crowd at the Dons / Murderwell game. The sheep always have a lot of fans at away games
2-0 the dons great goal
2 – 0 Sheep
Get in!
Cracker Aberdeen 2 up
Actually pleased that Celtic won’t be talking to the media for the rest of the season. There’s no real need for them these days, no one ges news from ‘newspapers’ any more. They exist only because people buy them and they take this as encouragement to pen ever more sensational opinions. Not bought a Scottish newspaper for about 10 years and I don’t feel any less informed for it.
2 – 0 Sheep
great stuff
eat that Mc (I don’t want to finish second in front of my beloved team) Call !!!
Leslie Neilson, more like.
What a dafty !
Congrats to Lenny and the Bhoys.
Terrific result.
Very professional.
Keep it goin lads – lets build up here and now toward CL around July 25th – hail hail.
Did I hear Fraser Wishart say that
Nielson put his arm up to protect himself then moved it in the direction of samaras??
Hurting H*N
GIRFUY
A belter of a volley puts the Sheep 2 up
Roon ye McCall
Well done to the Bhoys today. I feared it would have been a tougher fight than what it turned out to be.
As for having to speak to official partners, does that mean the likes of hacks from the Sun & the Daily Record too ? If we do have to deal with them, Neil should roll out one of the more media experienced players & instruct them to just answer yes or no to their irritating questions. If they want to annoy us, the fans, then our club should return the compliment.
Hail Hail
Fallon skelps Lanarkshire stickies.
McCall’s falsetto voice gets even squeakier.
16.14 Operation Stable Door has a… an… ermm
Then – take a bow son…
U
What’s the Aberdeen song choice today?
By the way, on the BBC website, the Rob Spence article, have a look at the comments below it. Some very well constructed opinions on the demise and potential loss of Rangers. They don’t have a lot of support outside their own.
Thanks for that link Mick.
Great to see us fight back now as a club against the like of jabba, someone posted the radio interview where his article was questioned and by his stuttering response I took it he was lying. Wee chico was laughing at his discomfort. I would ban the lazy retarad from Celtic park and any Celtic fan who buys that rag.
God bless Neil Lennon.
Well done today Celtic, very proud of you.
loved to see the great team spirit in the whole group, lots of smiles and jokes.
Lenny voicing clubs position on scumbag press, fantastic to hear us kick back,
He mentioned in the hands of lawyers, just watch keevins shut his gob this week,
HH
Mike
HT – Murderhuns 0 Dons 2
jamiebhoy76 on 11 March, 2012 at 15:23 said:
£20 quid on with WILLHILL before season started for treble! Happy Days
—-
What price you get mate?
Possilbhoy
As far as i know Hun & Retard dont sponsor any competitions or show games.
We DONT need to talk to them!
HH
Great to see the sheep do the haircut that time forgots mob.
Roon ye mcall.
McColl sent to stand
Stupid huns
C,MON FRANCAIS
17.00 Racing Santander V Barca. That will just round off today very nicely. Wife in the huff because the sun is shining and I refuse to go to the allotment to dig it up; WTF woman an allotment at my age? “You bought it you dig it the footballs on” was my succinct reply – result no distractions during the football she isn’t talking to me. Result
If the manager is red carded is he allowed to give the team talk at half time ?
Hi Bhoys and Ghirls
Check out craig browns funny handshake at motherwell today,
deary me, what a world we live in.
http://t.co/L18c6YZY
Today’s rant …
They Are The People: Examination of a Mind-set
Rangers fans love to tell you how They Are The People. This has become one of the most prevalent phrases in the lexicon of the blue hordes. I think I’ve heard it or read it more in the last eight weeks or so than I ever have before. There’s a good reason for this.
Let’s think on the average person who uses the phrase.
The first thing about them which you notice is their overwhelming arrogance. This is a mind-set over 20 years in the making for those who express it purely through football, and a lifetime thing for those who have been brought up in its sincere belief. That attitude will not be turned around in a day, or a week or a month or a year. It is probably ingrained, and permanent.
If Rangers is saved, that sense of entitlement will not be moderated but fed instead. Their current plight will not suddenly force them to embrace humility or understand the limits of acceptable behaviour, but will simply reinforce their sense of being something special.
Here’s the kicker. There is nothing special about them.
We Are the People is not a new slogan. Variations of it have been around for years and not all of them were supremacist. Sometimes it’s made it into popular culture; watch the movie Taxi Driver. Charles Pallantine, the US Senator Travis Bickle wants to assassinate, uses the slogan on his campaign. Those who will argue the slogan is not supremacist will have to explain the different phonetic use of the phrase from the one Pallantine’s campaign uses.
There is an instructive moment during the film when one of Pallantine’s campaign staff is arguing with a supplier of campaign buttons. The buttons have been sent to his office with the wrong word underlined. Instead of the word Are being underlined, as the Pallantine campaign had wanted, the word We is underlined instead. The argument over the difference is not about subtlety but about the very meaning of the phrase, where the accentuation of one word changes that meaning completely. We ARE the people is an expression of solidarity. It unites the speaker with the rest of the common stock. It might be self-absorbed but it is not supremacist.
WE are the people is a different phrase entirely, with a different meaning, setting one group aside from others, like a ruling class. When Rangers fans use it, when it is used by white supremacist groups, when it is appropriated by the Loyalist fringe, the meaning is very, very clear; we are better than you, we are different from you, we are of a higher order than you.
A higher order. Let’s take a look at the Rangers fans today, who so love to use the expression, who so enjoy its application to themselves.
First up, it’s a bit desperate, isn’t it?
When many of them say it to you these days, it often comes off sounding like it’s something from a self-help manual. It’s been turned into a mantra, something to repeat in the mirror every morning before going off to a minimum wage job washing dishes in a Taiwanese restaurant. The intent is not to convince us, we who know better and won’t play the role that phrase assigns us, that of second class citizens, but to convince the speaker instead. It’s become about positive reinforcement, to block out the reality of the situation they find themselves in.
And that situation does not just refer to the problems at Rangers.
Their place in the world, in its entirety, is now under the most serious threat. Time has moved on and they have not. Listen to some of their other phrases; “No Surrender”, and the now infamous “We Don’t Do Walking Away”, which I believe you and I will be hearing, and mocking, for years to come. These phrases are essentially about holding firm. The problem with that is that it’s limited, freezing things in time, never allowing change, not accounting for the fact people, culture and society are supposed to evolve.
Let me talk to you for a second about the difference between an evolution and mutation. Evolution is a step forward, whereas mutation is more often a step sideways, producing not something new but a slightly different version of what was there before. By its very nature, evolution is a step towards improvement whereas mutation tends to be – but is not always – a regressive step. The Rangers support has mutated over the years, but not truly evolved.
And so it was that when The Billy Boys was banned, The Famine Song was born. When the Nazi salute was condemned it mutated into The Red Hand Salute of the Loyalist Paramilitaries. In other words, society was not willing to stand for a commemorative sign of the murder of Jews, so they simply mutated and it became a commemorative sign for the murder of Catholics instead, and what worries this writer most about that was not the wholehearted embrace of this new mutation from those within the Rangers support itself, but the way that change stopped further condemnation of the sign from outsiders. Rangers even took that explanation to Nyon, where it was accepted by UEFA without any real scrutiny as to the shocking implications of it.
Yet, time is getting away from them. Demographics are changing and their choice to make their community insular has rebounded back on them as multi-cultural diversity has spread across the country they thought was their own. They have locked themselves into the steel jaws of a trap, isolated and alone. Typically, this has fed their pathological belief in their own uniqueness to the point of hubris, but it does not keep the rest of the world at bay.
Take their parades for example. Once an assumed right, those parades are now viewed by a large and growing number as an historical anachronism, the flight of fancy of a demented few. Once without challenge, they are now subject to scrutiny and a number have already been banned and deemed offensive to public decency. Furthermore, if you’ve ever been out in the town and gotten caught in one the image of those who stop to clap is not the one you might associate with masters of the universe; stale beer, fag ash and body odour are the prominent smells. Hanging guts, tracksuits and tatty clothes, bad hairdos and facial scars are the prominent sights. The forced pride, chests out, heads up, hands held above them, the applause, the occasional cheer … more and more it comes to resemble, as I said earlier, a version of positive reinforcement, like the story Gene Hackman tells Willem Defoe in Mississippi Burning, about how his father poisoned the neighbour’s mule and then told his son, in an ashamed effort at half explanation, half justification that “If you ain’t better than a nigger son, who are you better than?”
If I were un-educated, insular, backward and socially inept I too might seek refuge in morale boosting expressions of superiority, in chants of defiance. I too might seek comfort in age old notions of empire, and a belief in the white man’s right to rule the world. Alternatively, though, I might seek refuge instead in a library, to learn my way out of the gutter instead. You cannot excuse these people because of ignorance. It is wilful ignorance. They have the modicum of intellect which is required to rationalise their position and place in the world, and once there they simply retreat into a comfort zone rather than actually confront, and change, their circumstances. This is why I do not pity them for the way they think.
Rangers Football Club, and the culture which has flourished around it and within it, is a genuine anachronism. It is a totem pole around which dance the last dregs of empire, long since gotten fat on cheap curry and stupid on cheap wine. The white working class embrace of these ideas is not a new thing any more than We Are the People is a new slogan. In times of great social crisis, certain ideas have always found resonance in sections of the populace. Telling a man who has nothing that he and his kith and kin are actually the inheritors of everything, that their birth-right has been stolen, but that the blood of kings still flows in their veins is one of the oldest and most prevalent political and social sleight of hand tricks there is … and it never ceases to work on the dafter, more socially backward elements who need, above all, a reason to believe.
In another reality, the present circumstances should be seeing that mind-set ejected from the Rangers supporters like a spent cartridge shell … yet those ideas appear to be taking hold all the more, giving events a peculiarly skewed look, as though looking through a magic mirror. It appears not to have dawned on them that their very notions of superiority are precisely the reason they are in their present perilous state, and make it increasingly unlikely that they will exit this situation without a world of pain being inflicted on them.
They have brought this situation on their football club, out of a combination of arrogant over-expectation, behaviour which makes no neutral predisposed towards wanting to get involved with them and the crazy idea that their over-expectation should be funded from someone else’s pocket, as though the entire world owes them something.
So, they stand in their little groups, or huddle together in their large congregations, at the football or in the Rangers bars of the world and they believe. They utter their phrases of superiority. They tend to their egos and repeat the mantras into the mirror each day. Those mantras can take away all reality, they can close every door on the world outside.
Yet the world outside is real. And sometimes, it must confront them.
I stipulate that if they truly were The People their club would not presently be on its knees, at the whim of either the administrators or a mad man. They would not be presently hawking themselves around like a cheap Amsterdam hooker during the tourist season. They would not be talking to Far East consortiums made up of God knows who as they try to find funding from anywhere they can, like vagrants rooting around for spare change in the gutter amongst the pools of Saturday night sick and old fag ends. If they truly are The People, how can The People have been so stupid as to be duped by a man who, himself, was scammed completely by a couple of boys from the Huddleboard, who hung his shame up on the wall like a three-point buck?
How can The People have allowed a guy like this to walk into their club, take ownership of it for a solitary quid, tint their window green and sell the family silver? How can he have pulled the wool over the eyes of not just the average Peep, but the leaders of The People, in the form of supporters representatives, to the extent he even appropriated for himself the honour of unfurling a league flag he played no part in winning, even as he was working in the background to assure it’d be their last one for a long, long time?
How could the self-styled People be so stupid as to have gotten themselves into a place where they were praising a man without knowing his background, even as the supporters of their deadliest rivals were hollering from the rooftops that he would do exactly as he has subsequently done? How could The People have been so wrong, and we so right, and how can they face themselves in the mirror, and repeat their ancient mantra, knowing we showed them up?
How did The People get themselves into such a state that they now have to pick up the begging bowl, like the starving ghetto children of Sao Paolo, and go with it to the clubs they have disdained for years, and ask for a hand-out? How can Her Majesty’s Proud Defenders have gotten themselves into a place where they must muster the intellectual dexterity required to simultaneously sing her praises at the same time as they cower in fear of her tax collectors? How can The People be in a place where we are about to take over their house for a day long party where we celebrate, amongst other things, our cultural diversity, honourable conduct and ultimate ascendancy to the place where we are now the undisputed only remaining superpower in the game here? How can The People have become second-raters, at best, if they are so damned special?
How is it that the club which could once attract the biggest names in football to the managerial suite now makes do with a fat former game-show contestant? And how can The People be so dense and dumb and backward and stupid that it took a single phrase, “We don’t do walking away” to make them forget a 15 point turnaround in the league and their season being effectively over before Celtic fans were buying their significant others their Valentine’s Day cards? Is their sense of superiority really so skewed that the muggy detritus of defeat was, in their minds, actually transformed into the sweeping tide of victory by reminding them of their own uniqueness and special place in the world? Could Paul LeGuen have tried that? Could his exit from Ibrox really have been prevented by some mock playing of the flute and a rolled up trouser leg?
Maybe it’s just me. As inured as I have become to the idea of believing in something not backed up by evidence, perhaps I am blinded to something beneath the obvious. An analogy I like is the one of the teaching assistant who rolls a block of ice into the class and then describes its properties to students who immediately pick up their pens and start to write down what they are told. I believe that the only student who deserves to pass that class is the one who stands up, walks to the front of the room and puts his or her hands on the cold, dripping surface of the ice, who experiences those sensations first-hand instead of relying on information supplied by someone else, and who can then base their observations on something real.
I look at these People, and I see nothing to be proud of. I listen to their songs and perceive only the illogical train of thought so perfectly espoused in that Mississippi Burning moment I spoke of before, that notion that they tell themselves these things because without them they would have to accept what it is they truly are; a lengthening ash on the fag-end of history, ready, at any moment, to fall off and be no more. I look at dingy back-street boozers where they gather with their own; at churches empty of the faithful, who tell themselves they believe; at institutions they sing of, and pretend to embrace, but which they do not respect, and at a culture which espouses an unwillingness to budge, even as the rest of the world is moving on. I see overweight specimens in tight-fitting tops utter banalities like “the Big House must stay open”, but could not, if their lives depended on it, give a neutral one good reason why this should be so, outside of their own perverted need to be belong to something bigger than themselves.
I look at them and wonder what pleasure can be derived from holding a winning hand from a rigged deck. I wonder what satisfaction can be attained from victories secured on the back of illegality and fraud. I look at gross over-spends so severe they would skew any commercial activity, and then at league tables which reveal that, even taking these fantastic variances of resources into account, that, on years in which their competitors were, themselves, not in free-fall, the margins of victory are so wafer thin they belie the scale of cheating which underpinned the “achievements.” I wonder how they can kid themselves on that, on anything but a crooked table, they would even be at the races, far less out in front of the chasing pack?
Their notion that they are different is certainly one supported by the evidence. It is their apparently sincere belief that they are better which is seriously in dispute, and inspires only contempt. It is an idea so ludicrous as to need no detailed examination, yet I believe it was instructive to properly look at it, and to hold it up to the ridicule which it deserves.
Theirs is an institution whose best days were built on a foundation of cheating. That they have had as many bad days as good in the last 20 years only indicates that even with far-ranging measures in place to assure their ascendancy, whatever that required, they have actually been unable to dominate in the way one would have expected. Indeed, on those occasions when we have raised our game and given our very, very best, we have overwhelmed them, with ease, despite their stretching every regulation and breaking every rule.
Scottish football is preparing to act on those long-standing violations. HMRC is preparing to deliver its own verdict on two decades of evasion and deception. The world is watching, as Scotland football’s most quintessentially dishonest club faces being dragged into the sunlight and made to account for its many, many indiscretions.
On the sidelines, standing rank on rank, are The People themselves, watching as the day of justice finally looms, chests out in pride as the stinking, rotten shambles into which they have invested their souls is brought to book before the whole watching world. They stand there defiant and proud, in no way ashamed, as the dark heart of Rangers is laid bare for all to see. That this biased, bigoted, corrupt and scandalised institution has come to represent who and what they are has all the elements of a Greek Tragedy. Howard Barker, the great play-write, once said of tragedy as art and entertainment, “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies.” Unless, of course, you’re at the centre of the story, unless you are a character in the drama, and then the only issue becomes about whether you emerge at all.
Rangers is a club which for 20 years has lived with the lies at the very centre of its being. The modern version of Rangers, far removed from its founding by four young men kicking a football, was built on the foundations of those lies, has been sustained by the promotion of and careful nurturing of those lies and now seeks to escape by falling back on the lie which towers over all others, like a dark idol; that of their superiority, of their being special, of their being necessary and something in which they, and society, should take pride. That almost everyone else sees it for what it really is appears not to shift their perceptions one little bit. It proves one thing above all others, cements one fact, which stands above the rest, and marks down clearly who they really are.
The greatest lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
I have no doubt that when they say it, they truly do believe it, and it’s because of this that we need to strip them of everything, to bring down the wall of arrogance and to lay to rest the Frankenstein’s Monster that is their perverted sense of self.
They are not The People, not in the way they think. Their notion of superiority is an insult. Their idea they are something special is a joke. They lack intelligence, compassion, dignity, class, any sense of respect for others, they are cheats and cowards and liars without humility or any concept of responsibility at all. The club which perfectly encapsulates them, moulded so completely into a shape of their design, is, today, on its knees. If it dies, their smug sense of self will not die with it, but it will certainly grow to an ever more monstrous degree if they are allowed to escape. For this reason alone, it is important that justice is done.
The People have to be confronted with the reality of what they truly are, and if that shatters their fragile egos and sense of self then so be it. The tragedy will not be that it was done, but that it was not done long ago. Far from being something on which this nation depends, we would be a better place without them. Far from making a contribution, they are dragging us down.
Let us be rid of their arrogance once and for all. For this is who they are.
Paul67 et al
Dundee United shot themselves in the foot, they were playing well before Robbie Neilson committed hari kari, with our mid field struggling with the old two in the middle set-up. Still had to win it mind you, and we did that in style.
If Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs make it to the semis one of those should be played in Edinburgh and not Glasgow. The SFA will not see it that way of course and would force Say the Dons and the Hibees to play at Hampden. No imagination!
On another note, before the match Roddy Forsyth stated that the Administrators (Paul Clark) have refused to pay Dundee United the Scottish Cup money. And that is despite a SFA warning already. Oh that is right, Scottish football needs a club which point blank refuses to pay a fellow club. Terminate their membership now, and leave them wherever that leaves them!
Camaras go to “preparation” for Scottish cup draw, ogalvie sorting everything out.
Neil canamalar Lennon hunskelper extrordinaire:
I love it mate, because unless our ball isn’t in the pot there is nothing these people can do to stop us. Nothing whatsoever.
Jim white salivating as he reports that the buns admin have saved £1million. Great, he reports. No mention of unpaid debts to various football clubs, police, catering, stewards, tax etc etc.
Bhoys ,
Can anyone post a link to todays highlights ?
Thanks in advance…
Stuart McCall has a mullet.
A mullet is a fish.
Fish stink.
James Forrest is The Emperor of Ice Cream on 11 March, 2012 at 16:49 said:
Today’s rant …
Good post, if a bit long,
I get the distinct impression you are not a fan of brother hun :)
You really need to get on message and understand that we need them warts and all.
dort yourself out
:0)
HH
Mike