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Hildy

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  1. Hildy
    It's not easy when fans are struggling to face this new and growing reality; when they live in the past and expect the future to be just like it, and when they make no attempt to win back their clubs from the faceless people who have taken over. At Rangers we need to do several things: 1/ Work towards achieving fan ownership. When the club is in settled and caring hands it can plan for both the short and the long term. It will also be led by an elected president who will need to be accountable - or else. We can remove a bad president but getting rid of rotten ownership - that's not so easy. The RST is the vehicle for this. 2/ Rangers and Celtic will diminish and struggle if they remain in the Scottish league system. A way has to be found to either play down south, which I'm not that keen on, or join a continental league of top teams from small countries. This has been mooted before. It was called the Atlantic League. It should be looked at again. 3/ An attractive 'product' is more appealing than an unattractive one. Scottish football needs to chase out the dinosaurs and find coaches who know how to play with boldness rather than cowardice. 4/ Believe it or not, Rangers and Celtic, ideally, should be working together on possible solutions, but while Celtic has been doing what it can to effect change, Rangers is so caught up in its own problems that it has nothing worthwhile to offer until it rehabilitates itself.
  2. Hildy
    What he and the rest of us will have to face in future is the very opposite. Disaffected fans are turning to Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool and going to more of their games, and as glamour in football is increasingly going to be kept a safe distance from the best efforts of Scottish teams, the attraction of Barcelona, Bayern and Real is going to grow, too. Look around you at today's youngsters. Some follow Barcelona as avidly as their pals follow Rangers and Celtic, and this trend has no limit to its growth. Young people are attracted to the big time, and the big time has almost ceased to exist in Scottish football. Scotland is in the process of doing what the Irish Republic has been doing for years - picking a club from beyond its borders and getting behind it with all the zeal of the convert.
  3. Hildy
    I'm preaching the only positive that has a chance of making us a better club - fan ownership. I'm a member of the RST and a member of BuyRangers. We should all be supporting the RST's BuyRangers scheme if we want the club to be in the only hands that will truly care for it. Shouting 'we are Rangers' and imagining that this bestows some kind of immortality on the club is old-fashioned, outdated and the most outrageous form of wishful thinking imaginable. If you believe in the Rangers support, join BuyRangers and empower it. Let's replace crowing about being the people's club to actually being the people's club.
  4. Hildy
    If you and I had met up in Manchester in 2008, and if we'd been discussing Rangers over a beer, if I had said to you that I believed Rangers were in danger of going bust due to being part of someone's business empire, I suspect that you'd have come away with 'WE ARE RANGERS - it can't happen: it would never be allowed to happen: why are we even discussing it?' It is this attitude that has led us to where we are. The cynics and the doomsayers were right all along. It is those who refused to listen, and who perpetuated the myth that Rangers could never collapse, who let the club down. If we ever flourish again, it will be because the misty-eyed guff that naive perennial optimists cling to has been swept aside and replaced by enterprise, vision, sound planning and accountability. Sadly, at the moment, this day looks like being a long way away. Never mind, though - we are Rangers . . .
  5. Hildy
    Answer me this: Will Rangers' future be as glorious as its past?
  6. Hildy
    I don't think he was meaning 'new club' when he was talking about a new motto. I think we are so damaged by this repeated accusation that we are a tad over-sensitive when we see expressions like the above. Leaving that to one side, though, it amazes me how we quickly go on the defensive when justifiably critical articles are published. Perhaps we have seen so many despicable ones that we just can't tell the difference any more. In case anyone hasn't noticed or is maybe kidding themselves that we are on the mend, Rangers is now widely perceived to be a joke. Even non-football people are aware that the club has shed its immortality and special place in our country and become the poster club for all that is wrong with football, especially Scottish football; business, especially business linked to football; and football fans, particularly Rangers fans. The level of dysfunctionality is staggering, from the board to the fanbase, and even little old ladies who never utter a word about football know it. 'What has happened to your club' they say, along with, 'Why can't the fans do something'. Aunties and grannies know perfectly well what we prefer not to - Rangers has fallen so far from grace that it will never fully recover.
  7. Hildy
    That's a very poor statement. A 'substantial shareholding' could mean anything. It seems to be deliberately vague in an era where people are crying out for transparency and clear intent. Either this organisation doesn't know what it wants or it is struggling to make its position clear. Statements like the above are too vague to be meaningful, which makes the organisation hard to take seriously. To be honest, it doesn't seem to know what it is selling. When people who have signed up to it are stating publicly that it is not about fan ownership while others are trying to give the impression that it is, something isn't right.
  8. Hildy
    Rangers First isn't intent on achieving fan ownership. It wants fan involvement - not ownership. It wants a stake in the game, but only as a fringe player. A poster on here told me that he had invested in Rangers First specifically because it wasn't about fan ownership. I believe very strongly in fan ownership, but not as Rangers First apparently sees it.
  9. Hildy
    Ally got it wrong. The answers he gives are not for the people in the room - they are for us. He opted out of telling the fans - those same fans he praises on a regular basis - what his thoughts were on a growing crisis. Any journalist going along with Ally's wishes should not be in a job. The people who need to learn here are the manager and those who are defending his indefensible actions. The club is on the brink again and yet people are making excuses for the manager after he walked away from some hard questions. It has often been said, and I believe it is probably true - we really are our own worst enemy.
  10. Hildy
    What if there were no groups? What if we just remained disinterested and aloof when the ownership of the club changed? What if we didn't challenge the board in the way that the Union of Fans is doing? Would that be better?
  11. Hildy
    He's certainly not the ideal person to respond to this, and journalists should certainly be endeavouring to get answers from those who know more, but not to raise such a serious subject with the manager of Rangers would be unprofessional for any journalist who takes his profession seriously, and if Ally wants the respect of those journalists, he really must understand this. They were right to raise the subject and Ally was wrong to want to avoid it.
  12. Hildy
    Today there are stories suggesting the the club is fourteen days from going under and yesterday the manager of Rangers told a press conference that he would only speak about football matters - and Rangers fans defend his action. I guess this sums up why we are where we are. Repeatedly there are calls from fans asking why there are no journalists properly investigating the club's meltdown, and yet the manager is defended for refusing to answer questions on this latest worrying development. If you attack journalists for asking questions that need to be asked, don't be aggrieved when they stop asking the questions that need to be asked.
  13. Hildy
    He's a man under pressure and it shows. When he asked the journalists not to ask him about the day's big story, he was being disrespectful to them. There is a growing belief that Rangers has serious financial worries and there are thousands of fans who want to know what is going on and what the manager thinks about it. By avoiding the issue, no-one gets to know what his thoughts are. When Ally doesn't speak to the media, he isn't talking to us. It's not about the personalities in the room - it's about us. I am certainly not going to blame a journalist for asking questions about the health of the club. I wish they had done it earlier. Ally might not be best qualified to answer them, but as a good number of fans look to him as our man on inside, he should be attempting to answer them as best he can. When a manager earns a salary as large as Ally McCoist does, he really should not walk away when very pertinent questions are being raised about the financial state of the club.
  14. Hildy
    I believe you, SC, but you must realise that when people succeed in their lives to this extent, the change that would come from buying Rangers is huge and potentially very disruptive. Yes, people can be appointed to pull strings, but the profile that goes with being Rangers kingpin can compromise other business areas and intrude into personal life. David Murray loved it, but would he do it in 2014 if he could be that younger man again? Rangers was a great acquisition when he bought it, but it's not a great acquisition any more. Today's thrusting young Scottish entrepreneurs will not be drawn to Rangers as readily as David Murray was, which is a shame, but it's a sign of the times. It's not just fame that goes with the Rangers gig, it's infamy too, and many don't need the hassle - or the large and inevitably expanding hole in their bank balance.
  15. Hildy
    Would you commit £30-£50m and probably more of your own money towards turning Rangers around? Would you want to become a public figure overnight to be hated and despised by one half of Glasgow and lauded by the other until, inevitably, the honeymoon period ended and you consistently failed to measure up to the expectations of those who once respected you. If you did, I suspect that your whole outlook on Rangers would change when you experienced life at the helm. Being told constantly to defend the club; to spend more of your own money, to start a near civil war with Celtic and the SFA - really, what business person needs this in their lives? Rangers, rightly or wrongly, has a dismal reputation now. I suspect that there are people who could have helped, who probably once imagined that giving financial support would have been an easy decision, but who found themselves keeping both hands in their pockets when 2012 came along, and who have no regrets whatsoever about steering well clear.
  16. Hildy
    I have to say, I think it's a good thing that we have this Union of Fans to speak out in a reasonably informed way on these important and contentious matters. It's not perfect, but it is doing a fairly good job in difficult circumstances.
  17. Hildy
    Anyone who knows a thing or two about football could see that Charlie Adam had talent, and yet when he was discarded, it was widely assumed that he'd have a low level career or none at all. He probably has a lot more in the bank than Rangers these days.
  18. Hildy
    If King really has been contacted about this, it suggests that he's nowhere close to doing a behind the scenes deal, which is what many have been hoping (praying) for. Maybe King has been quiet because his interest has cooled and he's just going to wait and see what happens, pretty much like the rest of us.
  19. Hildy
    There is definitely a problem. Too many groups turn people off all of them because messages are mixed and ordinary punters don't understand why there is duplication. The RFFF was a bad idea, but well-intentioned fans like yourself were swept along thinking they were doing something useful when really they were just stockpiling money that had no chance of diverting Rangers from its awful fate. It came in useful in the fight to retain titles but that was more accident than design. You have paid your dues and I can well understand a reluctance to hand over more money to another fan group. Handing over money indefinitely every month is something that should only be entered into after long and careful consideration.
  20. Hildy
    The saga continues. With almost every club utterance, from football to finance, disillusionment spreads, hope fades and a realisation that this sorry tale might not end well, takes hold. Where once there was optimism, now there is fatalism. The only real hope for a long-term viable and stable future - fan ownership - has been largely ignored by the main body of the kirk, and of course mixed messages on the issue have been unhelpful and unnecessary. Instead, we are left to wonder if a saviour will come along to rehabilitate our dying institution, and this word 'saviour' both insults and condemns us. We should never have been in this place, but we are here because we trusted to luck on club ownership - the worst mistake it was possible to make. We thought that market forces would protect us indefinitely - and some still do - but institutions like ours cannot survive by taking risks on the most basic of basic issues. We are spectators now, watching from the outside as the inside crumbles. The pessimists have been justified - and the optimists have been misguided.
  21. Hildy
    Accepting being seeded inappropriately when it works to our advantage is bad form. If something similar had happened to Celtic, we'd have been making accusations about how corrupt and pro-Celtic the authorities are. If fairness and sporting integrity mean anything, rigging the draw, which is what this appears to be, should never be tolerated. If we win the trophy, it leaves us open to accusations of favouritism by the authorities, and we really don't need this on top of all that has happened.
  22. Hildy
    What a shambles. Rangers should have stated loudly that the club has no wish to be advantaged in any way. If we win this tournament, expect it to be referred to as a tainted trophy. Our football authorities made a big deal about sporting integrity and now this nonsense.
  23. Hildy
    The King / Gough campaign has been successful, if that's the right word, in seeing ST sales plummet. It was unsuccessful in its stated aim, but it made Rangers fans think about the club's governance, and having done so, many decided not to back this current regime. It has to be said, though, the ghastly fare on the park made a decision not to renew much easier, so while the boardroom and ownership issues are the root of our problems, the McCoist issue is a factor in the equation too.
  24. Hildy
    I'm not sure that there is a great deal of confidence that McCoist would be replaced with the kind of manager we'd like, but I've been surprised recently to see people who have previously stuck by him now wanting change. It's a separate issue of course, but identifying the right manager is a difficult thing to do - for any club. Manchester United have recently demonstrated this and almost everyone at Rangers agreed that PLG was a good move by SDM. Celtic have opted for an unusual choice, which annoys their fans because he's not a big name and far from being Celtic-minded, but even after a bad start, it could still work out. In football, there are probably only a handful of genuinely good managers, which often turns them into legends because they consistently outperform the rest, however, even the great Brian Clough had a torrid time at Leeds so every new managerial appointment is a risk. For Rangers, when McCoist moves on, I would hope that we appoint a manager who is successful at having his teams playing a watchable brand of winning football, however, I would insist on the nine in a row gang and their like being wholly excluded from consideration. Rangers has to consign the Smith era and its grim negativity to the history books and move into a more enlightened new era.
  25. Hildy
    So it would seem, but Rangers could sack McCoist and offer him nothing. McCoist would then have to chase Rangers using the legal route, which I'm sure he would do, but it would be messy and probably more revealing than he would like. Our board wouldn't be too keen on certain details becoming public either so it is unlikely to happen - unless of course the complexion of the board changes and is at ease with the previous occupants being publicly criticised. McCoist would win, of course, but his day in court would likely be an unpleasant experience.
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