I received a text early evening on 18th August last year: “Gongalves starts”. Former Hearts player, Jose Gongalves, was one of a handful of players FC Sion signed illegally in the summer 2011 transfer window and he had been named to start against Celtic in the Europa League qualifier, first leg.
As a contest, the tie was over. There followed two matches with considerable effort and drama from both teams but the eventual outcome was, literally, never in doubt, the courts would have their way. Sion would be expelled from the competition and Celtic would progress to the group stage.
Today Celtic’s only remaining competitor from the chasing pack for the SPL title is up in court to face the HM Revenue and Customs. The courts will have their way again but although you may feel the outcome of Rangers tax case is inevitable (I do), the impact on this season’s league championship is less assured. Should they lose, Rangers have the option to appeal, postponing any negative impact on the company until next season at the earliest.
If Rangers have, or can generate, enough cash to keep the lights on this season the league will be nip and tuck until the end of the season. The tax case will attract most attention but if you are looking for indications of how the season is likely to go, keep an eye open for cash related incidents.
Well done to Rangers’ broadcast partner, STV, for their story this morning on SPL discipline. They report the Ibrox club have the worst disciplinary record in the league, having accumulated a total of 41 bookings, contrasting starkly with the cool class at Celtic Park who are best behaved in the league with only 20 bookings.
With Beram Kayal out for the season Ki Sung-Yeung is the Celtic player closest to a suspension, a further three yellow cards would put the Korean over the threshold. Rangers have Lafferty one booking, Edu and Bocanegra two, with Goian, Broadfoot, Bartley and Whittaker all three away from a suspension. Lee McCulloch has only been booked twice this season but shows enormous potential.
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Forgive me if someone has highlighted this before, but is it the case that the debt (£24m approx. ) Rangers owe, not been transfered to the thousandairs holding company from Loyds. Thus, if Rangers lose this case (fingers crossed!!) then the debt is £49m + £24m(ish) i.e. approx. £73m
Cadizzy, I’d love to find out what Hugh thought of the coterie of Airdrie, St Mirren and Hibs fans who are currantly responsible for scottish football’s journalistic output.
Thanks for posting.
thebhoyfromoz says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:02
Well, you’ll want to read this one too
“The larcenous nature of death, its habit of breaking in on us when we are least prepared and stealing the irreplaceable, has seldom been more sickeningly experienced than at Ninian Park in Cardiff on Tuesday night.
Those of us who crowded sweatily into the small entrance hall of the main stand to wait for word of Jock Stein’s condition will always remember the long half hour in which the understandable vagueness of reports filtering from the dressing-room area lulled us into believing that Jock was going to make it through yet another crisis. The raw dread that had been spread among us by his collapse on the touchline at the end of the Wales-Scotland World Cup match gave way to the more bearable gloom of acknowledging that the career of one of the greatest managers football has known would have to be ended by immediate retirement.
Then – off in a corner of that confused room – Mike England, the manager of Wales and a deeply concerned first-hand witness of what had been happening to Stein, was heard to say that he was still ‘very, very poorly’. There was no mistaking the true meaning of those words and suddenly the sense of relief that had been infiltrating our anxieties was exposed as baseless. We felt almost guilty about having allowed ourselves to be comforted by rumours. Then, abruptly, we knew for sure that the Big Man was dead and for some of us it was indeed as if our spirits, our very lives, had been burglarised.
Of all the reactions to Stein’s death, none meant more than that of the thousands of Scotland’s travelling supporters who learned of it haphazardly but with eerie swiftness as they got ready to celebrate a ragged draw against Wales that should guarantee their team a passage to the World Cup finals in Mexico next summer. They are, given half an excuse, the most raucously exuberant fans in the game but as midnight neared in Cardiff on Tuesday they wandered through the streets in subdued clusters, sustaining the unforced atmosphere of mourning that pervaded the hundreds who waited silently in the darkness outside Ninian Park after the last hope of reviving the stricken man inside had been abandoned.
There is no doubt that the Scots have a highly developed capacity for the elegiac mood, especially when there is a bottle about, but what was to be encountered in South Wales last week was no cheap example of the genre. When travel-soiled units of the tartan expeditionary force interrupted their morose drinking to propose toasts to the lost leader, anybody cynical enough to see such behaviour as just another maudlin ritual doesn’t know much about the way the power of Jock Stein’s nature communicated itself to millions of ordinary people.
His achievements in football were monumental, but they can only partially explain his impact upon and relevance to so many lives. Perhaps he was cherished simply because he was a true working class hero – and that is a species which is disappearing almost as fast in industrial Scotland as elsewhere, if only because the values that governed its creation are being relentlessly eroded day by day. Even the common misery of unemployment has not halted the fragmentation of a sense of community that once seemed indestructible.
In an age when, if I may quote a line from my brother William’s latest novel, it is as if ‘every man and his family were a private company’, Stein was the unpretentious embodiment of that older, better code that was until not so long ago the compensatory inheritance of all who were born of the labouring poor. No one was ever likely to mistake him for saint, or even a repository of bland altruism. He could look after himself and his own in the market place or anywhere else, but there was never the remotest danger that he would be contaminated by the materialism that engulfs so many of those who find prosperity through sport or other forms of entertainment.
These days it is hard to avoid having the eardrums battered by some unlikely pillar of the New Right who – having persuaded himself that a largely fortuitous ability to kick a football or volley a tennis ball or belt out a pop song or tell a few jokes more acceptable than the next man is actually evidence of his own splendid mastery of his fate – insists that the dole queues would fade away over night if people got off their arses, got on their bikes and showed the enterprise that has carried him to what he imagines is glory. Stein’s whole life was a repudiation of such garbage.
He was utterly Scottish, utterly Lanarkshire in fact, but his was the kind of loyalty to his roots that made his principles universal. His father was a miner who was a miner’s son and Stein himself worked underground until turning belatedly to full-time professional football at the age of 27. During a long, incalculably rewarding friendship with him, I heard him say many memorable things and some of the most vivid were inevitably about the game he loved and the great practitioners of it, but he was most moved and most moving when he talked of that earlier phase of his working experience.
There was a dynamic, combative quality to most of his conversation (mischievous wind-up was a favourite mode and, though he did not drink alcohol, he occasionally dipped his barbs in curare) but when the subject was mining and miners, a tone of wistful reverie invaded his voice. ‘I went down the pit when I was 16 (at first I was working with ponies – it was still that era) and when I left 11 years later I knew that wherever I went, whatever work I did, I’d never be alongside better men. They didn’t just get their own work done and go away. They all stayed around until every man had finished what he had to do and everything was cleared up. Of course, in the bad or dangerous times that was even more true. It was a place where phoneys and cheats couldn’t survive for long.
‘Down there for eight hours you’re away from God’s fresh air and sunshine and there’s nothing that can compensate for that. There’s nothing as dark as the darkness down a pit, the blackness that closes in on you if your lamp goes out. You’d think you would see some kind of shapes but you can see nothing, nothing but the inside of your head. I think everybody should go down the pit at least once to learn what darkness is…’ “
bankiebhoy1 says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:07
I reckon he would not think much of them but he would say so very eloquently
Is Hugh McIlvanney [my dad’s cousin, btw] still writing?
Or has he retired?
“I’m back in front by one, but we’re both here to score goals, and the main thing is winning games,” said the Hoops hitman.
DBBIA
I think he is still writing for the Sunday Times.
(still pushing that ole family tie I see)
“I’m back in front by one, but we’re both here to score goals, and the main thing is winning games,” said the Hoops hitman.
That’s why he MUST be retained…otherwise goals could dry up from Stokes too…Great to have internal competition like this…my money still on Tony to win the race, though!
Cadizzy, it’s ole, but it’s the only one we’ve got.
Unless you include sundry cutpurses, parish rats and mountebanks.
……Cadizzy,
Yes, and it is precisely that eloquence that the current climate in scottish football requires.
I usually pin most hopes on Hugh Macdonald striking the right chord on the appropriate issues in the Herald but that title is tainted as well now.
HH
It’s just terrible that in these austere times the queen isn’t going to get that new yacht.
If only there was an organisation, steeped in the maritime tradition, that could help her out with the 50-60 million she needs.
JHJ
Never heard that take on it before.
If that is the case, which I doubt but would love to be the case, where does the £49M you detail come from?
MWD
CultsBhoy loves being 1st. You should be fine in forecasting Hooper to beat Stokes over the season in the goal scoreing stakes.Why do I say that ? well simply Lennie keeps hauling Stokes off an example is Saturday Lennie took our top scorer off and moved Sammi up beside Hooper What was all that about? H.H.
Cultsbhoy. I posted a few days ago about being invited to ibrox as corporate guest. Not sure if I should go. Somebody said you were someone I should ask.
The £49 is the tax case in the court today. The Rangers debt was never paid, but transfered if believe.
Did you know that if you say gullible really, really slowly it sounds like orange?
U
Joe Filippis Haircut says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:24
Stokes looked tired. I would have taken him and Stokes off and given Keatings a run but I trust Lenny to make the correct calls when we have won so many games on the bounce.
Looking at the squad we still need a powerful striker up front and a winger to play every match. The loss of Forrest was there for all to see.
The other area which is concerning is central midfield. Get a partner for Victor and stick with him.
Long way to go but some tinkering from Lenny required to keep us rolling on.
LB
Joe Filippis Haircut says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:24
Meant to say Stokes and Sami.
LB
LiviBhoy. We agree on one thing its time Keatings got a chance in the first team the Bhoy has been scoreing goaqls for fun.On the substitution of Stokes I cant agree we needed another goal to be comfortable and Stokes was more likely to get it than Sammi but in Lennie I trust mind you I dont allways understand his substitutions. H.H. ;- )
cadizzy says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:15
You and the bhoys will enjoy this old footage of the series narrated by Hugh.
McIlvanney’s Arena Tribute to: Busby, Shankley & Stein
After reading the three obituaries penned by the great Hugh Mcillvaney and poated by Cadizzy, i have trawled the internet to find other examples of his magnificent prose.
No obituaries this time just great sports writing.
Real Madrid’s historic 7-3 victory over Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 European Cup final at Hampden Park, reproduced from a running report:
“Fittingly, the great Glasgow stadium responded with the loudest and most sustained ovation it has given to non-Scottish athletes. The strange emotionalism that overcame the huge crowd as the triumphant Madrid team circled the field at the end, carrying the trophy they have held since its inception, showed they had not simply been entertained. They had been moved by the experience of seeing sport played to its ultimate standards.”
Arkle’s victory over Mill House in the 1964 Gold Cup at Cheltenham:
“As Arkle jockey Pat Taaffe, who had planned it all that way, began to close on the turn at the top of the hill, the incredible Irish support, the farmers and stableboys and priests, roared in unison: ‘Here he comes.’ It was like a beleaguered army greeting the hero who brings relief. He came all right, to run the heart out of Mill House, and that great horse was never the same again.”
Pele and Brazil’s 1970 World Cup triumph in Mexico:
“Pele says that when he woke next morning he seriously wondered if he had been dreaming. The sight of his medal at the bedside only partially reassured him and he telephoned his wife Rose at home in Brazil to ask: ‘Are we really the champions?’ Rose, who was seven months pregnant with their second child, told him she had felt a severe pain when he scored the first goal. She must have been one of the few people in Brazil who did.”
George Best scores a special goal:
Best had come in along the goal line from the corner-flag in a blur of intricate deception. Having briskly embarrassed three or four challengers, he drove the ball high into the net with a fierce simplicity that made spectators wonder if the acuteness of the angle had been an optical illusion.
“What was the time of that goal?” asked a young reporter in the Manchester United press box. “Never mind the time, son,” said an older voice beside him. “Just write down the date.”
The 1974 Ali/Foreman Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire:
“We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any ordinary old resurrection. His had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.”
And here are some nuggets:
The late January weather on Ayr racecourse: “It was the kind of wind that seemed to peel the flesh off your bones and come back for the marrow.”
On boxer Joe Bugner: “… the physique of a Greek statue but fewer moves.”
Brian Clough: “His record as a manager has a whiff of alchemy about it.”
On Carlos Tevez: “Whatever it costs Manchester City to get rid of him is a tolerable outlay on disinfectant.”
Frank Bruno in the ring with Mike Tyson: “Bruno was no more competitive than a sheep in an abattoir.”
Bobby Moore: “He could play tag with a fox and never get caught.”
Bob Paisley: “His feeling for the game is too deep ever for him to be immune to its romances …”
Maradona: “Surely there has not been such a pelvis since Elvis was in his prime.”
And his great friend George Best: “… feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands”.
praecepta says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:35
Thanks for that. I’ll save that to my home computer when I get home
I think I have that on a VHS tape up the loft somewhere (but I no longer have a VCR).
CQN Magazine Facebook post for today;
“So, yesterday we asked that apart from being the year in which we won our eleventh title, what was signifcant about season 1913-14? A lot of the guys on CQN had a stab at it, some of them getting part of the answer but only one getting the answer in full. That season was our best season ever defensively; we conceded just 14 league goals. We had a run of thirteen straight games in all competitions …without conceding a goal (ten of those games were in the league) and we set two marvellous shut out records.
What were they? Well, a lot of attention was being paid last year to Fraser Foster and Lukas Zaluska when the club was heading for an SPL shut out record. They did, in fact, hit their target; the SPL record for shut-outs is 2010-11 where we had 23 in the title race, which makes it all the more infuriating that we weren’t crowned champions. Nevertheless, that record got a lot of ink at the time, and yet the club record, and the Scottish League record, was set in that memorable 1913-14 season, when in 38 league game we kept a clean sheet 26 times.
It was the same season in which our keeper, Charlie Shaw, had 31 shut-outs in total … a monumental achievement, as I am sure you’ll all agree. So beloved was he by the fans, he had his own banner. Hilariously, or maybe not so much, despite this astonishing record, he was never capped for Scotland, although he did represent the Scottish Football League 3 times.
Throughout our history, players have scored crucial goals, goals which set our club on a new course. Jock Weir’s hat-trick away against Dundee, on 17 April 1948 were amongst the most important goals a player ever scored in a Celtic shirt. Why were they so significant?”
DownForSam says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:26
Cultsbhoy. I posted a few days ago about being invited to ibrox as corporate guest. Not sure if I should go. Somebody said you were someone I should ask.
I went in similar circumstances..youll be ok as long as you superglue your hands to your a**e and sit on them when we score!
James Forrest is Lennon says:
Did Jock Weir’s hat trick in the game in question ensure that Celtic would not be relegated that season?
johann murdoch 16 January, 2012 at 15:47:
Even then you’ll not be OK. Racism, bigoted and sectarian comments will be spewing from their mouths. It would take a special person to sit and take that without feeling sick.
Johann. That super glue will need to be strong. Thanks for the advice.
To the Ibrox Banquet,Ah Sneaked in,
Wan Cauld Wet Glesca Day,
But, the Fare Ah saw before Me , Fair Took Ma Appetite
Away!
Potted Heid,and Kippers …plus Pig’s Feet Stuffed wi Jam!
Ah called oot ,tae the Waiter..
Hey, Mac! Doncha Know Jist Who .. Ah Am?
Ah like Pickled Onions..Ah like Piccalilli,
Pickled Cabbage,is Awright.. wi’ a Little
Cauld Beef, oan .. Sunday Night!
Ah kin go.. Tomatoes.
But, Whit a Dae Prefer..
Is a Big Plate o’ Eggs Benedict,
Ah Did Sleekitly,
Declare!
Kojo
James Forrest is Lennon says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:46
thebhoyfromoz says:
16 January, 2012 at 15:50
The only time either of the 2 Glasgow giants have come close to being relegated-if we had lost we would have gone down and we were losing 2-1 with about 15 minutes to go!
Rumour has it that Dundee were on their biggest ever win bonus even though they had nothing to play for!
My Brother in Law had the pleasure/dubious pleasure of hosting tables for clients at both Celtic and Govan. He has told me many times of Mr John Greig – that master of ceremonies – telling fans of the visiting team (Celtic) that if their team scored they should ‘Remember where they are… And temper their celebrations accordingly.’
Fact
U
We’ve got Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Johnstone on the wing on the wing.
The boy’s a bit special: my almost-five year old son’s first football match
By Aidan Smith
Published on Sunday 15 January 2012 06:05
Taking a child to their first ever football match is an unforgettable rite of passage that changes everything. It’s just a pity about the result
TEN past seven in the morning and I don’t think my son could look happier, that this picture of childhood innocence as viewed through the gap in a door could have any more of a golden glow. The Christmas tree is still up and the TV is playing a DVD of Cars 2, the current fave, and, in his dressing-gown and pyjamas, Archie has rearranged the sofa cushions into a banked racetrack for his trucks and diggers. I’ve walked past this scene many times but today, with some guilt, stop and watch because I want to remember it, and hope to hell he’s remembering it, too. For in five hours, everything changes.
In five hours we’ll be at the football, his first ever game. Until now, his life – all four-and-three-quarter years of it – has consisted of absolute certainties. They tuck you up, your mum and dad. You don’t have to eat the peas. Jump and you will be caught, cry and you will be cuddled. Everything Playmobil interlocks. Everything Pixar has a happy ending. But football – especially Scottish football – doesn’t quite work like that.
Disappointment is a given. Your team will rarely win anything, unless they’re Celtic or Rangers, who’ll win everything but be disappointed they’re not playing in a bigger league. You’ll spend a lot of money – £42 for the pair of us today – to sit on plastic seats in a breeze-block arena right through the coldest months. You’ll see chancers, mercenaries, honest toilers, over-tattoo-ed fools and poor role-models. And as you’re inevitably distracted, start counting all the empty spaces, you’ll wonder why they ever built the grounds so big.
Ah well let me tell you, son: this place used to be jam-packed. I was in it with 50,000, a wall of humanity stretching to the clouds. Down there is where the schoolgirls screamed when Scotland’s George Best – the almost forgotten Peter Marinello – hurtled past (and years later the real Best, bevvying hard, would hirple past). That’s where my father used to stand, after depositing me by the pitch, although because the crowd surged and swayed so much, he’d end up further away from me than at the game’s start, much to my alarm. And now I’m beginning to sound like him, chuntering on about a lost era, as I always knew I would, come this day.
On 19 August, 1967, my dad blooded me. I was ten, which was quite old, and I guess Celtic’s European Cup triumph three months previously had triggered all my pestering because he’s not around to ask. I’ve no idea what obsessed me from nought to ten but it must have been good.
Archie is properly obsessed. He got his first pair of boots for Christmas, tears about with a ball at his feet all day long. Whenever football comes on TV he changes into full kit, re-enacting passages of play complete with commentary and what he calls “slow lotion”. He doesn’t just do this for televised games but also the goals round-ups on Reporting Scotland and the rolling football chit-chat with the Sky Sports blondes.
And here’s my first problem: he’s over-familiar with football’s galacticos yet knows nothing about the Scottish Premier League’s gallumphicos. “Where’s Messi?” is the usual cry; he expects the world’s best to always be playing (and I cannot persuade Archie to eat his greens otherwise he won’t get big like the Argentinian genius because little Lionel needed hormone injections simply to reach 5ft 6ins). “Where’s Messi?” asks the boy, bang on cue, as I knot his scarf. “In Barcelona,” I say. Down Leith way, to paraphrase Monty Python and Life Of Brian, there will be no Messi but a mess is highly likely.
It’s Hibs vs Hearts, the Edinburgh derby. Hibs are my team, and that of my father, although halfway through writing my book Heartfelt, when I was trying to follow the sworn enemies for a season, I discovered he’d been a Hearts fan in his youth and, who knows, maybe he was a little disappointed when aged ten I became thirled to the Hibees. To most people the book was about rivalry but all I was really doing was saying thanks to Dad for first giving me a “lift-over” and then paying me in (and to my mother for laminating the football routemaster free with Texaco petrol which got us to exotic Airdrie and faraway Greenock).
“Where are we going?” asks Archie, confused. “The Scottish National Portrait Gallery,” I say. Before its revamp, a painting of my father hung in the café and in the pocket of a safari suit of deepest purple – 1967’s other notable event: the summer of love – was my 6d match programme. But in the new layout we can’t find Dad. “Never mind,” I say, “you’ll get a programme today, to keep forever.” Cost? £3.50. Now we’re walking down Easter Road, the main drag leading to the stadium of that name. We pass a pub doorway where, in the good old, bad old days, small boys would be placated with juice and crisps to wait for their fathers – indeed the Scotland legend Gordon Strachan told me last year, just after the death of his dad, that he used to be one of them.
Archie and I are hand in hand and I’m squeezing his initials in morse code like my father did with me and usually my boy replies to this but he’s distracted by the boisterousness – the chant “Oh the Hibees are gay”, a mock tussle – and looks worried. He’s a shy lad although the speed at which he ditched his stabilisers and swimming armbands has enabled me to wind up his mother: “Before we know it he’ll have plooks and an unsuitable girlfriend.” Being in the vicinity of Jambos, however, is a different matter.
This is what I had to do for Heartfelt and it terrified me but maybe we shelter kids from too much now. From the day I drove our newborn son away from the maternity unit – maximum speed 23mph, shouting at other motorists for inching up to junctions 400 yards ahead – I know I’ve been over-protective in a way my father never was. Then I remember how everyone at my school apart from me was allowed to stay up late to watch Hitchcock’s Psycho on TV; how whenever Celtic or Rangers with their bogeymen reputations came to town I had to stay at home.
We enter the ground and Archie looks up at the stands and mouths “Wow” – surely the first expression of wonder heard here this dismal season. We’ve come to where I stood the first time, though the place is all-seated now. When the Hibs fans hoist scarves above heads during the Proclaimers’ Sunshine On Leith he copies them. Little does Archie know his father risked missing his arrival in the world to hear the unofficial anthem sung 50 miles away at Hampden in celebration of Hibs’ 2007 League Cup triumph. And then this match starts; there’s no going back now.
I’m worried he’ll be lost to football like me but I’m also worried he won’t, that he’ll be denied the wonderful opportunity to become an anorak who may be socially awkward but can name the capital of Peru (it’s Lima; fitba taught me this). Apart from the game not being as good now (yawn yawn, bore bore), there are so many counter-attractions. In ’67 everything about match-days was thrilling, even the ceremony of the half-time scoreboard when a man with a bag of numbers would walk round the pitch and climb a ladder into a giant box on stilts. This is the everything-on-demand generation and such innocent pleasures just won’t do. The day before we were in our local swing-park – full of helicopter parents as usual – and I told them we were going to the football. Their expressions were of pity mixed with mild shock. “Fearties and snobs,” I muttered to myself. If the Scottish game lacks the middle-class cachet of down south then that’s a good thing. “Archie, my boy, you’re about to get a useful life-lesson.”
Back at the match he seems to be taking it all in. After “F***!” figures three times in a single sentence spat from the row behind us, he says: “That’s Grandpa’s bad word.”
In ’67 I was entranced by the aroma of pipe tobacco. Today Archie says: “Daddy, what’s that funny smell?” The polis are moving into the away end where a Jambo appears to have started a conflagration. “A job for Fireman Sam?” I venture. My son, not yet five, looks at me as if to suggest his cartoon hero just got babyish; that he’s hanging out with the big boys now.
Of course he’s not. Long before the end he’s preoccupied with the rubbish gathered under the seats (cue voice from behind: “Aye and there’s a lot more f***in’ rubbish oot on the park!”). He’s impatient for the final whistle (“Yes but how long is 20 minutes?”). And he has to ask: “How many are Hearts winning?” The final score is 3-1, same as it in ’67 when Hibs beat Clyde, but today they lose.
Back at home we’re greeted by Archie’s three-year-old sister Stella who says: “Good game, boys?” This reminds me of how my own sisters had to be so supportive of my supporting. (Once, a match in Methil falling on a New Year holiday necessitated them being bundled into the car, to amuse themselves in a town that was otherwise shut.)
Do I want my family to be similarly ruled by football? Will Archie’s interest sustain to where we can properly male-bond (though my father and I didn’t use such poncey terms)? Will it endure through the silent teenage years? Will he one day want to go with his mates? Will we find our way to Greenock? Too many questions, too much pressure – bad parenting. Right now he just wants to get back to Cars 2.
Truth be told, I had a selfish reason for taking him to the football. Understandably after 44 and a half years’ unswerving devotion, I’d got a bit disillusioned. Roger McGough has a lovely poem called Bearhugs, about watching sons grow up, grow past their father. At the start, when they greet him, the boys are “squeezing the life out of me”. By the end he’s come to depend on their vigour, innocence and optimism and reckons they’re squeezing the life in.
Today Archie squeezed the football into me.
STV (Ragers News) you couldn’t make it up………………….”Celtic player caught driving without insurance”
Nicholas Witchall reports –
“Her Majesty has urged Revenue and Customs to pursue the current proceedings in Edinburgh’s first tier tribunal to a swift and successful conclusion. Prince Philip has complained to media sources that the Queen is very disappointed that the nation is unable at present to bestow a new yacht given the debts accumulated by her sporting enterprise. Once the case has been concluded, Her Majesty is believed to be willing to trade the vast 50,000 tonne rusting container ship SS Ipox, for a new vessel, HMS Newco. Meanwhile, the Brittania has sprung a leak…”
The Mo Bangura Influence
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-16582825
The Haunting
Bawsman
My earlier take wiz rang.
£24M cheating amount + Intrest between £12M with Pen between £12M/£15M still to be negotiated via seperate tribuneral.
MWD
Peeing Hector Off Don’t Work
All this talk of paying Taxes
It’s getting me down my love
Like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown
This time we’re going down
And we hope you’re thinking of us
As you lay down laughing on your side
Not paying tax don’t work
It just make your situation worse
But we know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Not paying your tax don’t work
It just make your situation worse
But we know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
But we know we’re on a losing streak
‘Cause we passed down our old street
And there was no show, they just let us know
We’ll no play in there again
Not paying your tax don’t work
It just makes your situation worse
But we know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
‘Cause baby, ooh, if Hector calls, we’re going down, too
Just like you said, Hector’s coming and we’re better off dead
All this talk of Old and Newco
It’s getting me down my love
Like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown
This time we’re going down
Not paying tax don’t work
It just makes you situation worse
But we know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
‘Cause baby, ooh, if Hector calls, we’re going down, too
Just like you said, Hector’s coming and we’re better off dead
But if your in division 3 just let us know
And we’ll sing in your ear again
Not paying tax don’t work
It just makes your situation worse
But we know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Yeah, We know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Yeah, We know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Yeah, We know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Yeah, We know we’ll see your face again in the Scottish Cup
Jack says we’re never going down, we’re never going down
But there’s no way, he knows, he knows, he knows, he knows
Jack says we’re never going down, we’re never going down
But there’s no way, he knows, he knows, he knows, he knows
(Repeat and Fade Out)
LiviBhoy says:
16 January, 2012 at 12:45
Anybody else done the survey on the Official Celtic Facebook page?
It would appear that they are finally looking at creating a fans forum. There is also a opportunity to rate the current website and add comments.
Celticquicknews also gets a mention when the question is asked on the forums you view.
I would suggest all supporters take part. It’s our club. You can also win a signed jersey.
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They are and for me such a forum is a key part of the Membership Scheme, so I would ask everybody who moans about the need for better communication between the club and support to take the survey. Even if you do not use the Celtic Web site a lot you might make the point where it asks for comments that an informative forum for members is what might attract you to the other parts of the site.