The prospect of watching the world’s greatest players on home soil at the 2030 World Cup, with the announcement of a joint bid by British and Irish FAs, is tempered by the realisation that it would provide flag waving political types of various colours more opportunities to distract attention from their day jobs.
The English FA bid for the 2018 tournament but the UK government was insufficiently corrupt at the time to garner enough support from the Fifa executive. A great deal of work has since gone into upgrading politicians corruption status across the UK, so the Scottish, English, Welsh, Irish and N. Irish FAs will be hopeful their governments can cut it with the best Banana Republics out there.
Perhaps harsh but not without foundation.
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and a one two and then kick
it was the crazierst game ever seen
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There used to be a turnstile to transfer from the Celtic end to the enclosure and you could also pay for a transfer from enclosure to stand.
I had to reread that wee part of the comment, with no glasses on i read it as “a tunnell to tranfsfer from celtic end to enclosure ”
and i though wow, never heard of that before, but ta for the insights, i like that.
ST STIVS
Wonderful!
Thank you!
Again!
barca look to be in a bit of bother.
https://twitter.com/david_conn/status/1366647296348274690?s=19
hh
St Stivs
I must be getting the Scottish Cup mixed up with the other bauble Paul won while with Dortmund! :-)
on a seperate note, where is roy croppie these days ?
posting the pics just because i liked when he did it
Well that’s a very interesting lead.
I’m afraid England must be defended on this occasion – while the FA were preparing their bid for the 2018 World Cup.
The SFA were preparing themselves for the then, real and present danger of Rangers going bust and armaggedon.
The corruption in Scottish Football, facilitated by the Footballing Authorities, the Government, Law Enforcement and The Legal Establishment was something that would shame a “banana Republic”.
Celtic obviously playing a huge part in ensuring that Rangers were allowed to resurrect, despite the bending, breaking and shattering of rules, up to and including including unlawful goings on.
The fact is, despite what Big Pedro’s pal Neil Doncaster said, It could never have happened in England.
Scottish Football in general and Celtic in particular have no case to feel morally superior over the English…
Nor, Ireland, Wales or Norn Iron for that matter.
The “great footballing scandal” in Scotland is way above and beyond anything in UK football.
IronyByPassCSC
Hail Hail
St stivs
:)
A tunnel would have been better.
Chairbhoy on 2nd March 2021 8:37 pm Agreed ten years (at least ) of cheating is surely the biggest sporting fraud in history IMO
EXCATHEDRA44 on 2ND MARCH 2021 10:36 AM
AN Tearmann 12:01am.
No doubt St Stivs will respond,however in the interim:
1.Upturned boat still on the Sandbank.
2.If you Google “The Kelly Cut” in Greenock it will give you lots of info as most details associated with the founder
=======================÷=
thanks Very much for the info and on robert thom.hope your good during these times
:-)
hh
BBC Scotland Sky 115,wee Nippy caught lying, on now
TIMHORTON
Yes I was at the 67 Cup Final against the sheep too before heading down to London and like you saw big final on TV.
Yep,let’s all talk about DOFs,new managers,CEOs,evry day.I am sure the amount of hot air,opinions,on here,will have a great input into any decision.It is criminally boring,to hear the same rumours,gossip,nonsense trotted out every day.Paul tries to mention something in his header to try and stimulate at least a bit of,different football related topic,and gets castigated.You know,if the theme of Paul’s recent blog,holds no interest for you personally,just don’t take part in it.God forbid a few other posters might be interested.
AN TEARMANN on 2ND MARCH 2021 8:48 PM
EXCATHEDRA44 on 2ND MARCH 2021 10:36 AM
AN Tearmann 12:01am.
No doubt St Stivs will respond,however in the interim:
1.Upturned boat still on the Sandbank.
2.If you Google “The Kelly Cut” in Greenock it will give you lots of info as most details associated with the founder
=======================÷=
thanks Very much for the info and on robert thom.hope your good during these times
:-)
hh
———————
i will need to go back now and see what the questions are.
i did get a cracker view of the sugar boat yesterday, i was up drumfrochar road, the tide was low, and the boat looked near shore, fascinating.
RPMCELTICFAN @ 8:45 PM,
Yes, ten years that we can prove… Hugh Adam suggested a much longer timeframe.
A huge sporting fraud that highlighted the level of corruption we are dealing with.
TURKEYBHOY @ 9:02 PM,
Where do I start with that…
Paul puts up a lead to stimulate debate, I comment on it in a way that could stimulate debate and you take a cheap shot in your own pusillanimous way.
Just to let you know Paul blog does hold interest in a different way that it did 16 odd years ago when I stated posting here but none the less…
For instance yesterday’s lead – we are having a giggle at the fact that St Johnstone is the second most successful Club in Scotland.
Yet are supposed to feel our Domestic Generation of Domination was somehow a huge sporting achievement.
IronyByPassCSC
Hail Hail
must say i would take the Wolves manager,
always enjoy watching their games
GORDYBHOY64-the boy adama is a tank
CELTIC BY NUMBERS on 2ND MARCH 2021 12:20 PM
I think there are two primary dynamics at play here 1. as you rightly say, lack of integration into FIFA corruption and then 2. much of the rest of the world absolutely hates the English and their “football coming home” arrogance. There is also wide spread resentment about the 4 “home” nations traditional political hegemony.
============
On your last ooint the home nations,tho primarily the english fa are loathed on a global scale.
Tim Vickery cites Joa Havelange defeating Sir Stanley Rous as a turning point as Havelange wanted a bigger world cup,more countries,more hope and spreading football to a wider base whereas Rous wanted an exclusive(elite in his eyes)
The world cup has grown in every way,african nations take part,far eastern countries to are better served,the loathing of the fa was palpable in the ‘qatar ‘vote especially from countries that would have been excluded historically.
i dont know how we could afford a world cup here but i feel centenary celebrations will be in soutb america.Football will be played anywhere,and to a wider audience than ever before.
Shrewd observation on footbal”coming home
its loathed due to the simplicity of the game and its widespread appeal and popularity.
hh
An amazing story, both tragic and heart-warming at the same time.
http://backpagefootball.com/the-extraordinary-career-and-tragic-death-of-jimmy-hasty/119737/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHUdVKWtp2c
Fairhill Bhoy
yeah a tank with the acceleration of a Ferrari
AN TEARMANN on 2ND MARCH 2021 12:01 AM
St Stivs..
i dont know if you know the “cut” area where Greenocks water system was dug out and chanelled for the towns of Greenock and the port.
was wondering if
1.You have any blogs/sites like the one above you mention above,describing the building of the greenock cut? .we used to take walking groups in from Cornalees country park.
2 is the big upturned boat that sank in 67 still upturned on the clyde?
:-)
h
———————
On the night of 27 January 1974 fierce winds were battering Scotland’s west coast.
Moored on the River Clyde, waiting to unload its cargo of raw east African sugar for the Tate & Lyle refinery in Greenock, the MV Captayannis took the full force of the storm.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45641159
It was 74 bud, my english granda took me down to the esplanade the next morning to see the wreck, I have a kind of memory of being woken up to see the news that night, as old Jim had been in the navy during the war, and said, this isnt going to go well, he knew the waters,
i sound like the lonesome boatman
GORDYBHOY64-road runner.
Beep Beep
Chairbhoy
i would say from the second Sir Hunner of Pence took over in 88 they were cheating,extrordinary hubristic act of power(and at time they knew it) hence “oor campbell can seamlessly interchange between sfa and their works team.
it did happen tho! and we are still paying for murray atop the pensions/liquidation/loan defaults… currently the malicious prosecutions etc etc.
scotlands shame and how end a football club is mintys next book
hope your good mate
hh
AN TEARMANN @ 9:48 PM,
All’s good thx – hope all’s good with you in these strangest of times.
Yes, Campbell played a blinder as Sir David’s Generation of Domination veered over the cliff…
Ian Fleming’s cliff scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was more authentic.
….and we are still paying for murray atop the pensions/liquidation/loan defaults… currently the malicious prosecutions etc etc.
Truth – Hundreds and Hundreds of Millions of Pounds!!
Are we really more corrupt than we were then!! Doesn’t bear thinking about.
The referees enjoying their greatest freedom since 2010 is a little indication of where we are:(
Hail Hail
Not-Jacinda and the Nats — For whom the bell tolls …
One unanswered question in all of this …
Not-Jacinda and her oft quoted desire to holiday on a specific Greek Island / love of carpets.
Would this not be her coping mechanism to keep the octopus that is Wee Eck of the scent so to speak?
All rumours and hearsay but it might all add up.
Interesting hints that their political divergence could be 10 years and counting.
They were not a happy family once they got into power and decisions had to be made.
jamesgang @7:13 pm
“Director of football, if recruited and working properly, could allow:
1. The CEO to focus on running the wider business, thus avoiding unhelpful meddling by an unqualified amateur
2. Create a clearly defined ‘Celtic way’ that mitigates the risk of upheaval when a coach/manager leaves. Like when BR did, leaving behind little more than John Kennedy and a Betamax.
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JG
I understand how it could free the CEO from some duties but it does not remove him from transfer discussions. I think it creates a 3 way tension and not a 2 way one. The more moving parts- the more it is likely to go wrong. The CEO still has to set a budget for wages and transfer fees and be involved at that level with DoF and Manager dealings on who gets in and who is too rich for our tastes.
We make a big fuss of the manager being allowed to choose his backroom staff but he gets no say in which DoF he can work with.
When you talk of a DoF being able to define the “Celtic way” or style of playing, it presupposes that he remains as a constant while the failing managers get readily rotated. That is why I posed the questions:-
Are both the CEO and DoF relatively stable and semi-permanent appointments?
Or do they or one of them fall if their chosen manager is unsuccessful?
And do the fans of those clubs that have DoFs accept this “unsackability” because of the benefits of continuity?
I can’t help but see it as a fashionable attempt to ape the big clubs, but it is just another layer of management unless there is this desire for continuity which, in turn, necessitates a high level of Protection from getting your P45 as a DoF.
PS no one is un-sackable. Now not even the Celtic CEO it seems. Rightly so.
St Stivs, Roy Croppie occasionally posts in the comments section of A Celtic State of Mind podcasts .
JVR
Was Pontins not known as the Blue Dolphin originally down in Scarborough ?
PS – Roy Croppie is on a RCQN WhatsApp group, posting his music on a Friday night 👍👍👍
In the event of SNP independence, Scotland would be Pontins – there would be no shortage of ‘Bluecoats’ eager to run the show and ensure the country continues to be ‘theirs’.
Paul67 et al
Lower Leagues of the SPFL given the nod to start back. Women’s League too, which should never have been stopped North or South of the Border but was on both counts. Then again both the FA and the SFA banned the Womens’s game for 50 years after WW1, with extreme prejudice so not such a big surprise. If I was them I would set up my own FA, GB wide in fact, to make sure they made their own decisions from now on. That said the Scottish Cup has got the go ahead to restart, no dates as far I know, but plenty time to get a knock out tourney finished by the end of May. Say. We play the winners of Falkirk – Arbroath at some point, once they get up and running that is. Gives us something to look forward to. Post Lenny.
Initially I wisnae that bothered about the SC, just one more trophy they widnae win if it wisnae played.
Then hearing that not only would it resume but could be completed before the summer and no next Christmas had me thinking, why not, no ones won it 5 times in a row and we after all are a renowned cup team.
Plus big JFK took the team tae Easter Road 2 year ago and won in the same trophy, a venue the sheffield wednesday supporter wisnae comfortable at.
SFTB
Thanks for your reply.
I tend to agree with what you’re saying, especially the inherent risks that either approach entails.
HH jg
Norrie M at 10.32 , sorry , I don’t know if it was called that or not I’m afraid.
Thanks for that information about Roy Croppie . His posts on here are very much missed.
chairbhoy
Are we really more corrupt than we were then!! Doesn’t bear thinking about.
the corruption is live.
cute tho the capatilist is in celticplc land the decision making can be cold,hard and enlightened. the the decision to support our team is emotional.that can lead to rash decision making.on our part…Celtic go on.
21/2 .
keep posting chairbhoy :-)
hh
haha charles and lizzy are on cqn.
JVR
how you doin mate? good to see you on.
i see on twitter there is a celtic 80/81.runs a great timeline
https://twitter.com/_Tweet_Celtic_/status/1366784563561791491?s=19
hopefully back to Celtic park soon
hh
JHB…me and awe ma family (and it’s huge-hunners ae us) are gonnae vote SNP jist tae spite you.
A hate the SNP bit a don’t care, am votin fur them noo…
See wit youv done?
C’mon the wee Nic…
Will be more difficult to pick up players because of Brexit.
Was about to read back and thought I’d leave a wee post first.
Enough Microsoft Update patches will be available to entire population of US by May. Beyond giddy! I can almost smell May for crying out loud,, I’ve got stuff popping it’s wee face out in front and back garden. We are into March by crikey!
Good times ahead on the planet and the pitch are around the corner. Parents in old country have had their two jags. It’s crazy over here, old country folks have it much worse. Still a blase attitude with a large section of society here. An obvious sense of ‘screw you’ from many. I’ve had a few run ins with anti-maskers, a few that would have come to blows if I was 5 (OK, 10) years younger. Sometimes going to Walgreens is like that Arnie move, Running Man? Did get to tell someone they were 2 minutes away from a Glasgow kiss. I think my tone made him realise that wasn’t something he wished to pursue.
Texas lifting it’s mask mandate now as well.
Zombies though eh? Or perhaps, just pretend you are dead in some scenarios and alive and well in others.
My dog has caught a couple or three possums in the back garden over his 8 years. I’ve seen the little fellas pretending to be dead. Was the fist time i actually saw what playing possum meant. My yank friends over here in the colonies laughed and mocked as I presented the first ‘dead’ possum in my back garden. He wasn’t.
Sometimes I play dead in the office. HR don’t seem to like the fake blood and the gun. Cancel culture eh?
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Playing dead really works to help insects avoid being eaten by birds
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Playing dead might help prey animals stay alive because the tactic leaves predators vulnerable to having their attention diverted elsewhere.
Nigel R. Franks at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues were running a study on how the beetle-like larvae of flying antlions (Euroleon nostras) use grains of sand to build pitfall traps to catch food. They noticed that when they dropped the 12-millimetre-long larvae onto a microbalance to weigh them, the insects would freeze.
Fascinated, Franks and his colleagues observed the behaviour repeatedly, noting that the insects would stay immobile on the microbalance for anywhere from a few seconds to more than an hour.
The researchers suspected this was a last-ditch survival mechanism for when various kinds of predatory birds, like dunnocks (Prunella modularis), accidentally drop antlions after grabbing them out of their sandpits.
They modelled the behaviour using computers in the hope of understanding how playing dead – what the scientists called post-contact immobility (PCI) – keeps a prey animal alive.
Their models considered various predator-prey factors like the number of pits in a given patch of sand, the distance between them, the time it takes birds to travel between pits, aspects of the birds’ behaviour – the likelihood that a bird will drop an antlion, for instance – and the amount of time that the antlion remains in PCI.
The models were also informed by marginal value theorem, which describes the optimal way an animal should feed to maximise efficiency. This weighs the costs and benefits of an animal staying in one spot to eat every last morsel of food available there, or instead taking the time to move to another food-rich spot when supplies at the initial location begin to run low.
Their results suggest that playing dead really can help an insect survive, if it lives in a patch with many other peers. This seems to be because there are so many other targets nearby that it is more efficient for the bird to pick up another insect.
The researchers speculate that this efficiency may be down to the way birds hunt. If they do so primarily by looking for movement, then a motionless “dead” insect is a difficult target. Any nearby moving insect is easier to detect and pick up, making the playing-dead strategy a winning one.
“I just find the phenomenon utterly entrancing and utterly bewildering, to tell you the truth,” says Franks.
An earlier study by the same research group suggested that the playing-dead trick works best when the time spent immobile varies from individual to individual. This means birds can’t learn to anticipate exactly when a “dead” insect will become “alive” again, leaving them even more open to being distracted by nearby moving insects.
“It’s this concept of, ‘I’m going to hide from you in plain sight by keeping still, and you’re not going to be able to guess how long I’m going to do this for’, and it’s a really beautiful strategy,” says Franks.
He says the tactic is almost like the techniques a magician uses to divert an audience’s attention while performing a magic trick, although there are obvious differences: an insect playing dead is relying on other insects to distract a bird rather than actively redirecting the bird’s attention.
However, there is no benefit in staying dead for too long. The models indicate that lengthy periods of immobilisation wouldn’t give better protection. Practically speaking, they would probably put the larvae at real risk of predation by scavengers.
“What we’re seeing here with the play-dead strategy is really an arms race between prey and predator, and the antlions have carried this to an absolute extreme, beyond which they would gain no further advantage,” says Franks.