andy steel

Good words from Jardine, but I',m not certain we can blame the tax folk for being pissed off with us. Unless he means the retrospective rule changes, in which case we'd have to know if it was HMRC or the govt. which moved the goalposts.

Yes, but why? Breast cancer awareness is best directed at those with, well, breasts. And I mean real ones, not the flabby things I have lolloping about on what used to be a flat, manly chest. Ah, youth... I can't see many Bears going home on Saturday night, and bringing up the subject over the Saturday night takeaway. Mind you, I could always try and cop a feel off the missus, and when she belts me I can claim it was Rangers that made me do it.

I don't find a single sentence in Ian's summary earlier remotely convincing. Unless he can back up his claims with hard evidence - which you'd imagine he would have done by now - it sounds a lot like bullshit. Fuck off, Whyte.

S'awright. Being over 40 I can't share the young peoples' enthusiasm for men wearing pink, though.

I'm curious - why is a ground full of blokes a good place to heighten breast cancer awareness? I mean, well done and good luck but it seems an odd choice. No offence meant.

Apparently Hearts had a transfer embargo applied after last month, but it was kept secret for some reason by the SPL.

GROUP A Team MP W D L GF GA Pts Belgium 4 3 1 0 8 1 10 Croatia 4 3 1 0 6 2 10 Serbia 4 1 1 2 6 5 4 Macedonia 4 1 1 2 3 4 4 Wales 4 1 0 3 3 11 3 Scotland 4 0 2 2 2 5 2 Nicht gut.

I don't know how to answer this because it doesn't relate to what I wrote in any way at all. By 'cultivating people I have no wish to cultivate' I meant the journalists at the Mail, who would be interested should I put them in the direction of statements certain people make. By doing this, I'd be lowering myself to the level of the likes of Greenslade and Thomson, while exploiting a mindset (the Daily Mail mindset) with which I've little in common. Or, if I do nothing, I get called a handwringer. I don't see how any of that is disliking certain sections of Rangers fans. Bit baffled, to be honest, Allan.

Look on the bright side....it will be an exciting fight to the death to see who finishes bottom between us, Wales & Macedonia.

Sounds like a club for gay Orangemen.

Please don't think I am in any way agreeing with the like of the Weird Sisters listed above - but having thought it over, the only two identities we actively advertise are Loyalist Irish & Imperialist British. I may know we are Scottish, but the only visible sign or sound of it I can think of is the wee saltire on our shirt - there's not a single Scottish tune. Not many clubs will have songs which refer to their country of origin, mind you. And you'd have to be deaf dumb and blind not to notice which country we are based in. Still...as long as we raise our standards to 'Rule Brittania' and 'King Billy's On The Wall' we will remain a target for people who despise such concepts. Should they have better things to do with their time? Of course they should. Do we make it easy for them? Well, a bit. All I'm meaning is that I frequently read pieces which refer to us as proudly British and Scottish. If you are on the outside, it must look quite a lot like we're more proud of being British and a bit Irish than especially proud to be Scots. There's nothing wrong with being proud to be British, though. Why should you change your views just to change some cretins? Ah, sod it.

Only by cultivating people I would have no wish to cultivate. For the everyday Bluenose it's a hideous paradox. In order to play these people at their own game, I would be required to buy into Daily Mail Britishness. But if I adopt a dignified silence, I get slaughtered by bluenoses. Whatever I do, I end up feeling like I've just had a kicking off someone.

You got that right. If we are relying on the likes of Littlejohn to ride to our rescue, we're in a worse spot than I thought! That can't be the actual Thomson talking. I would put him on ignore if he posted on here like that...garbage and a refusal to answer questions on a Whyte-like scale. I'm sure Thinker must have been talking to a spoof, he must have.

The airbrushing of history is nothing new. The least subtle example, to my mind, was during the Communist period in Russia, when the images of those who fell from Politburo favour were literally removed from photographs, being replaced with trees or similar background. In film, too, the editor exercised his art; I recall one film of Lenin in which a soldier rose from the bottom of the screen to salute Vladimir Ilyich, the act of doing which just happened to obscure Trotsky or some such former favourite. Quite artistic in its own way, so long as you can overlook the murderous intent behind it. There are plenty of examples from before and after Soviet Russia. Hieroglyphs and statues of the female Pharaoh Hatshepshut were defaced after her death, presumably by men with the same mind set as most modern day Scotsmen, while the most topical example is probably the late, unlamented Jimmy Saville, currently making the short journey from weirdo to paedo in the public imagination by way of the media. All this non-fitba related stuff flashed through the turgid, pompous debris that is my mind on the drive home before the Scotland game last week, listening to two extremely poorly trained presenters on the radio lament over the last ten years or so of the national team. If BBC Scotland are trying to go for an audio version of 'The Broons', I tip my cap. Any other aim and they need a rocket. But that's by the bye. The point is the strange desire to depict the last five Scotland managers as failures. I suspect you can guess where this is going. No-one in their right mind would call Berti Vogts and George Burley anything other than failures. We can all agree on those two. You'd be hard put to find anyone who puts the erstwhile incumbent outside the group, either. What about the two before that? Not quite so clear cut. Alex McLeish, well, we didn't qualify so I guess that is failure. Compared to the chronic attempts by his successors, they seem like reasonable stabs, but at the end of the day we didn't qualify. A 'qualified' failure for Big Eck it is, then. Which leaves, Uncle Walter. Sadly for the radio person making the claims above, and who I am sad to say once donned the light blue as well as the dark blue, the programme itself rather undercut his thesis by looking back to the campaign in which we held our own with Italy, France and Ukraine, only missing out on the last game. Which campaign was overseen by Walter, and later McLeish. There are failures, and then there are failures. That campaign, including two wins over a still damn fine France team, cannot be called a failure. So why try to write it off? Not because Steven Thomson is an anti-Rangers loonball, I'm sure of that. More likely because in football, forced to feed off itself in order to provide 24/7 coverage, rewriting history 'just happens'. Not to cause offence, not to have a go at anyone, not even to send a Spaniard with an icepick to Mexico. Just to fill airtime with something, anything. It may not be a big deal, but it's worth keeping an eye on. Chick Young - and here I am aware of how thin the credibility of this argument has just become - recently referred to the Scotland side of the 90s as having featured real talent, the like of which we can only dream about today. His real talents, believe it or not, included Gary McAllister and Craig Burley. If that's not looking back and rewriting history, I don't know what is! The chief whip of the government, some bespectacled pudding (not Levein, I think his name is Mitchell) tried to rewrite his own history only recently too...it doesn't seem to be working out too well for him, either. TV and radio especially, with their need to avoid dead air, can often find their presenters coming out with nonsense under pressure. There may be no ulterior motive behind such statements, but it's becoming a feature of 21st century Western society that the past which is redrawn is getting ever nearer behind us. If you are telling a story, there is always a fine line to be drawn between depicting enough detail to be convincing, to draw in the reader, without going so far over the top that the reader becomes aware he or she is actually reading a book: destroying the fictitious illusion or reality, if you like. Gersnet poster der Berliner has, many times, drawn attention to how the Rangers administration and liquidation fiasco is misreported; if current events, too, are subject to the airbrush, the reality we perceive around us may become thinner still. Since I moan regularly on here about how we, as Rangers fans ane therefore ambassadors for the club, really need to present ourselves better to the world, it's only fair to ask those with an audience in the thousands to do the same.

Line of the day!

That describes me pretty well - but if I look in the mirror I can see that if I expect society to organise itself to suit a grown man who is utterly obsessed with a football team, I'm going to be disappointed. Rangers are my daily life to quite a large extent but the rest of Scotland is under no obligation at all to take that into account. The private meetings have so far resulted in zero - not one - policy decision which you could even vaguely suggest is informed by Christian Democracy, let alone the barely Christian and not-at-all democratic Bishop Whatisname's views. Not even the sectarian legislation - the FoCUS minutes posted elsewhere told us that timothy is being scrutinised on a game-by-game basis; if the cops don't take action, that's hardly the fault of bad or good laws. State and police are, apparently, seperate in the UK. But for all that, I do share your doubts. Not least because is completely indefensible. You wouldn't be surprised if you learned that these initiatives are to be rolled out in schools...

Great read, heartfelt and cogent. Your analysis of the obsessives who have been using the Rangers saga to work out their anxieties in public is spot on. I would disagree with you on two points, though: firstly, that our society is bowing to anything or anyone, and that the government makes legislation ignoring statistics. Outside a small circle of loons like PhilPhilPhil and myself, this is a marginal issue. Scots society is a very different place than the cyberworld we messageboard/blogger types inhabit. I did a wee trip some weeks ago where I didn't log on, didn't read any papers and didn't listen to any TV or radio about the fitba. Not one word about sectarianism or discrimination did I hear. While the story of our collapse and subsequent feeble minded threats by what must be unhinged fans make for great copy, we've got to keep it in perspective. Most football fans don't even use a fans website, let alone know there's a campaign going on. Glance at other clubs' boards - there's usually about 7 members and a dozen guests viewing. The howling of these people seems loud to us but compared to dealing with the chronic economic issues we face, with Syria, with Russia trying to screw the whole middle east, with energy issues, with murders of police officers, with child killing even in what seemed strong, contained communities, it's a long way down the list of priorities of most people. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes get what they want, but it likewise does not mean that they are taking over the place. It might sound like this reinforces my second issue, that the government introduced legislation based on nothing more than satisfying some minority grievance and would have been better looking at other issues. That it has brought in legislation based on nothing approaching a basis on fact or quantifiable statistical data. But...that's how government works. Not just against us, but on a daily basis. The highest profile announcement which got past my anti-Cameron filter and into my bonce last week was some quasi-fascistic drivel about being allowed to go this far but not further when kicking the shit out of burglars, should you stumble over them during a theft. Talk about your minority interests! There can't have been more than a dozen people involved in any sort of police activity on this subject, and of those you have to include that dude who ambushed the burglars and shot 'em. While I don't have any sympathy for the crooks, sanity suggests you discourage people from tooling up and taking on lawbreakers. The point I'm struggling to make is that the legislation is not needed, not proportionate (to go from what's been trailed) and not based on any sort of sound, factual base. We could talk about laws concerning immigration, too, which ignore your actual economic pointers and play on the feea of being outnumbered by people who look a bit different, or speak a funny language. The USA did the same with it's Patriot Act and Homeland Security bills; this is not a Scotland or UK only issue. It's just how government works. It was not the propaganda machine that forced through legislation, it was Lennon being attacked in the West End and then (I'll choose my words carefully) some strange kind of possibly non-lethal but still pretty fucking creepy devices being sent to some celtc fans. Add to that our refusal to stop singing songs society - not some bloggers, but the wider society - now find unacceptable and there was, in hindsight, nothing else going to happen but some law being passed. Having said all that, I still think the whiners are a bunch of twats. The Twatonista.

It is possible I'm looking for clouds where there are none. But we still need to be careful - the disaffected clubs are not trying to bag Regan because he's been mean to us. They'll have their own ambitions, their own plans and there's no way these plans are all going to be just ideal for us. This is where Green needs to can it with the rhetoric, let events play out and work quietly for the best outcome for both us & the game. It might not be ideal (almost certainly won't!) but getting rid of Regan, necessary though it is, doesn't signal the Triumph Of The Bears. Rereading that I imagine you know that anyway, sorry.

By whom? Are we talking the SNP or the RC church here?

I will admit that never crossed my mind.

That kwality.

If I wanted someone lecturing me on what I ought to believe at the weekend, I'd wander into the local RC chapel.

Backward looking stuff.

Who was this? Could be just about any of them?

I go back longer than you SA, I can dimly recall the late 70s. The difference between then and now is that we have the TV tech to find out what they are up to. When I got a video in the 80s, like many of you I had tape after tape with Rangers games on them, watched over and over until they were of a blurry, fuzzy quality you rarely saw or heard outside of a 12th generation bit of Dutch porn or the guidance videos they used to show in schools, when any silences between dialogue meant a build up of hiss as if a teacher had gone apeshit and introduced a bag of adders into the class. One of favourites was the 5-1 game against them, the Wilkins volley one. I think I liked it especially coz that day was the first one I spent at work, in B&Q. Not a great job made worse by missing that. Having watched the whole thing many many times, I can say without fear of contradiction that when Drinkell goes down for our pen, he waits for Rogan to stick his foot on then drags both feet over it. Not that I care! The point is that if a throwback forward like Drinkell was doing this around 88, UK players were certainly doing it long before as well. Nothing new under the sun and all that...it's only because media pundits don't have the guts to call out players that the foreigners get the rap. As CB says above, we just did it less obviously. The day the media start really highlighting cheating - asking the players straight out, 'well, Gareth, it's clear from the video that you dived there...why did you do that?' They could have done this with Bale's dive for Spurs last week, instead of which it was greeted with the hardly believable comment 'you've got to see the funny side of football sometimes'. Sky and MoTD are completely gutless on this issue.