Kris Commons looked like he had put a lot of practice into taking penalties yesterday. The ball was firmly hit and found the corner of the net, a feat which is far from impossible but which has been beyond various Celtic players for the last few years. We have little a little over a month before we could face a penalty kick competition against Juventus. Penalty kick practice should be on the menu every day between now and then, for the entire squad.
I’m delighted Lukasz Zaluska has had an extended run in the team. No player will be at his best if he is seldom tested and never in important games. Lukasz carried his share of the blame for last weekend’s Hampden defeat but not every keeper can pull off a Nigel Spink. Good to have Fraser back for Inverness.
If you read on a Celtic site that The Rangers chief executive and chairman are “at loggerheads” after “a chaotic week of back-biting” or that there is a prospect they will “frighten the life out of those institutional investors who ploughed £17million into the coffers little more than a month ago”, you would be forgiven for discounting the claim as a case of wishful thinking.
When it comes from the Daily Record and recent colleague of the club’s newly installed head of media you can be sure there is a little more to it than that.
You would think with all the positive feedback Green and Murray would have received form the SPL Commission they would be flush with joys. I sincerely hope, for their sake, that Phil’s Bridge over Troubled Waters ditty was more wishful thinking than another leak from the media team. That would be embarrassing. “Squelch.”
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Will be very interesting to see how many turn up at Ipox on Saturday. Are we about to see the bubble of defiance finally pop?
RA BERRRS WILL NO BE HAPPY!
I’m quite chirpy :O)
You would think that a body buried in a car park under tarmac would stay buried…
JamsieBhoy
Rangers lack class on the pitch AND off it as self-pity clouds every decision
4 Feb 2013 00:01
RANGERS should be ripping through the lower levels with some spectacular performances, instead of blowing the opportunity they have to reinvent themselves.
SOMEWHERE amidst all the fog and fury of the last 12 months, Rangers Football Club has lost its sense of direction.
A once proud giant of Scottish football stumbles around from pitch to pitch, forgetting where it came from and with no idea of how to get back there.
Today’s Rangers is in a state of deep confusion. The brutal events of the last year have left it so ravaged and traumatised that it can now barely be recognised. It is exhausted. It has become a ghost of a club.
The initial rush of pain and anguish which set in on administration day, last February 14, was quickly followed by a head-spinning mix of anger and resentment at the rest of the world. You can’t blame Rangers for that. It was an understandable, human reaction to a truly desperate situation.
They had been battered in their sleep by Craig Whyte and then, as they lay sobbing and bloodied with an outstretched hand, others took it in turn to boot them into the gutter. In their darkest hour, they found no friendship or sympathy. Only more hostility and hatred.
No wonder then that these events took such a heavy and lasting toll.
But amidst all of these powerful, blinding emotions, Rangers have also lost sight of what they are supposed to be about. They are engulfed by self-pity and resentment.
For their own good, the time has come to stop playing the victim card and to get on about their business because, both on and off the park, today’s Rangers is seriously lacking in class and in danger of self harming all over again.
It’s bad enough on the park, where Ally McCoist and his players have been blundering around the lower leagues since August, from one sub-standard performance to the next.
On Saturday they returned to far more familiar territory at Tannadice and yet, from the moment they arrived, they could not have looked more lost or out of place.
In fact, the defeat brought the curtain down on a chaotic week of back-biting behind the scenes which could yet prove to be far more damaging to the club’s long term revival than McCoist’s aversion to staying in cup competitions for any respectable length of time.
Word has it the chief executive is at loggerheads with his chairman, Malcolm Murray, and that their relationship has broken down. It’s likely that they will be forced to call a truce for the greater good and in order not to frighten the life out of those institutional investors who ploughed £17million into the coffers little more than a month ago.
So the two of them will be told to limp on for a while, although probably only until the summer, but the fact that things have become so strained and so volatile in a brand new boardroom is another major cause for alarm.
It could be that Murray, a long-standing Rangers supporter, is finding it increasingly difficult to recognise his own club in its current, angry guise. If so, who could blame him? Rangers are indeed a baffling business.
How can it be that a team of highly-paid professionals, earning more than any other in the country with one obvious exception, perform so amateurishly? So regularly?
Why has McCoist been so ready to abandon the standards which have been embedded into the marble foyer of Ibrox since the beginning of time?
Never in his life has McCoist allowed himself to lower the bar to such a level but already it is hard to see him ever soaring high again. Rangers under McCoist are now truly a Third Division team. That’s the ultimate insult.
Yes, they might be well clear at the top of the table but is this seriously to be considered as any kind of triumph when, in fact, they are grinding out results by the odd goal and often failing to do even that? Should today’s Rangers really be proud of that?
No, what they are really doing here is blowing an opportunity to reinvent themselves and the way they play the game. McCoist has been given a blank canvas and right now he’s making an almighty mess of it. It’s time for him to get a grip before he too falls out with Green and an even bigger mess is created.
Yes, McCoist never imagined having to manage at this lowly level but now that he is, he should be operating with a bit more style.
If a club like Swansea can rise up like a beautiful phoenix from their own financial abyss, then shouldn’t Rangers aspire to do the same?
McCoist should be busy rebranding this team and introducing a contemporary passing game. He has time to tweak his template as Rangers rise up through the leagues, recruiting better players on the way. And he should have this new, slicker Rangers ready to hit the ground running in the SPL when that day arrives.
In the meantime, Rangers should be ripping through the lower levels, blitzing their part-time opponents aside like football’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters. They should be making a show of it. Instead, they are making a spectacle of themselves.
Maybe if that positive mentality had prevailed from the start, they might not have looked so overwhelmed at a place like Tannadice.
But standards are not what they once were inside Ibrox. And McCoist alone is not to blame.
On Saturday, Yorkshire’s one-man circus rolled into Tayside and the Rangers chief executive did about as much to enhance the reputation of his club as his players. As if his ill thought out endorsement of a boycott of the cup tie was not quite mean spirited enough, Green refused to shake hands or break bread with United’s directors or chairman Stephen Thompson.
Instead, he waited until just before kick-off then bustled in through reception to take a seat in a private box.
Green will no doubt have taken some satisfaction from giving Thompson the cold shoulder. After all, the United man has previously acted in the same spiteful manner, preferring to sit on his own in an empty team bus outside Ibrox rather than to go inside and press pre-match flesh in the boardroom. Pathetic.
But even if Thompson had it coming, Green’s behaviour will nonetheless continue to alienate Rangers from the rest while perpetuating the feeling of victimisation amongst his own. He is presenting such a snarling face that it is hard for others to feel any kind of compassion for what his club has suffered.
Green’s raging bull act is becoming a bore. It’s doing more damage than good at a time when grown up conversations about the state of Scottish football are required. After all, what would be the point in restoring Rangers to its former self if huge chunks of the competition are not fit for purpose by the time Green’s club returns?
Time to change the mood music, Charles. It’s simply not healthy to stay so angry at so many for
so long.
Ole Leckie and Jackson had the same tip off at Ludge?
Afternoon CQN , agreed Paul , practice is required from everyone even the keepers we all remember the dun utd penalty decider 11-10 with Arturs penalty in the top corner,
now that would be a memorable way to beat Juve and qualify for the last 8 ,
looks like all is not well down newco ibrox way, shame
By BILL LECKIE Published: 03rd February 2013
Tweet
SEE that telly show Who Do You Think You Are?
It’s high time they had wee Ian Black on it.
Not researching his family tree.
He’d just be sitting in front of a camera, explaining exactly who he DOES think he is.
On the evidence of Saturday, it’s someone pretty special indeed.
Part Charles Bronson-style enforcer, part pantomime WWE wrestling baddie. And 100 per cent Charlie Big Spuds.
Well, I’m sorry to be the one to burst your bubble, son. But here is the news. You’re a player who was going somewhere but who chose to swap the top flight for the Third Division and now can’t handle the pressure of the shop floor.
And at Tannadice, your attitude from first to last said everything about the total absence of class shown by rank rotten Rangers.
Don’t like that summing up much? Not surprised. I’m pretty sure the fans won’t either, because any suggestion that anything to do with their club is any less than the noblest of the noble is met with a counter-suggestion that their critics should f*** off and die in agony.
But sadly, it’s just how it was in the Scottish Cup thumping by Dundee United.
And I really do MEAN sadly, because Rangers could and should be much better than this. From the way they reacted when the draw was made to the hopeless way they defended and reckless way they tackled, they showed no class in any sense of the word.
Though to be fair, there is one high-profile exemption to that sweeping dismissal. Their manager.
Ally McCoist has never, in the 30 years in which our paths have crossed, been anything BUT classy. He’s spent half his life pumping out a positive image of Rangers, which is why it’s so baffling that, for a guy who is so idolised by the fans, that positivity never seems to catch on.
Look at how he handled himself in the build-up to the United tie. While t’mill owner Charles Green was rabble-rousing and fans were manning the boycott barricades, McCoist was doing his best to defuse the nonsense by wishing ex-Old Firm foe Jackie McNamara well as he took over the Tannadice hotseat.
That was a wee touch of quality, of common decency.
Black’s display was the exact opposite. That long, slow swagger off the pitch after being sent off?Embarrassing. A staggering act of self-deluding bravado.
You’ve just got a red card. You’ve let your team down. You should be getting yourself up that tunnel double-quick and having a good think about what you’ve done.
Or, alternatively, you could always applaud the two men and a dug in the away section, scowl at the home support while the cameras are fixed on you. Then pretend to pick up a corner flag like you’re going to javelin it into the crowd, cos that’s the kind of wacky funster you are.
Black sees himself as a victim. He whines about lower league hammer-throwers being out to get him, but he should have been booked for his first tackle of the game and didn’t have the savvy to take the hint and keep his nose clean from then on. So what else can you say but hell mend him?
Maybe he somehow thinks throwing his weight about will endear him to the punters.
Maybe that’s also what drove young sub Kal Naismith to earn an early shower for that ridiculous two-footed assault on Willo Flood.
If so, it’s an attitude that comes from the top. Not, as I’ve said, from the dugout, but from the VERY top, from Green with his permanent come-ahead view on the world, a view aided and abetted by the former journalist who is his newly-appointed Director of Provocation as they bash out angry press releases like McCoist used to bang in goals. They’re the Toshack and Keegan of rabble-rousing. Always sniffing for the next half-chance. They’ve got something inflammatory to say on anything and everything.
And even when there’s nothing to say, they put out statements anyway. Like this belter on Wednesday:
“Rangers Football Club today received notification of the SFA Arbitration Panel’s decision which ruled that the Club did not inherit the right to continue the arbitration process started by oldco.
“Suspecting this would be the outcome, the Club had already filed a further Notice to Refer under SFA Article 99. The Club had argued that since oldco’s registration had been transferred to newco the right to continue the case would also have transferred.
“Nothing has been won or lost at this stage and the Club will continue with its action.”
Brilliant, that. A complete non-story, yet they still manage to couch it in the kind of conspiratorial jargon that convinces the hard of thinking Thae SFA Basturts are up to no good again.
Everything’s about pointing fingers at the rest of the world, about looking inward and putting their own untidy house in order.
Even as I’m writing this, it’s a stick-on that the reaction from the ones Green’s rants are aimed at rousing will be the same as ever:
“See if you don’t like us? Then don’t watch us. Don’t comment on us. Just leave us be.”
If only it was that simple. But it’s not, partly because Rangers are one half of every game they play, but mostly because they seem oblivious to the irony that they feel entitled to cane everyone and everything they see as not being on their side.
Which is pretty much everyone and everything outside Ibrox Stadium.
With a few more McCoists around the place and a few less Greens and Blacks, there’s no doubt it would be different.
But it seems Rangers have made their choice. They don’t want to win people round with a charm offensive.
They just want to be offensive.
Rangers lack class on the pitch AND off it as self-pity clouds every decision
By Keith Jackson | 4 Feb 2013 00:01
SOMEWHERE amidst all the fog and fury of the last 12 months, Rangers Football Club has lost its sense of direction.
A once proud giant of Scottish football stumbles around from pitch to pitch, forgetting where it came from and with no idea of how to get back there.
Today’s Rangers is in a state of deep confusion. The brutal events of the last year have left it so ravaged and traumatised that it can now barely be recognised. It is exhausted. It has become a ghost of a club.
The initial rush of pain and anguish which set in on administration day, last February 14, was quickly followed by a head-spinning mix of anger and resentment at the rest of the world. You can’t blame Rangers for that. It was an understandable, human reaction to a truly desperate situation.
They had been battered in their sleep by Craig Whyte and then, as they lay sobbing and bloodied with an outstretched hand, others took it in turn to boot them into the gutter. In their darkest hour, they found no friendship or sympathy. Only more hostility and hatred.
No wonder then that these events took such a heavy and lasting toll.
But amidst all of these powerful, blinding emotions, Rangers have also lost sight of what they are supposed to be about. They are engulfed by self-pity and resentment.
For their own good, the time has come to stop playing the victim card and to get on about their business because, both on and off the park, today’s Rangers is seriously lacking in class and in danger of self harming all over again.
It’s bad enough on the park, where Ally McCoist and his players have been blundering around the lower leagues since August, from one sub-standard performance to the next.
On Saturday they returned to far more familiar territory at Tannadice and yet, from the moment they arrived, they could not have looked more lost or out of place.
In fact, the defeat brought the curtain down on a chaotic week of back-biting behind the scenes which could yet prove to be far more damaging to the club’s long term revival than McCoist’s aversion to staying in cup competitions for any respectable length of time.
Word has it the chief executive is at loggerheads with his chairman, Malcolm Murray, and that their relationship has broken down. It’s likely that they will be forced to call a truce for the greater good and in order not to frighten the life out of those institutional investors who ploughed £17million into the coffers little more than a month ago.
So the two of them will be told to limp on for a while, although probably only until the summer, but the fact that things have become so strained and so volatile in a brand new boardroom is another major cause for alarm.
It could be that Murray, a long-standing Rangers supporter, is finding it increasingly difficult to recognise his own club in its current, angry guise. If so, who could blame him? Rangers are indeed a baffling business.
How can it be that a team of highly-paid professionals, earning more than any other in the country with one obvious exception, perform so amateurishly? So regularly?
Why has McCoist been so ready to abandon the standards which have been embedded into the marble foyer of Ibrox since the beginning of time?
Never in his life has McCoist allowed himself to lower the bar to such a level but already it is hard to see him ever soaring high again. Rangers under McCoist are now truly a Third Division team. That’s the ultimate insult.
Yes, they might be well clear at the top of the table but is this seriously to be considered as any kind of triumph when, in fact, they are grinding out results by the odd goal and often failing to do even that? Should today’s Rangers really be proud of that?
No, what they are really doing here is blowing an opportunity to reinvent themselves and the way they play the game. McCoist has been given a blank canvas and right now he’s making an almighty mess of it. It’s time for him to get a grip before he too falls out with Green and an even bigger mess is created.
Yes, McCoist never imagined having to manage at this lowly level but now that he is, he should be operating with a bit more style.
If a club like Swansea can rise up like a beautiful phoenix from their own financial abyss, then shouldn’t Rangers aspire to do the same?
McCoist should be busy rebranding this team and introducing a contemporary passing game. He has time to tweak his template as Rangers rise up through the leagues, recruiting better players on the way. And he should have this new, slicker Rangers ready to hit the ground running in the SPL when that day arrives.
In the meantime, Rangers should be ripping through the lower levels, blitzing their part-time opponents aside like football’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters. They should be making a show of it. Instead, they are making a spectacle of themselves.
Maybe if that positive mentality had prevailed from the start, they might not have looked so overwhelmed at a place like Tannadice.
But standards are not what they once were inside Ibrox. And McCoist alone is not to blame.
On Saturday, Yorkshire’s one-man circus rolled into Tayside and the Rangers chief executive did about as much to enhance the reputation of his club as his players. As if his ill thought out endorsement of a boycott of the cup tie was not quite mean spirited enough, Green refused to shake hands or break bread with United’s directors or chairman Stephen Thompson.
Instead, he waited until just before kick-off then bustled in through reception to take a seat in a private box.
Green will no doubt have taken some satisfaction from giving Thompson the cold shoulder. After all, the United man has previously acted in the same spiteful manner, preferring to sit on his own in an empty team bus outside Ibrox rather than to go inside and press pre-match flesh in the boardroom. Pathetic.
But even if Thompson had it coming, Green’s behaviour will nonetheless continue to alienate Rangers from the rest while perpetuating the feeling of victimisation amongst his own. He is presenting such a snarling face that it is hard for others to feel any kind of compassion for what his club has suffered.
Green’s raging bull act is becoming a bore. It’s doing more damage than good at a time when grown up conversations about the state of Scottish football are required. After all, what would be the point in restoring Rangers to its former self if huge chunks of the competition are not fit for purpose by the time Green’s club returns?
Time to change the mood music, Charles. It’s simply not healthy to stay so angry at so many for so long.
bournesouprecipe – makes sense , they say the appeal has been “lodged”
WeeJoe, 13:20
No, it was the one that Phil put up yesterday
tomtheleedstim
( ((
\ =\
__\_ `-\
(____)) ( \—-
(____)) _
(____))
(___))____/—-
“Rangers lack class on and off the pitch”
Here’s something else,
They also lack cash, trophies and history.
O.G.Rafferty
You got a ball park figure of what is owed?
Far Eastern consortium chasing sevco … Hmrc after them again… Bdo still hunting the oldco..
What was it their banner said … No not Walter the legned … We welcome the chase …. ;)
So Wee BILL LECKIE loves Ally and hates Jabba.Heads up this is the start of the journo war.
or was it we welcome the case?
OG
Any legal notifications today likely?
HH
…(relevant to our topic of recent hilarity, of course!)
HH
Cheers OG, should have known that was more unappealing to the zombies.
Nothing smells quite like Bhun on Bhun action on a Monday…
cartuja @cartujakds
Career FAIL… http://twitpic.com/c0v7od
If a lightbulb goes out and gets changed it’s a new lightbulb..
traditionalist88
13:57 on
4 February, 2013
OG
Any legal notifications today likely?
HH
++++
Does Scottish Football League lodged an appeal to the First Tier Tax Tribunal on 17th July last year for case hearing next month count?
Strange that they’re oh so very keen to hastily merge (read: self-destruct) with the SPL as soon as possible.
Linkage (scroll down to case FTC/56/2012, or search for ‘football’)
HMRC launch appeal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-21326039
In the clearing stands a rangers fan
He’s a villain by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every tim that layed him down
Imagined or not till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am Raging, I am leaving
But our titles still remain”
starry plough
14:01 on
4 February, 2013
Nothing smells quite like Bhun on Bhun action on a Monday…
———–
Deadclubmedia going into meltdown about HMRC appealing, but still no questions for chuck.
I dont think they like or believe Phil :))
EXILED TIM, I know nothing!
DougC, would be sweet.
LNS BDO HMRC
CQN CSC
BSR
LOL
CHE CSC
dirtymac
Interesting, will take a look
HH
leftclicktic
Denial will blind you to the most obvious truths..
Dharma ya bam!
” we welcome the case”
KWALITY!
:)
A smattering of their lordships’ on FF:
“Only being done for sectarian reasons.
There is NOTHING to gain for HMRC – no legal precedent, no money from us, and no money from Oldco.
There can only be ‘reasons outwith football’ for this.”
——
“hmrc are full of celtic men david cameron and george osbourne are a disgrace aswell”
——
“Its hard to follow , though I will continue, Rangers these days, it just gets more and more depressing.I feel like a hunted species half the time with this case, that singing, this tribunal etc etc its beyond a bloody joke.”
——
“Lets not give these ********s any more time or space They are a shower of braindead
bigots who are wasteing the tax payers money 2 tax experts for Rangers 1 accountant for the mob
The only way the verdict will change is if the sphell pick the jury.”
——
“HMRC mailedhim?
That should be investigated for a start.
Methinks IF this is true, Rangers lawyers should be demanding his arrest”
——
“Well here we all go again, what point of law they feel they can appeal on will be interesting. Thanks go out to all those bears who are out there who did not sign the e-petition against these people abusing their positions because they have only gone and done it again.
I am begining to wonder if we live in a free country anymore, plod make up any laws they fancy to make them look better, HMRC appealing and taking on defunct companies who cannot pay anything liable (as they would like) as said holding company has been liquidated, incompetant people running affairs and still we have that poisonous rhat “Timmy T******n” taking the p*** out of us all. What the **** has gone so wrong with our society, why did good people go off to die in foreign fields to only be replaced with rhat lickspittle barstewards who give not one **** about this country and instead see our history as an embarrasment. Needed to get that off my chest as it is now looking as though my 31st year on this planet will be spoilt just as my 30th was, I am just near the ****ing empty level on my tank and am getting more and more ****ed off!”
Huns dont do Irony :))
http://twitter.com/ArthurTrubshaw/status/298429643923525632/photo/1
Paul67…..gonny…please please please please change the colour of your post box….its playing havoc with my eyes
Seems to be all unraveling nicely.
The Sevcovians have truly learned nothing have they?
Nothing cheers you up like a hun in turmoil.