STILL it drags on - Rangers have now taken longer to die than the entire cast of Reservoir Dogs, plus Mel Gibson in Braveheart; will nobody deliver the coup de grace?
How has it come to this? Why is it that shares, once considered amongst the strongest in the Stock Exchange are now in the possession of a bunch of spivs and wide boys? Please, somebody - HMRC, SPL, SFA, just kill them off and be done, there is no sense in dragging this thing out any longer.
MEANWHILE, life goes on and the Euros have kicked off. I watched both opening games on Friday and while the Spanish referee in the Poland v Greece game was little better than Craig Thomson or Willie Collum on an average SPL Saturday, he made his decisions and stuck to them. OK, you might argue about some of the cards and in particular the red one to the Greek, but, the Laws of the Game do not insist the referee is correct, merely that he gives his opinion and once he has given his opinion, the decision sticks.
Somebody ought to tell messrs Hansen, Lineker & Co that. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that, amongst the BBC pundits, if you kill an opponent it's only a foul; hanging said opponent without a full jury trial merits a yellow card and lining-up your midfield and using them as a firing squad is, maybe a red.
Guys - the referee is the sole judge of fact - live with this.
Then we switch to ITV for the Howard Webb Show. Now I like the big South Yorkshire policeman, I think he's a good referee. He ought, perhaps, to have got his red card out early-on in the 2010 World Cup Final, but that one was a case of damned if he did, damned if he didn't and since he wasn't the one doing the kicking, I think we can allow him a bit of leeway.
I thought he did ok on Friday; he certainly made every effort to let he game flow and one of his advantages was as good a use of that often-overlooked example of refereeing deiscretion as I've seen in years.
But, while Webb had a good game, he wasn't as wonderful as ITV's Peter Drury made him out to be in another wonderful example of talking-up the English dimension, and ignoring everything else.
Russia looked good though, but, that said - it just goes to show how bad we now are that we couldn't beat the Czech's; and makes 4-6-0 even more of an abberation.
THE FA/BOA junta which is running the Team GB football portion of the UK's Olympic Games effort have, apparently, sent the long list of 35 players from whom the final 18 for the Games proper will be selected, to FIFA.
I sincerely hope there are no Northern Irish, Scottish or Welsh names on that list, or there could be bother. It is fairly common knowledge that the four Home Nations are lacking in true friends inside Sunny Hill, Zurich - the FIFA headquarters.
Certainly, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales do have some friends down the road at UEFA. However, the UEFA guys are somewhat distracted by events in Poland and Ukraine at the moment, so those enemies of the UK within the world body can perhaps make hay while the sun shines.
I spotted some months ago that, should the FA and BOA, as they seem determined to do, go down the road of selecting Olympics squads, male and female, which include players from all four of the Home Nations, then they would be breaching FIFA statute 8/iii. This says (briefly): "If England is picking the squad and they pick Northern Irish, Scottish or Welsh players without the written permission of the IFA, SFA and FAW, they are screwed - they have broken our rules".
I pointed this out to the FA, the BOA, the IFA, the SFA and the FAW, in writing. Not one of these bodies even acknowledged by missive. And I wasn't alone in doing this, others have made the same point. The three Celtic FAs have told the English, repeatedly: "We don't want you picking our players", but, apparently, the FA is going merrily along, backed by the BOA, who are insisting the two squads have to reflect all four Home Nations in their make-up.
I have pointed-out this breach of rules to various national newspapers, but, just as they ignored warnings about Rangers going into free-fall, so they have ignored this one.
Now, I do not for one moment, believe UEFA will want to chuck-out four of their oldest members, but there are those outwith Europe who crave the end of separate independent membership for all four, and who want a single UKFA - or FA -since they think we are all English any way.
But, where UEFA might play along with the Africans, South Americans and Caribbeans who want the four to go into one, is on the matter of the Home Nations' right to have four places on IFAB, the International Football Board, the body which oversees the Laws of the Game.
If Sepp Blatter could get his hands on say three of these and give one to a mate in South America, another to one of his African backers and one to perhaps the Asian confederation - he would cement, ever-more-firmly, his despotic control of the world game.
That's a prize worth fighting for and an own-goal such as a breach of statute 8/iii just might be worth taking advantage of.
You have been warned.
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