andy steel

There is no solace in those words. A prime example of Corporate Model of UK plc has the club by the balls, & no amount of rallying calls from another century is going to achieve anything. We have no recourse to law, nor public influence. We have no channels open which could 'bat' for us. We have a chronic PR problem. We have an in some ways out of date stadium which will become an increasing drain on scarce funds. We have extremely limited revenue generating options. We have competitors from across Europe and the world on our TV's daily and no means to compete with them. We have contemptuous fat cats and dimwitted simpletons comprising the board. We have tactically backward coaches training the team. We have a collapsed scouting system and what looks a lot like a youth system being choked of funding. No doubt I've left plenty out. These are not 'trials' not temporary, on the pitch 'failure'; these are the visible symptoms of a failed club. Struth's words have their place in the history of the club but taking them as a template for rescuing a 21st century business entity is not one of them. No doubt many in Pakistan would look to some rousing words from Jinnah in these times of crisis for that state but it won't actually do anything tangible to change things.

Not for me, not anymore. Your reply to T4C is to the point, though, because it WOULD be a new club, without the history of trophies. But it would have the collective folk memory. I think it would be an impossible sell because, bluntly, I don't think enough Rangers fans have the guts to do it. We'd have to be open enough to say it is a new club, it doesn't have the history, but it's still more Rangers than the imposter playing out of Ibrox. To be mildly insulting, it would require a lot of people who've banged on for years about having Presbyterian values actually putting them into practice. The evidence, though, is of a flock which prefers being led by an institutionalised hierarchy...maybe I'd better not give an example of one. I just don't think people will buy into it.

BH was the victim of puerile inter-fan rivalry rather than boardroom machinations - the minutes released so far are clear that the board don't give a monkey's about the RFB, let alone who's on it.

I suppose the only way to do it is not admins, liquidations, boycotts or any other plan, but the founding, from scratch, of a completely new club which is entirely, 100%, only and always about the 11 men in blue shirts and not about security over loans, mystery holding blocs, groups of requisitioners, merchandise deals or anything else you can think of. The team and only the team. It would need unbelievable strength of character, long term planning, collective action and the setting aside of ego. It could allow us to have a club rather than a business to follow, it could remind us why we love football and Rangers in the first place. It could attract the many hundreds (if not more) Rangers fans who won't touch the thing we see today with a barge pole, and who are in fact investing in other clubs even as we hirple on, getting further and further into the mire as we go. It could see a group of fans buy land, build a ground, assemble a team, work up from the very bottom, calling upon their reserves of strength and belief and achieve something that would be worth celebrating. But in all truth, it seems very unlikely.

#scumbags! Deeply dispirited to see Easdale setting foot on our pitch, even on a walkway.

Increasingly coming to believe we're going to have to.

John - while the club being self-sustainable would be welcome, if your analysis is correct then the buying habits of Rangers fans must - absolutely must - change radically. Rewarding an owner who creates a permanent culture of mediocrity would surely be too far, even for us?

Many fans aged over 40 will easily recall the grim days of the mid 80's, when the team, if not as bad as now, was pretty rotten and suffered 'humiliations' quite regularly. I could take that then, and I could take a crap team now. What I can't handle is the rotten, mutated, hideous entity running the place in the worst possible manner, embarrassing anyone who claims a connection with Rangers. I can take us losing: I can't take us losing our dignity. Fans of other clubs would no doubt derisively claim we never had any, but that view, which insists all Bears are in there with the LUMPS, is far from the real picture. It used to be about friends, family & football for me: I don't see how we can get back to that.

I admire and envy your positivity, but the question has to be asked: how?

Well, I'm a good poster but very depressed, so that would be about right.

"The intention will be to settle the absolute minimum with creditors before they can cash their chips and make money off the ground, most supporters thus feel the club may as well go bust so that at least a phoenix team may be able to take the stadium. But the incumbents have a history of doing this at other clubs and are well connected. The club has had 4 chairmen in 6 months as they pass it around dodging winding up orders and pesky owners and directors tests, I'm sure they'll come through this somehow still in possession of whats left of the club. A friend of mine is a Darlo fan, watching his team cease to exist was pretty tough but in the end he was relieved when their farcical former incarnation came to an end. I don't think it's an easy task to come back but enough teams have to show it can be done." For fans of a certain age, Ronnie Radford's 'rocket' speaks of an entirely different world of football. Mud bath pitches, genuine cup shocks, a pitch invasion not immediately followed by FA investigations and/or police reprisal, even the flared trousers of the kids take the viewer back to an era when daytime TV was more Open University than Loose Women, Mash and Fray Bentos was an aspirational dinner, and football was a stable certainty, with even the most badly run club more or less safe from extinction if they had any fans at all. Sadly for Hereford, the times have seriously changed. Banned from any and all football activity by the FA owing to failure to complete paperwork - rather than the various questionable practices by various questionable owners, the usual 'Al Capone' approach to oversight taken by enfeebled football authorities - the present era of free ownership by speculators rather than fans has led to an on field decline and a boycott by the vast majority of supporters, dismayed at the hollow shell their beloved club has become - this sounds familiar to the Rangers fan. It's come to the point where the FA ban is hailed as good news, at least to this Guardian commenter: "This news has been welcomed by myself and 90% of my fellow Hereford United fans. The club's demise this season has been heart-breaking and the response from the authorities has been either non-existent or completely toothless until now. It's good to see that the FA have finally acted but it's taken far too long." Late Friday has brought the news that, owing to the owner being stuck in traffic with a guarantee of funding, the club has in fact been wound up. It's the sort of farce that Bears are all too familiar with, and sends out the message that, should your owner be incompetent enough, extinction is all too possible. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-30542821 Why football authorities are so slow to protect their game is mystifying. Hereford might not be up there, financially, with Chelsea or Man City, but in football the whole is very much the sum of the parts, a lesson forgotten too easily by too many. Trying to sell a top league with no substrata will not be so easy as it might sound: if we have no Hereford, before long we have no Chelsea, at least not as we know it, for we lose the FA Cup, the League Cup, eventually losing entirely the interaction between 'giant' and 'killer'. If you have a lack of clubs who can aspire to the Premiership, the Premiership ceases to be aspirational. For some, replacement with an UltraEuroSuperLeague sounds very appealing, but shrinking the game to a super elite is no basis for a sustainable future. Lose the Body of the Kirk & you must reinvent yourself: and re-invention comes with no guarantee of success, as the Church of Scotland could attest. And just as important as a coherent national structure is a coherent model of ownership. Like much of Britain since the 70's, football has seen a decline in any form of social responsibility and a lurch into unfettered capitalism. Allowing teams to be owned by anyone who happens by with a chequebook - or whatever they have now - then belatedly issuing punishments which further damage the club rather than the dodgy owner is not common sense or natural law but it's symptomatic of Britain nowadays. You can see this kind of withdrawal from the social sphere all over the UK. The choking of funding to local government has seen the loss of effective town planning, resulting in ugly, empty and unattractive urban centres people would flee if only they could. In 2014 Britain, absolutely nothing is sacred, nothing is off the table, and mere football clubs going to the wall not just possible but starkly likely. "The club is still in the hands of conmen with another date at the High Court coming up on Monday (the 7th time...or is it the 8th...or 9th) that the club has been back there. Winding-up orders have been staved off due to the mysterious shifting around of funds by even more mysterious 'investors' and the involvement of shell companies." Iffy owners and bizarre financials have become part and parcel of the game, from Premiership to Pontins League, if that still exists. A big name is no guarantee of safety: in Scotland, Rangers currently tick most of the nightmare boxes Hereford were opening, like some nightmarish advent calendar, while the Scottish FA veer between anger, contempt and hamfisted appeasement in their attitude to the various owners who take the stage, but never actually achieve anything that might either kill or cure the Ibrox side: they, too, have adopted the light touch which in actuality is the expression of their powerlessness, so desperate are they for the financial benefit the club brings to overlook financial lunacy. This is not mere arrogance: the League Cup in Scotland, without a real sponsor for several seasons, suddenly gets one at this year's semi-final stage, with a much needed six figure sum going into the game. I'm sure the fact that one semi-final features Rangers playing Celtic is complete coincidence. Aping the attitude of Hereford's owners, Rangers treat their paying customer with total contempt. Last week, Rangers board member Mr Sandy Easdale took the opportunity to berate fans for not celebrating hard enough that naming rights to Ibrox Stadium, originally 'sold' to Mike Ashley of Newcastle Utd fame for the princely sum of £1, had been reclaimed. That this secret and stupid deal was rescinded only after a fan outcry apparently bypasses Mr Easdale; they should celebrate that the club was dragged into acting in the best interests of itself. His words: "We've gotten these (rights) back and the fans haven’t celebrated enough on this topic." The expression 'beyond parody' comes to mind. On the pitch the team is terrible. At least when Hereford's 'owner' Andy Lonsdale did the dirty on Feltham FC, by dumping rubbish on their pitch, he wasn't paying the rubbish £10,000 a week. [http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/bedfont--feltham-president-plays-7296079] There is an alternative to this ongoing horror story, though. It's nihilistic, dangerous and offers no guarantee of success, but at least it - unlike the present conditions - does have a potentially positive outcome. "Follow my team AFC Wimbledon and start again. You won't regret it and you won't feel like your being shafted each week by a rich owner with no understanding of a clubs place in the community." I find it astonishing that, as a Rangers man of 30 years and more, I can contemplate the death of my club, on the basis that the present incarnation is so hateful that either a rebirth, or nothing, would be preferable. It's certainly a scorched earth policy, but there have to be limits: currently Ibrox stadium is fast approaching decrepitude, a state of affairs completely unacceptable at a club where 66 people died in the 1971 disaster. Money comes in and disappears. Chairmen come and go, directors likewise. Majority shareholders emerge, only to retreat to offshore shadows. There seems no future. At a recent fan board meeting, one representative delivered an excoriating warning to the club that their attitude and provision toward disabled fans will see them barred from competing in UEFA competitions unless a serious amount of money is invested, now. Setting aside the grim mirth that the idea of the present Rangers team competing in Europe occasions - frankly, Hereford would probably put up a better showing - what UEFA decrees now, domestic bodies follow sooner or later, and Rangers will not be 'Ready', mocking the club's increasingly ironic motto. Rangers are so far from any kind of stability it's not true, and it's sad to see a club so far away from an even keel still spout the same rubbish about business reviews, plans going forward, all in it together, Champions League: the bullshit merchants of Glasgow are no more believable than their Wyvern equivalents in Hereford, just less honest. Coming back from the position Hereford and Rangers find themselves in is not easy, nor is it guaranteed, so I expect many if not all Rangers fans will consider a course of voluntary self-destruction, with only at best a 50-50 chance of a rebirth afterwards, insanity. Well, I'm certain I don't want to see the current mess go on any longer, and I'm selfish enough to believe that if it's not good enough for me, it shouldn't be good enough for anyone else. But I don't know that I've ever been entirely sane on the subject of my team: it was always about love, not reason. At present I am in the cowardly position of having little feeling for what is currently calling itself Rangers, but not having the guts to call for a completely new start, irrespective of history or heritage. "We're all hoping the end might, finally, be in sight." Whether the end turns out to be a new beginning, though, that's another question.

I can see why John was fed up. Life's too short.

You're not trying to suggest your post wasn't in defence of the other guy's abuse, are you?

The day I give a fuck what our enemies think of Ally McCoist there'll be two blue moons in the sky.

Dude, that's seriously not funny.

My naive bewilderment against your worldy, wise nous, and in no way my full, luxuriant head of hair, means you get to be big Sean.

Fair points, no question, but the overall impression for me remains one of complete confusion. I did try to look up Roddy Forsyth on Twitter last night to express surprise at him buying this line, but he doesn't seem to be on it.

That's actually a fair point which I had forgotten due to the abysmal quality of play - winning two leagues was the target, & he did it. I doubt if there's any clause in the contract which stipulates 'must be done with flair'. I wish there had been, though, and over the piece - from a fans view - I would certainly class Ally the manager as a failure. But from a contract pov, I suppose he'd solid.

I'll have a go, but I fear detail may be lacking. It's about input vs extraction. When, say, Brian Stockbridge wandered along, got a juicy contract, acted like a pillock and was then bonusized to leave, that was wrong because he got out so very much more than he put in. When Graham Wallace waddled in, splashed around rather aimlessly for several months then was bonusized to leave, that was wrong because he had achieved virtually nothing and absolutely nothing of any substance. When Ally McCoist wandered in, became our record scorer, club icon, hero to millions, lifebelt onto whom many grabbed, right rubbish manager, then resigned, it's not so wrong that he is recompensed because he put in more than he took out. I confess it's hard to justify given quite how bad his teams have played but it would be beyond satire to rather meekly accept repeated pay outs to non-entities then get hyper about one to a pillar of the club. Ideally I would prefer salary and glory to be the rewards without payoffs but that's the real world, the world of business many have pointed to when disparaging Ally, having it both ways as usual: we're a business! Except when it doesn't suit us! Then we're Mes Que en Club! A Club! What a joke. 'Clubs' are formed by like minded people, friends, colleague,s who get together through a mutual interest. In the rewriting of history that seeks to portray McCoist as venal, though, people thronged Edmiston Drive of a gameday, drawn not by Baxter, MacDonald, McLean or Cooper, but by an exciting brand of business which drove the club to the top. Until unfairly banned by the SFA, 'Hullo! Hullo! We are the Balance Boys' was often heard booming out from Ibrox. Having ploughed dispiritedly through month after month of this, we can put forward the syllogism that not only are Rangers not more than a club, nor not even no more than a club, it's not even a club.

I've been asked to make it clear that John was not in bed with me as I snuggled down with my book. Not last night, anyway.

I was just settling down in my bed with the great murder mystery book, The Name of the Rose, when John pointed to driving footfall in SD's ghastly shops as the raison d'etre behind Ashley's moves. The idea just doesn't quite add up in my head, though, so in best William of Baskerville fashion I've lay half the night trying to work out how to make 2+2=4. But I still can't get it to work out. If Ashley wants to use Rangers merch as a vehicle to generate sales, he has no need to acquire a single percentage more of Rangers than he already has, for as we now know he has tied up some staggeringly beneficial deals already. Short of taking 100% of RR profit I don't see how they could be any better for him, in fact. So why bother going to all the trouble of buying 29.9%? Or slashing costs which could never impinge on overall balance sheets, like secretaries? The serious way to do that is to target the playing staff bill, but that would inevitably impact on merch sales, since the impression given would be negative - you see, 2+2 doesn't come out as 4. And the CL? If SD is making a tidy profit from merch sales while we suck beyond any measure yet known to man, why outlay the expense needed to access the CL? As I said last night, CL participation isn't going to sell more than a handful of tops or scarves above what the present figures are, so why bother? The CL idea makes even less sense than buying another 20% of a club you have absolutely no need to buy. 9% for total control, massively advantageous contracts and useful oafs to take the heat = makes sense. 29% + £millions to get into the CL = non-sense. As loss leaders go, getting Rangers into the CL is about as extravagant as they come. Eventually all will become clear, no doubt, but for now I cannot understand what Ashley's strategy is.

We agreed never to speak of those times again! Fair enough, there seems no bottom to the well of gullibility from which Bears sup.

I hear this repeated time & time again. How? The money needed to qualify for the CL proper is huge. The money needed to escape from a group is colossal. Anything further than that is off the scale. The money needed to bring the stadium into compliance with UEFA is rising every month. Non-CL approved sponsors are not allowed to display logos during CL games. Even if all the above were, in an ideal world, to happen, Rangers would still be a footnote in 99% of countries CL coverage, maybe 30 secs of highlights if lucky. And all this is going to drive the SD brand to unheard of heights? I just don't see it.

Not that it matters, but PIsa were in for him when Serie A was the best league in Europe.

No wonder Regan is bailing...enforcing the rules like this will inevitably be see as pandering to Rangers.