Sport And Politics Don't Mix

AYE RIGHT!!

Sport and politics have always mixed and that will never change; just as Nero and the other Roman emperors gave the plebians bread and circuses to placate them, then today you have Gordon Brown's Raith Rovers fixation, Tony B Liar's great own goal about watching Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle United and Lord Reid of Kerrydale Street presiding over a football clubs, a section of whose support also support a terrorist organisation which, due to his job at the time, once had the said Lord Reid on its hit list.

I fear, perhaps, there is a political element in the current travails being suffered by Rangers Football Club, and, let's face it, being enjoyed by those of us on the sidelines who are not nor ever were Ra Peepul.

This is I should add, an indirect political element. I feel that the stance being taken by the Lloyds Banking Group over Rangers £20 million-plus debt is rather akin to that taken by the Blessed Baroness Thatcher over the poll tax.

You may recall the then Iron Lady insisted on trying out the much-maligned poll tax on the ungrateful and trucculent Scots, before foisting it on her natural English constituency.

I would suggest that, since a day of reckoning is surely somewhere down the road for the over-spending and profligate clubs in the English Premiership, a day which will bring wailing and gnashing of teeth and seriously bad publicity (in fact more seriously bad publicity) for those upstanding organisation the banks, then these same banks have to have a damage limitation plan in place.

Where better to try it out than on a basket case of a Scottish club - Rangers.

Rangers should not be skint. Their ability to compete at the top of the Scottish game has not been compromised by years of mis-management (in the business sense) by Sir David Murray and his minions.

But, they have over-paid journeymen players, failed to properly develop young talent, under-achieved in Europe and, as is so often the case with "a national institution" thought they could serenely sail along as they had always done.

In high finance, confidence is everything, rather as it is in sport. For as long as SDM had the confidence of his bankers, and for years there was the a cosy, clubable Edinburgh establishment relationship between the Murray Group and the Bank of Scotland, all was well.

Then came the credit crunch, those nice Merchant Company chaps who ran the bank and socialised with SDM were swept away, to be replaced by hard-nosed English bankers, who had a different outlook. They didn't have the same confidence in SDM's business acumen - cue trouble for the Murray Group and its highest-profile arm: Rangers FC.

As someone who has known SDM for 30 years and who also "kent his faither", the current travails of the Murray Group and Rangers has a familiar look.

I hear echoes of the way Murray grew his Murray International Metals basketball team, then saw it become Livingston Bulls and fade away. Echoes too of the way his late father could do no wrong in Ayr, before going bust and becoming a sad, shunned gentleman (believe me, even when on his uppers, SDM's dad was always a gentleman).

Gambling did for his father - gambling on European basketball success didn't work for MIM BC - gambling on big name Europeans for continental success didn't work for Rangers. But now Rangers and SDM are embarked on their biggest-ever gamble, that they don't have to cough-up £28 or £30 million to HMRC.

It's all very well a QC who specialises in tax law giving an opinion that Rangers are not liable for this. Said QC can write his own invoice for that. He then perhaps has to back-up his opinion with precedent, case law and the like and argue his point before a group of judges.

If he gets it right, his clients win and he pockets a hefty fee. But if he gets it wrong, disaster.

The judges in the Supreme Court will hand down the definite result on Rangers' case and these guys cannot be second-guessed. Like thousands of others, I have an on-going battle with a bank as regards whether charges accrued on my account were fair or unfair. The FSA, Financial Services Agency, were keen to have a definite ruling on the legality and fairness on banks' penalty charges.

They thought they had the right to rule, a High Court judge agreed; the banks appealled to the Appeal Court - and lost. They then appealed again to the House of Lords - and lost again; but, the Supreme Court was set-up, they appealed again to this new body - and won.

That victory makes all of Celtic's recent wins over the SFA seem small beer. Forget all the favourable opinions Rangers and the other big clubs involved in this battle with HMRC - until their Lordships of the Supreme Court hand down their judgement, it's all up in the air.

It could all still go tits up.

Funny thing though, Rangers, the ultimate Scottish Unionist institution, finds its fate to a large extent in the hands of a Unionist organisation - the Supreme Court. Things just might have been easier under Scots Law in an independent Scotland: politics and football - bloody hell, as another Scot with an interest in politics might say.