Breaking News: Ferguson Transfer Listed and McGregor suspended

[theboyharley 5]

Would this have happened under Eck or Smith in charge of Scotland. NO. Burley is a joke, the other night i really couldnt care less about the Scotland result and i've never felt like that before.

 

This has went WAY to far. The players are on the transfer list because we need money, no other reason. This is an easy way out for the shambles that is Rangers Football Club.

 

As usual instead of getting 3 million we'll now get 1 million. Our club has a cancer that needs removed. Martin Bain is a total scumbag and the sooner him and DM leave the better.

[UCF2008 0]

Role models? Aye rrrrrrrrrrrright!

 

What about our new captain? How good a role model was he when he was sent off for trying to strangle a player in that OF game last season? We all do stupid things in the heat of the moment sometimes.

 

Besides, who really gives a f**k about role models? We look back on players like Ricksen and Gazza who both disgraced our club on a regular basis with their off the field antics and we mostly remember what they brought to the game.

 

We don't need role models. What we do need is the league title and to bin two of our best players at this stage of the campaign is about as stupid as what Bazza & Shagger just did.

[UCF2008 0]

After months of moaning about the mock offense caused by some of our songs, not to mention the criticism levelled at the club for not defending us in these issues, here we are acting like we've been mortally wounded by a subtle two finger salute and praising the club for the (harsh) punishment it's handed out. Hypocrisy of the highest order imo.

[Gers4Life 0]

Had rangers not acted in the matter in which they have to this situation, would it have not been deemed that our club simply just lets the players get away with murder! what ferguson and Mcgregor done was a complete act of childness and stupidity and now their careers are now but over at rangers.... tut tut ffs set an example after all they get paid well.....

[UCF2008 0]

Had rangers not acted in the matter in which they have to this situation, would it have not been deemed that our club simply just lets the players get away with murder!

 

The way they're being treated by the nhation they might as well have committed murder.

 

what ferguson and Mcgregor done was a complete act of childness and stupidity and now their careers are now but over at rangers.... tut tut ffs set an example after all they get paid well.....

 

Yes, I agree it was childish and stupid. Still the fact remains that the punishment doesn't fit the crime. I suppose my opinion just isn't biased by jealousy over the size of their salary.

[ian1964 10,669]

Graham Spiers

 

Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor have been stupid and immature in their behaviour, and have received due public humiliation for their antics, but there is still only one word to describe Rangers’ treatment of them – draconian. I remain staggered by the ferocity of the punishment doled out to the pair by Walter Smith, the Rangers manager, and the club’s chief executive, Martin Bain.

 

Last Friday, due to comments made both on and off the record by Smith to reporters, a degree of doubt still prevailed among supporters about Ferguson and McGregor’s future at Ibrox. But Smith, in his private comments, made it perfectly clear what Rangers’ position was. The club is finished with the two players. Neither will play for Rangers again.

 

In the case of Ferguson it is a particularly swingeing penalty. The Rangers captain had made it repeatedly clear that, following his 18-month hiatus at Blackburn Rovers, he regretted ever having left Rangers in the first place and didn’t want to play anywhere else in the remainder of his career. In family terms, Ferguson also has a problem, in his dubious distinction of being married to someone who never wishes to stray more than 20 miles from the original family nest, to the extent that Ferguson has sacrificed aspects of his career for the sake of his loved ones.

 

But Rangers haven’t given two figs about that. For some very unoriginal footballing crimes – getting drunk and giving V-signs to the crowd – Ferguson is being crucified by his club. It is an utterly heartless and callous reaction to the 31-year-old’s misbehaviour, and one that, while causing many in recent days to nod approvingly towards Ibrox, has still left me completely shocked.

 

It can be invidious to simply list endless other incidents as a means of highlighting the double-standard being applied here. But in this case, football’s log of past misdemeanours shows just how ruthless Rangers are being with Ferguson and McGregor.

 

Did Ally McCoist get flung out of Ibrox when he publicly rained blows down on Sandy Clark in a long-forgot-ten league match between Rangers and Heart of Midlothian at Ibrox in 1985? Wasn’t that an “undignified moment” for Rangers? Or what about Paul Gascoigne’s wife-beating episode at Gleneagles 11 years later? Such violence is a heinous crime – far, far worse than the mere effrontery of giving V-signs – yet was Gascoigne evicted from Ibrox as a consequence?

 

These are rhetorical questions – of course neither player was. And so the list goes on and on, and not just at Rangers. How many public spats has Neil Lennon been involved in at Celtic – and don’t tell me he has been the innocent at every turn – yet was he ever punished like Ferguson and McGregor? There seems something almost faintly fascist in the way Rangers have turned on their captain and goalkeeper.

 

Don’t think the irony of all this is lost on me – it isn’t. I knew the whole Paul Le Guen saga at Rangers inside out. I spoke to Le Guen at length about it for a book I wrote about the fallen Frenchman two years ago. One chapter is entitled “The Trouble With Barry Ferguson”. I met Le Guen for lunch in Paris and reprised again the whole scenario of how he believed Ferguson had been complicit in his downfall. “He [Ferguson] is the problem within,” Le Guen told me. “He causes adversity inside the club. He tries to have too much influence, he tries to undermine what you are doing. He made my job at Rangers harder and harder.”

 

Having recognised from the outset what a fine coach Le Guen was, I was inclined to be sympathetic towards him, and distinctly unsympathetic towards Ferguson. I have no doubt Ferguson undermined Le Guen, which is why I have never been cited among the now-deposed Rangers captain’s apologists.

 

But on this occasion Ferguson is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He is being harshly – almost vindictively – treated. Football is littered with the sort of antics he and McGregor got up to, which have not ended in such summary punishments. Apart from the sheer severity of it, Rangers, in their action, are also ruling out any possibility of contrition or rehabilitation, which is just plain wrong.

 

Yes, I see where Walter Smith is coming from. The incidents at Hampden Park last Wednesday night were a personal affront to the Rangers manager, who had spoken in private to Ferguson and McGregor two days earlier – ie, 24 hours after their allnight binge at the Scotland HQ – and told them to “take their medicine” from the SFA and get on with it. So when Smith then witnessed the pair offering their crude gestures from the Hampden substitutes bench, he knew they were riding roughshod not just over the SFA, but over him as well.

 

Even so, even on such a point of principle, to end both players’ club careers at Ibrox like this is a punishment disproportionate to the crime.

 

At 27, I have no doubt McGregor will find himself another club, but Ferguson’s situation is more complicated. At 31, and after three major operations, his future looks less certain. He is being cut down in his prime by the club he loves. I would love to see Ferguson play again in the Barclays Premier League, where he could absolutely hold his own, but his family circumstances make that scenario difficult.

 

The actions of Ferguson and McGregor were stupid and childish, yet Rangers, in response, have been tyrannical.

 

And another thing...

 

So what did Smith do to deserve all this bashing?

 

I noted the whole Ferguson and McGregor palaver was turned into yet another excuse for some Gordon Smith-bashing. Almost before the two players had downed their final drinks at Loch Lomond last week the word was: “Right... let’s somehow implicate Smudger.” Trying to shoot down the SFA chief executive, pictured right, has become one of the football clichÃ?©s of our age.

 

For the record, last week’s saga went like this: Ferguson and McGregor had their binge on Sunday. On Monday, they were dropped by George Burley. On Tuesday, word leaked out to the press. On Wednesday, Gordon Smith said he would “review the situation” after the Iceland game. On Thursday, Smith was then part of the process that banned Ferguson and McGregor sine die from Scotland.

 

Tell me: how in heaven’s name could any of this become a Smith-bashing exercise? What exactly was it that Smith got wrong? Last week was the final proof that, come hail or shine, regardless of circumstances, part of Smith’s remit is simply to take it in the neck.

 

Destination unknown

 

Will Paul Le Guen sign Barry Ferguson for Paris Saint-Germain? I have to doubt it. But Martin O’Neill might be interested in taking him to Aston Villa, and Ricky Sbragia, if he can last the course, would certainly take Ferguson to Sunderland. As for going to Dick Advocaat’s Zenit St Petersburg, Ferguson’s wife, Margaret, could hardly face uprooting herself to as far away as Armadale, let alone to the Gulf of Finland. So that, I guess, must be a long shot.

[pete 2,499]

As i said before, although i am a Barry critic i do feel he has been hard done to.

Taking his captaincy away i think was enough punishment.

[calscot 0]

I think the whole thing is a throwback to the puritan days - but somehow I don't think the same message is being taught by parents to present day kids...

[bmck 117]

honestly, the sticking the vicky up thing is the most cringeworthily embaressing episode ever. drinking thing is out of proportion. but the only reason bf and am are transfer listed is because we need money.

[CammyF 7,614]

honestly, the sticking the vicky up thing is the most cringeworthily embaressing episode ever. drinking thing is out of proportion. but the only reason bf and am are transfer listed is because we need money.

 

If only SDM had the balls to come out and admit to that fact.....

 

Cammy F