Jump to content

 

 

andy steel

 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    4,054

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by andy steel

  1. andy steel
    He does, and I thought it was a very well done piece. But I still disagree with some of it! The 'nothing out of Murray Park' is an easy stick to beat Rangers with and unless it's qualified with the caveats that you mentioned - that Scots youth teams have regularly shone but done nada at top level, which can hardly be the fault of Murray Park, that the best players go to England, like Mackay-Steven, that 1001 factors must be taken into account - it veers toward a little out of balance. But hey, I'm the first to admit I am not rational when it comes to Rangers. Maybe he's right!
  2. andy steel
    I thought it agreed with your post?!
  3. andy steel
    Sorry Z, these are all in the middle of exam season.
  4. andy steel
    That the chief exec. focusing on the firs team means there was nothing going on at youth level; that focusing on winning at first team level is so bad, I certainly wasn't complaining at the time, this means this: that we maybe missed out on young talent like wossname in the article, who had to drop to amateur level before coming good, hardly proof positive that his release was a major error by RFC staff: this quote would suggest that the players who shone at that very young level didn't make it - what were we meant to do, play them anyway just so we could point to a young lad in the first team, while we got pumped?; that Murray Pk hasn't produced anything of note; that the lads 'believed their own press' (what press? at youth level? El Fideldo's blog is the only place I read about any of them!); this is little more than an attention grabbing headline, quickly modified in the article with unnamed 'other chief protagonists' and effectively rendered meaningless in so doing; and that Barca's model, which has landed them in seriously deep shit, is something to aspire to. Other than that, as I say, good piece.
  5. andy steel
    Well written piece. I'd take pretty serious issue with a lot of its conclusions, mind you.
  6. andy steel
    It was no coincidence that when Little got injured our form slumped alarmingly! I was pleasantly surprised by him in the early part of this season, I thought he looked very good. One I would certainly keep.
  7. andy steel
    Both Jamie Murphy and the big lump Harry McGuire (cb) of Sheffield Utd would do me for starters. Unlikely they'd fancy second tier Scotland over working with Son of Clough, though.
  8. andy steel
    Aye, but, if we own the club and it needs £10m worth of repairs for Ibrox to get a safety cert, how do we do it?
  9. andy steel
    How would it work under outright fan ownership? Is there anything in that model which could suggest a model to follow?
  10. andy steel
    There's no way we're £10m short of a safety certificate - have you seen some of the grounds we've been at these last few years? Anything which would impact on the ground being closed can be dealt with as and when, whether it be by present incumbents or again by HNWI who have bought into the King plan and who may use this as the path to the boardroom themselves. Signing up as of now requires little more than a gesture - I expect many people will want to see some facts and figures before committing your actual money.
  11. andy steel
    A small word for Pinnochio at Southampton - thin on resources, big on decent football. Made two average strikers World Cup candidates as well.
  12. andy steel
    You would imagine someone with the resources would become the legal trustee, and should any work need done on the stadium would fund the sub-contraction to an appropriate company. If the team went elsewhere (a) it would be pretty much apocalpyto and (b) I wouldn't care to be the person who made that call. Not even our board could be that dumb, surely.
  13. andy steel
    I suppose if your definition of 'unhealthy' is 'extinct', the current scenario could possibly be described as 'healthy'. You've no business making a living from words, though.
  14. andy steel
    'nuclear winter'??? Fuck off, plagiarist!!!
  15. andy steel
    Very kind, RPB. I need to look up the last of those, mind you. OP now edited to make some kind of sense - posted in wrong forum last night, sorry bout that.
  16. andy steel
    Enough with Rangers based navel gazing! Here's some golf based navel gazing. Football is a funny old game, said Saint and Greavsie in their inexplicably popular lunchtime show of the 1980's. I guess it showed how stuck in its ways Football Focus had become that such a dismally unfunny programme could actually be made, let alone become popular. At least it allowed Jimmy Greaves some later life rehabilitation, which given his abilities (before my time, I admit) and drink troubles counts for something. Takes a lot to justify inflicting Ian St. John on the nation, though. There's never been any accounting for football with logic, though. Or sport, in general. As the weekend draws to a close, the annual circus that is The Masters adorns our screens, the stunning flora of Georgia only matched by the stunning crassness of a set up which reduces golf to little more than hit and hope, a well paid version of the fabulous crazy golf course next to the ferry port at Brodick. One of the holes features a miniature version of the Forth Rail Bridge - Brodick, that is, not Augusta. Some may see this assertion as heresy, but it's ever harder to defend The Masters as anything but golf for people who don't get golf. Galleries made up of a-whoopin' and a -hollerin' Bubba lardos, about as unreflective of golf's horribly overdue racial diversity as you can get, greens which appear to be devoid of grass, golf's risk-and-reward ethos eliminated and replaced by pure luck: The Masters isn't golf, it's stick and ball based comedy. Such an opinion, alas, found me in the company of the awful Peter Alliss, about whom I feel bad being mean since he plainly is not long for this world. I won't miss his commentary, though, which is ever more a talking obituary column and less about the golf. Alliss has dared incur the wrath of Augusta's organisers by publicly, on air, calling out their tournament for the shambles that it is: 'Bobby Jones never played golf like this', he said this evening, and he was right: you probably couldn't have fitted Bubba Watson's ludicrously oversized driver into Jones' golf bag. How I would have loved to be good enough to get an invite! I would be torn between declining on the grounds that it isn't real golf and that to endorse such a bastion of sexism and racism is unethical, or turning up in full clown outfit, with wig, squirting flower in lapel and sporting giant shoes. The only worry is that, in the world of pro golf, such attire might not be thought unusual. I do often think, sardonic smile on chubby face, how Spiers can reconcile his decades long attendance at Augusta with his crusade on diversity in Scotland. Or how the BBC as a body justifies it. Or their coverage of our Open. However, golf is changing, and broadcasters no longer need be embarrassed to cover it. They can move on, so can golf. Be nice if they extended the same courtesy to us, but no matter. I fear to keep such conservative company as Peter Alliss, who is out there in the land where that Inverdale oaf is acceptable. Queer bedfellows, indeed. I am far more comfortable cuddling in with someone like Peter Tatchell, of Outrage, or gay rights group Stonewall. Like Nil by Mouth on golf, such people have been loud in their denunciation of football as a hotbed of homophobia, but although they have my every sympathy in their general aims, when it comes to football I just can't see it. Football must be the least macho sport around, replete with much mano-a-mano hugging, shorts which are again, after two decades of repressed, baggy shorts, showing signs of becoming short shorts again, more unconvincing acting than Rory McIlroy in that Santander ad (once more I wonder how some ad executives both get and keep their jobs) and - the final clincher, this - people who are always threatening violence but who never, ever actually throw a punch. Footballers are the weediest bunch ever. Why the game gets a homophobic name is beyond me: if we're going to accept 1970's stereotypes of homosexuality, you'd have to chalk up fitba as the game of Queens, on the pitch at least. I suppose it's like all those rockers who used to worship Freddy Mercury without either knowing or turning a hair about his rampant queer identity. Well, I can't work out people who want to make us all different anyway. Gay or straight, most of us are boring, dull people who don't differ all that much - work, sleep, work, shopping, complain, work and so on. Fetishists, those are the freaks we should be marginalizing, like fans of rubber or nihilist East Fife fans. The half-cut beer bellies who are presently intoning 'Kooooooch' in order to worship a lanky, inoffensive golfer aren't doing any more harm than some half-cut Weegie twat calling a footballer 'a big poofy bastart' because he shirked a tackle. But the lads in Georgia sound like wallopers, and so do unthinking or conscious homophobes at football games. It certainly doesn't take a PC totem like Spiers or Cosgrove, working to a highly selective agenda of inclusivity, to realise that this ain't the 70's, and that neither tartan flares on the golf course nor nasty jibes about what other people get up to in the bedroom are really on. Anyway, I'd bet that the idea that gay people indulge in a non-stop festival of sweaty shagging is as far from the mark as the idea that I, married 15 years, am doing likewise with my missus. Like I say, work, sleep, and so on is much the same regardless. But one of these days, like Augusta, we in Scotland will catch up with the rest of the world. Even St Andrews allows women in to the clubhouse now! Everyone, everywhere is in a flux, a process of change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, like in Ukraine. This idea that of the entire globe, only Rangers FC can never change has to be consigned to the bin, whether it comes from LUMP fundmentalists within our own support or everyone else who are ironically more puritan in their distaste of us than we, with our imaginary Calvinist identity, could ever be: look at the effort they have put in to demonising us over the last few years! We can only dream of such ideologically driven energy. Here's to the golf, anyway. No doubt I will watch again next year, as Westwood demonstrates that not being able to putt means you'll never win a biggie, and that golf should not really be allowed away from Scottish links. Perhaps it will help me forget another week of enormous letdown brought on by eleven men in shorts. It's a queer old game, right enough.
  17. andy steel
    Surely I'm not the only one outraged that the SFA allowed this game to take place at what was essentially a home venue for St Mirren?
  18. andy steel
    Only got this far. Now, where's me pitchfork...
  19. andy steel
    Agree we can't afford to be choosy but it's certainly not the ideal image to be projecting.
  20. andy steel
    Absolute crap, as usual. While they were never popular, the like of Solly Sanderson or even Alex Cameron, God help us, had their fans and were missed by some. Proof of Hugh's dire abilities is the fact that no-one at all will even notice he's not there, let alone miss him.
  21. andy steel
    Yes, true enough. I can't give you empirical evidence, obviously, but the gut tells me that something had to happen in the last month or two to encourage people to renew or else the empty seats which have been all too visible as this season went on will be permanently empty, and not because ST holders would rather go to Petstore than Ibrox but because they will consider £500+ better spent on a weekend in beautiful Kintyre or something. Nothing has happened. We won the league, Ally spoke out about youth getting a chance, and since then we have managed to play even worse than before (not a feat I would have thought possible, frankly), seen flashes of only one young player (Gallagher) who was promptly dumped in favour of unfit failures when it came to cup games, horrible legal threats and a suspiciously rushed renewal process. Bluntly if someone wanted fans NOT to renew they couldn't have done a much better job of it. I feel, only feel, that the bulk of fans who renew will be like yourself, able to afford it and with decades of habit they simply cannot break. Anyone who has been STing for less time, or is feeling the pinch (which must be a good few), will be a very very hard sell indeed - and that's entirely the fault of the present incumbents. We've been here before, in the mid 80's: I don't see any reason why we won't go down to the hard core of @10k ST holders again. And that, we will agree, would spell disaster.
  22. andy steel
    Tbf BH, if we cannot sell out 3/5 of the ground for a Cup semi against a team that hates us it's a pretty clear indication that fans are bailing out. Therefore to conclude that ST's will be down is not exactly in the realms of Nostradamus!
  23. andy steel
    Agreed and understood, Darther - but from my point of view the present incumbents are doing such a poor job, from financial management, through PR to, sadly, tolerating a quite dreadful coaching setup, that the first order of business must be to replace them with someone else. We'd all have our own ideas on who best to replace them, under what model and on what timescale, but unless we are in a position to come up with the shekels all we can really do is shout on the internet, hold up protest cards - or use the one direct action available, make the ST monies contingent on improvement (in one or more of these areas). King would have to come with an airport's worth of baggage for me to view him as equally uncertain a candidate at the Blakey Bros. & chums, and while he's certainly not 'hand-luggage' only the potential £££ he brings, allied to the potential changing of the guard all round, outweighs the negs for me. No doubt Hildy will be on with his Calvinist fire & brimestone to denounce me for a sheep like lackey but in the real world it's the best available option at this moment. While we cannot know what the future holds, we can be certain it holds failure and pretty sure it contains collapse at some point under the present lot - there's only one person in a position to change things right now and that's King.
  24. andy steel
    It is self evident from the superb way that dB uses English, which is of course a second language, that the man is intelligent. There is zero point reducing your disagreements with him to 'he's stupid' because it will persuade no-one and, unfortunately, leave the person making the accusation looking like the daft one. Aside from which, internet warrioring is a waste of energy. Easy for me to say at 43, and you're plainly in your 20's or late teens, but then again I am a condescending arrogant twat.
  25. andy steel
    Any excuse for a pic of Mrs Slocombe: Would you mind holding my pussy?
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.