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I hope not but I am beginning to expect so.

When There’s No Room Left In Hell…





“They are the ones who will suffer the most.”








And Thomson Must Score . . .

Re-reading my article on Alex Thomson‘s “solutions” for the problems which Scottish football now faces because of Rangers, I think I haven’t made it clear enough that, for all the good work that Alex Thomson did up to this point, I feel let down by his emphasis on starting again with a clean sheet through a straightforward corporate rebranding exercise.
I should have made my feeling clearer that there is no reason to expect anything to change if there isn’t a full investigation into how this shambles was allowed to happen.

Campbell Ogilvie remains the President of the SFA. The mass of Scottish football fans have absolutely no confidence in either Stewart Regan or Neil Doncaster. The mechanism by which people of that calibre can be appointed to oversee the game remains the same.

It is inevitable, in my view, that the same problems will arise again if the same conditions exist; therefore we’re no further forward and a lot of culpable people will never be held to account under Thommo’s proposals.  His willingness to gloss over the causes of the scandal does him no credit.

What he flagged as an investigation into corporate misgovernance ends up with a solution that comes straight from the corporate playbook, benefiting only the corporation.

When someone dribbles the ball right through the defence, past the keeper and up to the goal-line, it’s reasonable to criticise him for then putting the ball out for a shy.
The question then is not, how did he miss?
It’s, why did he do that?

How To Re-brand A Toxin

Alex Thomson, the chief reporter for Channel 4 News, has suggested a way forward for the supporters of the now extinct Rangers Football Club.  In his blogpost of June 23rd he proposes a solution which is based upon the principles –  we are probably stretching the meaning of that word beyond its limits here – which guide the thinking of the leaders of multi-national corporations such as Nestlé™ and Tesco™.
To give Mr. Thomson his due, he hints at an acknowledgement that there is far from universal consensus that these companies represent ethical standards to which the rest of us should aspire.  I, for one, do not consider either of those companies to be worthy of my support and I have deep misgivings about many of the methods which they employ in order to maximise their profits.  But that can be left for another day; let us move on to the substance of the proposed strategy for resolving the problems which have been created by the self-destruction of Rangers FC.

In line with the materialist, corporate thinking of the company men, the first recommendation is to identify the existing concerns which make it hard to sell products associated with the brand name of Rangers FC.  That’s easy.  The name of Rangers is now a byword for a long list of offence such as corruption, dishonesty, remorseless arrogance, aggression, shameless cheating and so on and on and on. Not an easy sell.

In the Gospel According to St. Tesco™, it is written:

Here is wisdom; blessed is he who hath ears to hear.
Shouldst thy very name be like unto a stumbling-block to thy prosperity, yea, even to such degree that the very ears of the righteous are sore offended by its sound; thereunto I say to thee, “cast thou thine name into the burning pit whereupon it canst be consumed by the flaming tongues of fiery devils. For what doth it profit a man to cleave to that which causeth the very foundations of his corporate strategy to crumble?  Verily, I say to you, better to take to thyself a New Name and store up thy treasure on earth than to atone for the sins committed under thine old name.”  (© All rights reserved. )

This is known as rebranding.
It’s simple but very effective.
Has it become generally known that the Windscale nuclear power station is causing too much leukaemia?  Change its name to Sellafield and restart the clock.
Anglo-American imperial ambitions repeatedly having a spot of bother in Mesopotamia?  Okay, we’ll call it Iraq instead.
Is that boardroom full of fully-fledged, clinical psychopaths?  No, no!  We say now that they’re afflicted by some narcissistic tendencies.  Or they’re suffering from borderline personality disorder.  (For pity’s sake, don’t give the game away by calling them psychopaths.)
A bare-faced lie is rebranded as a terminological inexactitude and a liar is someone who is economical with the truth.
A British person who goes to a foreign country to steal its resources and murder everyone who resists is called a war hero but dark-skinned people going about their lawful business are called terrorist threats.  Someone who steals a tenner from a shop is called a thief but someone who robs the entire population of billions of pounds is called a banker. Or a financial expert.  Occupy someone else’s back lawn and you are called a trespasser; occupy the whole of India, Australia and half of Africa and you’ll be called Your Majesty.
What a great wheeze!

So step one is to rebrand the toxic, disgraced Rangers as something less repellent.  Alex suggests Govan Rangers™.  I don’t know about you, but that looks to me like exactly the same name except it has the word Govan in front of it.  I’m not entirely convinced, even though it worked for New Labour.  I think Hun Loving Criminals would be much better.  But I’m not going to argue with revealed corporate wisdom, so Govan Rangers™ it is for just now.

By some process of corporate marketing doublethink which I admit I cannot fathom myself, this totally new identity somehow separates the new G. Rangers™ from the negative associations of the word Rangers while simultaneously rewarding the “extraordinary brand loyalty of fans which is the one real asset” the club still has.   Or something.
So the loyalty to the brand will survive because the brand has been rebranded as a totally different brand to remove the negative associations of the brand name Rangers which is still in the brand’s new, re-branded brand name, Govan Rangers™?
Nope, I still don’t get it.
But maybe that’s why I’ve never made millions out of dissuading mothers in Third World countries from breast feeding their babies so that the infants have an increased chance of dying from water-borne diseases in Nestlé™ baby formula solutions.  Guess I’m just not a corporate kind of guy.

But, having come this far, I’ll see it through to the end.

So.  The next two parts of the deception are called re-positioning and relaunch.

The 10-point plan involves a gratuitous insult directed at the Hearts owner who declared that he would not vote for admitting Sevco 5088 Ltd FC into the SPL.  Further repositioning apparently requires a pointless jibe about “Neanderthal” men dressed in green – which is pretty rich, coming from a supporter of Newcastle Utd.   But Mr. Thomson doesn’t stop there – he has eight more great ideas.
Govan Rangers™ draw a line (it says here).  They become clean.  They do a thing called being demonstrably detoxed.  Everybody respects them because they also do paying bills.  Their new Glasgow Govan Rangers™ brand name attracts a fantastic support from somewhere, fantastic supporters who had previously been repelled from attending football matches by the toxic word Rangers in the old brand name and supporters who are so fantastic that they had nothing to do with any of the old “WATP mentality” (although, according to Alex, pandering to this toxic mentality will continue to sell papers.)

Somebody blows the whistle to start a new season.  Govan Rangers™ get to win all the league championships for the next few years and everyone loves them even more, especially because their fantastic supporters with the extraordinary brand loyalty are nothing like the ones they used to have when they had a totally different name without the word Govan in it.

Even better, as the icing on the cake, the SFA and the SPL suddenly see that everything is wonderful now that a totally different G. Rangers™ isn’t cheating while it wins all the time.  Everybody has completely forgotten about the decades of fraud, dishonesty, bias and corruption.  Those honest mistakes have all been forgiven and the spineless cowardice has been completely forgotten about because of the successful rebranding of Sir Stewart Regan, the noble Lords Doncaster and Dallas and that lovable old scamp, His Royal Highness The Prince Campbell Ogilvie, Duke of Larkhall.

And the best bit of all is that there are no impediments to this brilliant marketing strategy.
We “Just Do It,” according to the corporate manual.
So that’s that, then.

What a wonderful world it will be!
What a glorious time we will see!
Suddenly, with one mighty bound, Carruthers was free!

What an insulting and patronising proposal.
I seriously wonder why Mr. Thomson suddenly stopped trying.
At exactly the same time as the SFA, SPL and SFL came up with the most conclusive proof yet of their utter contempt for every vestige of sporting principle, financial probity, general decency and even their own rulebook, Alex has just thrown in the towel.
We have been invited to swallow the contents of a bottle of deadly poison.
We are told that it will be good for us.
Why? Because the bottle has been relabelled as Vitamins.
What is the next, new brand name going to be for cover-up?  They’ve already used Investigative Journalism, Inquiry, Probe, SFA Tribunal, Holyrood Summit, Disciplinary Hearing, Police Investigation, Appellate Tribunal, SPL AGM, Fit And Proper Person Test, Licensing Requirements,  SPL EGM and due process.

Farewell, Alex Thomson.  He came; he saw; but in the end, he couldn’t be bothered.
It was always up to the supporters to stop the corruption of the game.
It still is.

Stop The Fight, Ref!

Scandal.  Disgrace.  Corruption.  Cheats.  Laughing stock.  Fraud.  Incompetence.  Cowardice.  Fiasco.
Nowadays, these are just some of the words that are most likely to spring to the minds of objective onlookers as an automatic first response to a mention of Scottish football.  It would be foolish to think that the reputation of any Scottish club is not being tarnished by the outrageous conduct of the former football club which was known as Rangers FC.  The stench that continues to emanate from Ibrox is making the entire game stink to the high heavens.  Let us recall that Rangers have already been found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute, a conviction which even their own shameless representatives have sullenly accepted.
Let’s emphasise that point.  They were not found guilty of bringing Rangers into disrepute; they brought the game itself into disrepute.
So now the Scottish game is officially disreputable.  Thanks for that, Huns.

Scottish football has already reached an all-time low.  It can sink  lower still and seems hell-bent on doing so.  It will continue to sink for as long as it clings pathetically to the shattered hull of Minty’s Titanic as if no other course of action could be possible.  One club is entirely responsible for the catastrophic condition of professional football in Scotland.  One club  infected what was a reasonably healthy body, polluted the atmosphere and poisoned the well.   Even from beyond the grave, its putrefying remains present a mortal danger to the rest of Scottish football, not least while its own deluded pall-bearers defiantly insist that the corpse is still alive and about to resume its business.
There are others who, as yet, have not dared to believe that a stake has finally been driven through the cold, flinty heart of the club which, like a vampire, spent most of its existence recoiling from the light while sucking the life blood from its prey, using every dark art and nefarious device at its disposal.

It is now time to truly believe and it is time to start anew.   The first part of the renewal requires facing up to the world as it is and to reject the insubstantial pseudo-reality which is peddled by media spin-doctors and self-serving publicists.  The world as it is sees the potential for a  perfectly viable, sustainable Scottish professional football industry which cuts its cloth according to its means.  It has to stop pretending to be something which it is not.  It is not a smaller version of the English Premier League.  It is not currently capable of producing an international team which can qualify for major tournaments.  It is not a major force in European club football.

However, it is capable of being much better than it is.  Once it takes the necessary steps to release itself from the dead hand of the extinct Rangers FC (1872-2012), a vast panorama of opportunity can open up.   Pre-Minty, the SPL was ranked as the fourth best league in Europe.  Aberdeen and Dundee United were setting the standard for other Scottish clubs to aspire to.  I want to see that level of competitiveness returning to Scottish football.  To achieve that, the first myth that must be destroyed is the notion that the future SPL will be a one horse race which Celtic will win at a canter.  There is a simple counter to that concern.

Now that the Celtic-Rangers fixture is a thing of the past, Sky Sports has no excuse for continuing to dictate – against the wishes of the clear majority of Scottish football supporters – that the top division cannot expand.  There will no longer be four Glasgow derbies every season.  There won’t even be one.  Hooray!  So I see no argument against a top division of twenty clubs, playing each other once at home and once away.  This could completely open up the title race.  Even if a club lost both of its games against Celtic, it would still have thirty-six games against the other opposition in which to make up the loss of those six points.  That is a huge change from the twenty-four points which the wee clubs have contested in the past.  It brings the championship well into striking range for the better clubs (and those clubs will also be stronger for the fact that their best players will not be lured away to Ibrox!)  At a stroke, we will have a more competitive league and a more attractive competition.

The time has also come to revisit the idea of Scottish football taking control of its own television broadcasting.  The Sky deal is lousy.  £16 million per year pales into insignificance in comparison with other second-tier leagues in Europe.  Denmark, whose population of roughly five and a half million is similar to Scotland’s, receives nearly twice as much TV money than the SPL does.  Belgium and Portugal have populations of 11 million but their leagues receive roughly four and five times more respectively than the SPL can attract under the incompetent management of half-man, half-mollusc, Neil Doncaster.  The Eredivisie runs its own subscription TV channel and sooks in around £60 million pounds per annum.  When you see these figures, it’s hard to see why Sky is considered to be a benefactor of Scottish football!  It should also go without saying that the TV revenue must be more evenly distributed than it is at the moment.  I do not think that there will be huge resistance to that argument from Celtic, especially if a well-run subscription based TV service is putting far more money into the pot in the first place.  (There’s a splendid article by Cardiff Bhoy on Celtic Underground which looks at this subject.)

These wheezes are viable.  But they must go hand in hand with a complete house-cleaning of the completely discredited structure of Scottish football as it stands.  A total relaunch is required and it is of paramount importance that the new, improved, shiny clean organisation makes a complete break with its sordid past.  This requires the courage to fully address the extent of the malign influence of the former Rangers FC and declare unambiguously that its financial doping and associated skulduggery mean that no form of the club can be admitted into the league until there has been a complete, thorough investigation into its affairs by the competent authorities.  The brand is too strongly tainted for Scottish football to risk any further contamination from associating with any manifestation of it.  If it looks like Rangers, sounds like Rangers or smells like Rangers (especially if it smells like Rangers!) there is too great a danger that it will continue to behave like Rangers.  For the good of Scottish football, the brand must be retired until further notice.

If nothing else, Sevco 5088 Ltd FC (or whatever it will be called this time next week) actually needs someone to throw in the towel on its behalf.  When a boxer is being pummelled by a superior opponent, the referee or his corner men actually do him a favour by stopping the contest.  He can then take time to recover from his injuries before getting himself into shape for a  future contest.  That’s the position that Zombie-Rangers FC are in just now.  It will do them no good to carry on stumbling blindly onto left hooks and right uppercuts.  There are plenty more of them in store for them.  It’s time for them to touch a knee onto the canvass and if they won’t do it voluntarily, the referee needs to step in.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can look forward to playing and watching football.

Where To Begin?

Rangers haven’t even begun to taste proper punishment.

At least ten years of cheating cannot be atoned for by anything less than expulsion. I, like tens of thousands of other Scottish football supporters, spent years paying to see what was advertised as a sporting competition but was in reality a fix. Looking only at ten years of buying two season tickets in the first decade of this century and ignoring for the moment the likelihood of previous fraudulent activities perpetrated by the same Rangers organisation, I personally have been defrauded to the tune of well over £12,000.
I am by no means alone or even exceptional in that respect.  Many, many others have been cheated.

Taking Celtic alone (but also recognising that supporters of every other club were cheated, particularly the supporters of every SPL club which suffered the relegation which should, by rights, have been the fate of the club which lost every match 0-3) and looking only at the seasons in which Celtic were cheated into 2nd place instead of 1st — that gives us five seasons. 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Hugely simplifying the numbers to a low-end, estimated annual average of ~40,000 tickets @ c.£500 each, we get a ball park figure of £20,000,000 worth of mis-sold tickets.

Twenty million pounds minimum.

Without counting millions of pounds of extra prize money.
Without counting millions of pounds of extra revenues from Europe.
Without counting enhanced reputation and consequent sponsorship potential worth millions of pounds.
Without counting potential for merchandising based on 12 In A Row and related achievements.

Twenty million pounds is the tip of the iceberg of the damage and disruption for which RFC were responsible.

Not to mention that tens of millions of pounds more would have been paid into the national tax coffers if Celtic and other clubs had been receiving the prize money which was due to them.

Yet we are currently hearing Rangers apologists telling us that Rangers “have already been punished heavily” or even, “have already been punished enough!”  A fine of £200,000 for doing at least £20,000,000 worth of damage to a single set of supporters?  A three year exclusion from Europe as a punishment for ten years of European participation?  A ten point deduction after stealing five championship titles?

Proper punishment hasn’t even come into the frame yet.

Exposing The EBT Effect

After coming a poor second to a newly resurgent Celtic side the season before, Rangers entered the following season (2001-2002) determined to make up the lost ground by fair means or foul.  They illegally used EBTs to pay the wages of players whom they could not otherwise have afforded.  The spent lavishly to acquire the services of players such as Shota Arveladze, Christian Nelinger, Claudio Cannigia and Michael Ball.  I know.  Stop tittering there at the back, please.
Neil Doncaster continues to pretend that this is not a matter of the greatest importance as he delays the release of the findings of the SPL investigation into the use of improperly registered players by Rangers.  Here is a glimpse of what he is hiding.

The Rangers team which took part in the 2001-2002 season fielded ineligible players in all competitions.  By the rules of the game, each of the results involving these players should be amended to a 0-3 Rangers defeat.

Yet Rangers official results in domestic competitions still stand in contravention of the rules of the game.
In the SPL, the other teams recorded these results in their games against Rangers.
Rangers’ score is given second in each case.
For comparison, results in parentheses have been adjusted to take integrity into account.

Aberdeen took zero points from 12 with a goal difference of  -8:
0-3    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
0-1    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
GD . . . -8  (+12)  Turnaround in the real world = 20 goals.
Pts . . . 0  (12)    AFC should have had 12 more points according to the rules.

Celtic took 8/12:
2-0    (3-0)
2-1    (3-0)
1-1    (3-0)
1-1    (3-0)
GD . . . +3  (+12)  Turnaround = 9 goals.
Pts . . . 8  (12)    Should have had 4 more points.

1-4    (3-0)
0-4    (3-0)
2-4    (3-0)
1-1    (3-0)
GD . . . -9  (+12)  Turnaround = 21 goals.
Pts . . .  1  (12)    Should have had 11 more points.

2-2    (3-0)
1-3    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
GD . . . -6  (+12)  Turnaround = 18 goals.

0-0    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
0-3    (3-0)
2-1    (3-0)
GD . . . -4  (+12)  Turnaround = 16 goals.
Pts . . .  4  (12)    Should have had 8 more points.

1-3    (3-0)
2-2    (3-0)
0-5    (3-0)
GD . . . -7  (+9)  Turnaround = 16 goals.
Pts . . .  1  (9)    Should have had 8 more points.

Kilmarnock would have made the top six if Rangers’ improper registrations had come to light before the split.
Oh.  And if any of the SPL office bearers had had the balls to apply the rules.

Dundee United:
1-6    (3-0)
2-3    (3-0)
0-1    (3-0)
Pts . . .  0  (9)    Should have had 9 more points.

0-2    (3-0)
0-0    (3-0)
1-2    (3-0)
GD . . . -3  (+9)  Turnaround = 12 goals.

2-2    (3-0)
1-1    (3-0)
0-3    (3-0)
Pts . . .  2  (9)    Should have had 7 more points.

0-3    (3-0)
2-2    (3-0)
0-3    (3-0)
GD . . . -6  (+9)  Turnaround = 15 goals.

St. Johnstone:
0-2    (3-0)
0-1    (3-0)
0-2    (3-0)
GD . . . -5  (+9)  Turnaround = 14 goals.

The final league table, adjusted for integrity, sees Rangers finishing in the relegation spot on zero points with a goal difference of -114.
Aberdeen would finish second instead of fourth. Every other club finishes one place higher except Livingstone who remain third.  St. Johnstone would survive in the top flight for at least another season.  Kilmarnock, as previously mentioned, would finish in the top half of the table.

Neil Doncaster ignores all of this and still peddles the preposterous notion that there is a place in the SPL for these cheats.

Let’s look at the cups.  Rangers, through the efforts of their otherwise unaffordable players (who were not properly registered and therefore not eligible to play), ‘won’ both the League Cup and the Scottish Cup.  Because of their rules breaches, they should have been disqualified after their first tie in each competition with their opponents being awarded a 3-0 win.  So that’s a 3-0 win for Berwick Rangers in the Scottish Cup and 3-0 for the late Airdrieonians in the League Cup.  As well as being eliminated from the cup competitions, Rangers would have missed out on their half of the gate receipts from the subsequent illegitimate ties.  That’s just short of 100,000 paying customers for the League Cup and more than 130,000 for the Scottish Cup.   Those tickets were sold on a fraudulent basis.

Rangers interest in the Champions League should have ended at the beginning of August with Maribor progressing at their expense.  Chalk off one 50,000 home gate for Rangers bore draw a week later against Fenerbahce.
Another 144,000 people would not have been pouring money into David Murray’s crooked club if Rangers had been correctly disqualified from the UEFA Cup after fielding ineligible players against Anzhi Makhachkala in the first round.  Nor would there have been any income from television coverage of matches which would not and should not have taken place.

Neil Doncaster is aware of all of this information but continues to be the poltroon for the cheats who put him in place to try to shield themselves from the consequences of their massive con trick.

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