Uilleam

I'll wager that block would not be made against the fhilth.

We need to put the 'G' in 'xG', I believe

You have to worry about that defence. A statuesque goalkeeper, and two guys that could be ragdolled by anyone with an element of physicality.

I thought it was their tongue they employed to rasellik's arse, not a rectal thermometer.

I think that you are right. Is it the case that BBC Scotland needs Rangers' support more than the Rangers' support needs BBC Scotland? If the offer is declined, then I do think that the reasons for this should be made clear to BBC, and made as public as possible.

The most telling argument for declining the opportunity is that if accepted, people, might feel obliged to listen to Sportsound.

It strikes me that you will get very little in return for allowing that mob to tick a box. Personally, I should decline this limited opportunity to partake in a no doubt edited telephone conversation. You should hold out for a proper live interview and debate in the studio, with the paramenters, rules, and red lines delineated in advance (with of course, light refreshments, and a cheque for no less than 100 nicker). Oh, and remember what these vermin did to McCoist.

Oh dear! It seems that the sanctimonious ones' attempts to deflect attention from el Caso Negreira continue to fail.... El Clasico clubs clash, but now over which had Franco as a fan Isambard Wilkinson Madrid Wednesday April 19 2023, 5.01pm, The Times Real Madrid’s “historical” video shows a Barcelona team giving fascist salutes. Barcelona’s president appeared to link Real Madrid to support for General Franco https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/el-clasico-clubs-clash-but-now-over-which-had-franco-as-a-fan-8xhwb6xfp The rivalry between Spain’s two biggest football clubs has boiled over, with insults being traded over whether Barcelona or Real Madrid was the favourite of General Franco. There has always been tension between the clubs, whose meetings on the pitch are referred to as “El Clasico”. However, their enmity reached new heights on Monday when Joan Laporta, the Barcelona president, used a press conference to defend his club over a corruption scandal and called Real Madrid “the team of the regime”, apparently referring to Franco’s dictatorship under which Spain existed for 36 years until 1975. Within hours of the insult, Real Madrid responded by posting a video on its channels chronicling Barcelona’s links to Franco. The video begins with Laporta making his assertion and then fades to a full screen question: “Which was the team of the regime?” It follows this with a potted and highly partial history of Barcelona’s fortunes under the dictatorship. Using archive footage culled from the regime’s No-Do (news and documentaries) propaganda service, it then shows the Nou Camp, Barcelona’s football ground, being inaugurated by José Solís Ruiz, one of Franco’s closest collaborators and a cabinet minister, with a Catholic mass and state pomp. The video also claims that Franco saved the Catalan club from bankruptcy on three occasions, adding that in return FC Barcelona bestowed several honours on Spain’s leader and made him an honorary member. To rub salt in the wounds, the video then shows Barcelona players giving the fascist salute and records that the club won eight league cups and nine Generalisimo Franco trophies. “With Franco, Real Madrid had to wait 15 years to win a League title,” a subtitle notes. It then records that some of its players were assassinated during the civil war, and its ground was bombed and destroyed. When the civil war ended in 1939, only five players from the squad remained. “The rest had been exiled or detained by the victors.” It ends with a recording of Santiago Bernabéu, the club’s legendary president after whom its stadium is named, saying: “When I hear ‘Real Madrid are the team of the regime’, I want to curse the father of the person who said it.” Laporta made his outburst when he came out fighting, after two months in hiding, over a scandal regarding the payment of €7.3 million by his club to a senior referee. The payments to José María Enríquez Negreira stopped when Barcelona dispensed with his services in 2018, coinciding with his cessation as vice-president of the country’s referees’ committee. The case is being investigated for possible corruption and Real Madrid has agreed to be a witness. Laporta said that it was “an unprecedented exercise in cynicism” for the reigning Champions League winners to criticise his club. He added: “They’re a club that have been known for being the club of the regime, because of its proximity to those in power politically, economically and in sports.” The Catalan government, which has no financial interest in FC Barcelona, called for Real Madrid to remove its video and to apologise. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who is from the Popular Party and is leader of the Madrid region, defended Real’s video as “magnificent”.

Celtic should be shut down. It can start again as St Catamite's FC, in the bottom division of any league which would lower itself to permit it entry. Celtic Boys Club founder ‘abused teenager in shop’ Marc Horne David Love Wednesday April 19 2023, 12.01am, The Times Jim Torbett is accused of sexually abusing a boy he was tasked with looking after between June 1967 and December 1968 A former player with Celtic FC’s feeder club was sexually assaulted after being put to work creating souvenirs celebrating Celtic’s European Cup victory in 1967, a court was told. The High Court in Inverness heard evidence that a teenage boy was indecently assaulted by the founder and manager of Celtic Boys Club in a toy shop that produced merchandise for the senior club. The former player, who was 13 at the time, also alleges that Jim Torbett, now 75, made him wear the club’s shorts before attacking him as another boy slept in the same bed. The claims were outlined in an hour-long video of a police interview with Torbett which was recorded in 2021 and played for the jury. Torbett is accused of sexually abusing a boy he was tasked with looking after between June 1967 and December 1968. It is claimed that Torbett molested him at a toy shop in Glasgow’s Maryhill after he asked him to help to label miniature European Cup trophies. It is claimed that Torbett exposed himself before seizing the boy by the neck and repeatedly attempting to force him to perform a sex act. It is also alleged that Torbett attacked him in a car in the Drumchapel area of Glasgow and put his hand down his shorts and kissed him while he was staying over in a multistorey flat in the city’s Sighthill district. Torbett told Detective Constable Diane Curran that he did invite players back to the flat he shared with his mother “to wash kits”, but insisted they did not stay the night. He also denied molesting the boy at the toy shop, stating: “It never happened.” His alleged victim is expected to give evidence today. Torbett denies all the charges. The trial continues. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/celtic-boys-club-founder-abused-teenager-in-shop-smvm26fc6

Imagine telling him that. XG is just a way to make snowflake players feel a little better, less hurt by criticism "Ye missed anurra sitter, ya glaikit bastard!" being more offensive than " Mathematically we should be two up by now".

Not quite as clear cut as the Catalans would like you to believe. Perhaps file with Maurice Johnston being the first ever RC to play for Rangers.

Imagine telling him about expected goals.

Real Madrid accuse Barcelona of being Franco’s club after Joan Laporta attack By Mario Cortegana and Luke Bosher Apr 17, 2023 https://theathletic.com/4422079/2023/04/17/real-madrid-joan-laporta-barcelona-corruption/ Real Madrid have responded to Barcelona president Joan Laporta’s claim that they were the “club of the regime”. Earlier on Monday, Laporta gave a press conference in which he again denied any wrongdoing after his club were charged with corruption in the ‘Negreira Case’. Barcelona have been accused of corruption over payments they made to the then-vice-president of Spanish football’s refereeing committee, Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira. But Laporta then went on to attack Barcelona’s historic rivals Real, claiming they had historically been favoured by the officials because they were “the club of the regime,” referencing the period of Spanish history in which Franciso Franco ruled in a dictatorship from 1933 until 1975. Real then put out a video on the club’s official channels on Monday evening, in which they ask “which is the team of the regime?” and document Barcelona’s own links to Franco. They explain that Barcelona awarded Franco three medals and made him an honourary club member in 1965. The video also points out that during the Franco regime, Barcelona won eight La Liga titles and nine Copas del Generalisimo (later, Copa del Rey), while Real endured a 15-year period in which they did not win a domestic league title. They also refer to the words of Santiago Bernabeu, the legendary Real player who their stadium is named after. He once said “when I hear that Real Madrid has been the team of the regime, it makes me want to shit on the father of whoever says it”. The video also highlights that Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium was opened by Franco’s general minister, Jose Solis Ruiz, and that the club was saved from bankruptcy three times during the regime. Barcelona have denied any wrongdoing and Enriquez Negreira has denied ever favouring Barcelona in terms of refereeing decisions. Real previously confirmed their intention to join the complaint against Barcelona in March, alongside La Liga and the Spanish FA, and expressed their “utmost concern” regarding the charges. Laporta addressed Real’s stance in his speech, saying: “They (Real) claim to feel aggravated in sporting terms by this. This comes from a club, as we all know, that has been favoured from refereeing back in history and still nowadays. A club that was regarded as ‘the club of the regime’ back in the days. “Why was that? Because of how close they were to the political, economical and sportive power… it might have to be remembered that during seven decades, the majority of presidents and officials from the refereeing committee were former Real Madrid partners, former Real Madrid footballers or former Real Madrid executives. During 70 years, the people in charge to make decisions in that regard were from Real Madrid. “Seeing now that this club joins the official complaint and declares themselves disadvantaged from a sporting point of view is an unprecedented show of cynicism. I hope the whole trial puts them in the place they should be.”

Here's something for older readers and contributors (you know who you are): those who remember the short corn, centre dabs, when fitba' was fitba', balls were balls, men were men, women were women, and everybody seemed to cope. Could Trent Alexander-Arnold’s travails at Liverpool be helped by stepping inside into midfield as the full-back role evolves? Sat 15 Apr 2023 20.00 BST https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/apr/15/wing-half-full-back-trent-alexander-arnold-liverpool Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold (right) has the qualities to become a full-back/wing-half, perhaps with Jordan Henderson tucking in behind as he goes forward. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters One of the easiest and most misleading pieces of footballing received wisdom is that everything is cyclical. Wait long enough, the great drum of history will revolve again and the same ideas will come back round, be that sharp side-partings, the back three, Howard Webb apologising to Brighton or Roy Hodgson managing Crystal Palace. Except time is not a flat circle. Each iteration is different because it comes with knowledge of what went before. Watch Manchester City in possession. They have a centre-forward and two wide men. They have Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva or Ilkay Gündogan as “free 8s”, essentially old-fashioned inside-forwards. They like to have five outfielders behind the ball, who will usually form a trapezoid shape: a line of three defenders and two deep-lying midfielders. Show that to Herbert Chapman and, while he may think City could be a little more direct, he would understand what he was seeing. This is essentially a W-M. But this is not Pep Guardiola simply appropriating a formation from almost a century ago. A lot has happened since, not least the coming of zonal marking, so the game is no longer the series of individual battles it was in Chapman’s day. Indeed, it’s entirely likely Guardiola is yet to form strong opinions on Arsenal’s title-winners of 1930-31 (although you suspect that in the key dispute of the age he would go against Chapman and favour the ball-playing qualities of Jack Butler at centre-half over the gangling stopper Herbie Roberts). Rather it’s that the trapezoid shape has proved over time extremely effective at preventing counterattacks. That’s why the 3-4-2-1 had its brief vogue, most notably as Chelsea won the league under Antonio Conte in 2016-17. But the problem with that shape, as has subsequently been seen at Chelsea and Tottenham, is that while it may be solid, it is very dependent on the wing-backs to provide width and on the individual inspiration of the two creators playing off the striker. It can become predictable. If you want to be flexible, then, how can you create that three-two anti-counter trapezium? Often teams playing a back four would allow both full-backs to advance, with a holding midfielder dropping in between the centre-backs to create the line of three. Or one full-back would go forward with the other tucking in alongside the two central defenders. That was how it worked for Guardiola at Barcelona, when Dani Alves would habitually charge forward supporting David Villa on the outside, with Sergio Busquets slipping between the central defenders or Eric Abidal shuffling across. At Bayern, though, blessed with a player as tactically accomplished as Philipp Lahm, Guardiola began experimenting with having one of the full-backs advancing into a deep-lying midfield role, rather than providing attacking width. At Bayern Munich, full-back Philipp Lahm was so technically accomplished that Pep Guardiola was able to experiment by sending him into a deep-lying midfield role, rather than providing attacking width. Photograph: Kerstin Joensson/AP At City, Guardiola has sometimes had two attacking full-backs who would overlap – Bacary Sagna or Jesús Navas and Gaël Clichy or Aleksandar Kolarov in his first season, for instance – but he has also tried the Lahm protocol, occasionally with Fabian Delph, most successfully with João Cancelo, most implausibly with Bernardo Silva, and most recently with John Stones – even if, in Tuesday’s win against Bayern Munich, Stones was stepping up from a central position, with Manuel Akanji and Nathan Aké almost as old-school, orthodox defensive full-backs; it may be that the solidity of Aké is one of the factors in Jack Grealish’s run of form, that he no longer has Cancelo inside him, impinging on the space he would naturally like to attack. For three decades full-backs have been at the forefront of tactical development. As they have become increasingly attacking, so wingers have increasingly cut infield, which in turn made possible the rise of the false 9. Guardiola, so far, is unusual in his use of the full-back as an auxiliary wing-half, but it may be that this is the logical next step in the general development of the full-back. There is, perhaps, a gradual turn against the modish idea that full-back is an essentially attacking position. For full-backs to operate as high as, say, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson have for Liverpool, demands the press be all but perfect. If it is not, as in 2020-21 and again this season, opponents can exploit the space behind the full-back. When Mauricio Pochettino was at Tottenham, he in effect had four wing-backs on rotation because of the physical demands on them covering the length of the pitch; having them shuffle into midfield at least part of the time may be a way of mitigating the strain. There has long been an argument that Alexander-Arnold would be better deployed as a midfielder rather than as a right-back, initially on the slightly spurious grounds that it would involve him in the game more (a line of thought that seems to underestimate just how important the full-back position is in modern football), and more recently because, as Liverpool’s press has faltered, Alexander-Arnold’s defensive shortcomings have been exposed. How plausible the idea of Alexander-Arnold as a hybrid full-back/wing-half is remains debatable. Appealing as the prospect of him dictating the play from deep may be, it would if anything place more demands on the defensive side of his game, while reducing his crossing opportunities and limiting his interactions with Mohamed Salah, which were such a key part of Liverpool’s play last season, his overlaps encouraging Salah’s darts infield. But then if Liverpool’s press improves again, those defensive issues may recede and it’s just about possible to imagine a future in which Alexander-Arnold can be both an overlapping full-back and a full-back/wing-half. Given that Jordan Henderson will be 33 in June, it may be too late, but the Liverpool captain, a very good crosser of the ball, would seem to have the ideal game to interlock with an Alexander-Arnold who sometimes bombs on and sometimes tucks in. The issue, though, goes beyond specifics. For 60 years full-backs have been become increasingly attacking, to the point that almost every full-back is in effect a wing-back. The question was always what came next: how would full-backs evolve when there was no more attacking to be done. This, perhaps, is the answer: by helping to recreate a shape in possession that is itself almost a century old. The spiral of history revolves again.

Barcelona hits back at accusations of corruption, labelling them smears. Still doesn't want to produce the reports for which it claims it paid. I am sure that there are good reasons for this. Really good reasons. Barcelona president Joan Laporta says club are victim of smear campaign The 60-year-old criticises La Liga chief and Real Madrid as he defends his club against claims of corruption Dani Gil, Barcelona Monday Aril 17 2023, 4.30pm, The Times A seething Laporta hit back at Barcelona’s accusers during a heated press conference https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/barcelona-president-joan-laporta-says-club-are-victim-of-smear-campaign-t8f6qpv9v Barcelona’s president says the club have been subjected to a “public lynching” and has accused La Liga’s president of making “false accusations” over claims of corruption, including the bribery of referees. Joan Laporta also said that Real Madrid, Barcelona’s biggest rivals and one of their accusers, are the team “most favoured by refereeing decisions historically” and expressed his hope that “justice can unmask them”. Spanish prosecutors are pursuing a case against Barcelona over payments made to the company of Jose Maria Enríquez Negreira, a former vice-president of Spain’s referees’ committee, totalling €7.3 million (about £6.5 million) from 2001-17. Uefa also last month announced that it would be carrying out its own investigation, which could lead to Barcelona being banned from European competition. Barcelona have denied any wrongdoing, saying the money was for technical reports on referees and youth players. And, at a press conference, Laporta attacked those who have accused the club of corruption. “Barcelona has never carried out any action with the aim or intention of altering the competition in order to obtain a sporting advantage,” he said. “We do not like to win through refereeing, and the tax agency has not identified any conduct with criminal relevance linked to bribery. “You can’t condemn anyone before they have been tried. Barcelona has not had the presumption of innocence in the media but has been subjected to a public lynching.” Laporta, who said that Barcelona have filed a total of 20 claims for defamation, singled out Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, who has said this is the most serious integrity issue to hit Spanish football and that it was keeping him awake at night. “He has acted irresponsibly, unwisely and with an obvious lack of professionalism,” Laporta said of Tebas. “I ask him to stop this verbal incontinence because it does not do La Liga any favours, which he constantly denigrates with false accusations”. Tebas, the president of La Liga, was singled out for criticism by Laporta PAU BARRENA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Laporta, who began a second spell as club president in 2021 after seven years at the helm from 2003-10, then turned his ire on Real, who have been named as a private prosecutor in the case. “It is the club that has been most favoured by refereeing decisions historically and also now,” he said. “It has always been considered the team of the regime. For seven decades, most of the presidents of the referees’ committee were ex-partners, ex-players or ex-managers of Real Madrid. For them to say that they feel they have been wronged in sporting terms is an unprecedented exercise in cynicism. I hope that justice can unmask them.” Barcelona are 11 points clear of Real at the top of La Liga and are poised to return to the Champions League next season, but the club are worried that any Uefa sanctions could include a ban from the competition. There have been suggestions that Barcelona’s status as one of the founding clubs of the ill-fated Super League project may also count against them, but Laporta — who said he would defend the club “to the last drop of blood I have” — praised Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European football’s governing body, for his handling of the situation so far. “Javier Tebas has used this as an opportunity for Uefa to add to this public lynching,” Laporta, 60, added. “However, I appreciate the prudence with which Mr Ceferin is taking the case. So far he has not fallen into Javier Tebas’s trap. Barça is questioning Uefa’s monopoly and is looking for tools to compete with state clubs, but Uefa will rule on the Negreira case when the time comes.” Real Madrid

Arsenal Spursing it, I see.

Davies and Souttar, Souttar and Davies... I'm sorry, but whichever way you perm it, it remains a bad hair day

Generally, one should bring to the boil slowly.....

There is only one reason for turning away from a Rangers game, and surely it lasts longer than six minutes

And Alfie Runs the Voodoo Down

I think that we can get the draw, here A valuable point

Clark O'Hara given freedom of the penalty box there. If we are gift wrapping goals in April, what will be do in December?

Benfica are proof that if the priority is selling talent, glory will always be tomorrow’s dream Portuguese side’s hopes of European success were all but ended on Tuesday night and Owen Slot says that pattern is unlikely to change any time soon Owen Slot Chief Sports Writer, Lisbon Wednesday April 12 2023, 5.00pm, The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/benfica-are-proof-that-if-the-priority-is-selling-talent-glory-will-always-be-tomorrows-dream-wvsh5qhq2 Tuesday night in Lisbon and in front of us is both a football match and a question that threatens the game’s establishment: can the best football factory in the world build the best team in Europe? This is Benfica, at home against Inter Milan. Benfica are in the chancers’ half of the Champions League draw and Inter are probably the quarter-final opposition they would have picked if they could. So Benfica fans are feeling, not unreasonably, that they could be the first Portuguese team in the final since José Mourinho’s Porto won it in 2004. The player in whom I am most interested is Antonio Silva. He is the centre back playing with an uncanny maturity for a 19-year-old. He takes the ball forward and distributes with a striking authority. This time last year, he was in the Benfica team that won the Uefa Youth League (for under-19s), a team that thrashed Barcelona and Bayern Munich en route to the final. He got a chance in the senior side at the start of this season and has stayed there ever since. So it is reasonable to expect the big European vultures to come for him in a shopping spree soon; if not this summer then within another year. Out of the door before him will be Gonçalo Ramos, the 21-year-old best known for supplanting Cristiano Ronaldo in the Portugal team at the World Cup and then scoring a hat-trick against Switzerland. Just this very morning, reports from Germany suggest that Bayern have a €100 million fund to buy a new striker and that Ramos is on the shortlist. Of course, Ramos and Silva will be following Enzo Fernández, who left for Chelsea in January for £106.8 million. And to the question — can Benfica build the best team in Europe? — we had a sort of an answer in the other Champions League game on Tuesday night because Manchester City are heavily Benfica-produced. Ederson, Rúben Dias and Bernardo Silva are all Benfica products, as is João Cancelo, though he is on loan at Bayern. It is not even a subjective observation that Benfica are the best factory in football. The International Centre for Football Studies in Neuchatel, Switzerland, recently ranked the youth academy graduates of clubs worldwide and estimated their transfer value. Benfica were top. Fifa’s annual Global Transfer Report put together a decade’s worth of analysis at the end of the 2020-21 season that showed Benfica as the world’s top club for transfer fees received, with Portugal’s two other talent laboratories, Sporting and Porto, in second and seventh. Collectively over that decade, Portuguese clubs made a transfer market profit of $2.96 billion. Portugal is the most extraordinary of sporting economies. How does a population of ten million people farm its talent so successfully? The answer is partly because no other sport poses the remotest challenge to football here. Plus scouting networks are rigorous. Plus there is considerable investment in facilities, education, pastoral care and coach education at the academies where the players are developed. There is something, too, in the fact that the big three clubs are so far ahead of the rest of the field. In the 88 years of the Primeira Liga, only twice has it been won by other clubs. Thus, while Premier League teams in England are eternally loathe to blood their youngsters, the opposite is true of Benfica, Porto and Sporting because they have a number of soft fixtures each year where there is a lower risk of defeat. And they need to play their starlets, too, to prepare them for the summer and winter sales. Portuguese clubs are also the world’s best wheeler dealers. Fifa’s Global Transfer Report last year showed that there were more transfers into Portuguese clubs than any other country in the world. Yet these, in the main, were young players bought cheap; that same report showed that the biggest transfer stream anywhere was from Brazil to Portugal; last year, 338 players followed that route. Yet bringing players in just means there are more to sell further down the line. Portuguese clubs again made the greatest profit in the transfer market last year: $405.1 million. And that was before Fernández went to Chelsea. At the other end of the scale was the $1.60 billion lost collectively by the clubs in England. With all that magnificent income, Benfica fans are therefore left wondering: why do we always have to keep selling? Can’t we keep Ramos and Silva and just briefly escape the cycle of build, sell, replenish, rebuild? Is the Fernández cash not enough? Yet they are resigned to the reality that the big income streams in other big football nations — TV and sponsorship rights plus ticket sales — are a comparative trickle here. They are resigned, also, to the lack of public accountability and the steady trickle of unresolved corruption scandals. Does player-sales income really all go back into the club and not its executives’ pockets? Again, this is the deal with being a fan here: the knowledge that you can never really know and will never really find out. So it is not uncommon to see the question being asked: what if it was different? More specifically: what would the Benfica team look like if we hadn’t had to sell? (Answer: pretty awesome). “Best of Benfica” teams regularly pop up online. Just for now, you wonder what it might have looked like had Dias been playing in a centre-back combination with Silva against Inter. Silva’s centre-back partner is usually Nicolás Otamendi, but he was injured and without him, Morato, the Brazilian, had to step up. That’s a 21-year-old replacement coming in next to a 19-year-old; hardly ideal for a big Champions League night. You wonder what it might have looked had Cancelo still been there, because Alexander Bah, Benfica’s first-choice right back, was injured and it would seem unlikely that Cancelo, for instance, would have allowed all that time and space for the cross which led to Inter taking the lead just after half-time. Yet that is the deal with Benfica, and all the Portuguese big three. They don’t have a lot of depth; when an Otamendi is injured, it is regarded as an opportunity for a Morato to get some more experience so that he too might one day be a trophy sale in Portugal’s thriving market place. These past few weeks, though, the feeling in Benfica had been that, even despite Fernández’s departure, they had a team that could compete, that it hasn’t been too whittled away by transfers out; that, with their favourable draw, maybe this year could be their year. And that is why Tuesday night was such a painful reality check. After Inter had gone 1-0 up, Benfica attempted to energise a comeback, but actually it was Inter who got stronger. The Italian side then stretched the lead with a penalty from Romelu Lukaku, and though that was a questionable decision, there was no doubt that it was Inter who were in control. In the fourth minute of stoppage time, Ramos was played in. This was Benfica’s best chance but his low, left-footed shot didn’t adequately test the goalkeeper. Ramos should have scored. He may have the chance to make amends in the return leg, though no one any longer thinks that this might be Benfica’s year. All we have proved is that if your football economy is so structured around selling your factory talent, your year will probably never come.

I wonder if any of our lads will end up in Nottingham, after, of course, he has reduced the playing staff numbers, which may well be his 1st task.

I seem to recall that Sir David Murray advised that he had rejected one or two bids for Rangers, one, at least, at the 11th hour in a London hotel, because the prospective purchasers were not fit to be proper custodians. Or something.