THE Diamond Jubilee long weekend allowed me an opportunity to go away and forget about football for a time. This was a break I enjoyed, but, back before the lap top this morning, what do I discover? Plus ca change blah de blah.
Yesterday saw the SFA's annual meeting. I glanced through The Scotsman - still the best sports pages in Scotland and what did I find? For the firs time in what seemed like years, there wasn't a Rangers story in the paper. Not that the troubled Glasgow giants were entirely absent, much of the paper's preview of the agm was concerned with matters pertaining to Rangers.
Switch to scotsman.com, the website and which matter was most exciting the on-line cyber warriors? Got it in one - the continuing Rangers saga.
I wager there are some alleged members of the wider Celtic family who will perchance lose the will to live when, if ever, the Rangers saga ends. I can still see no outcome other than liquidation for the club. Nothing else adds up. But, if liquidation happens, or if, as seemse increasingly unlikely, Rangers do the Saturday morning matinee cliche and: "with one bound they are free", there will be a lot of people with nothing left to live for.
Maybe, just maybe, Rangers are too big to be allowed to fail - in which case, see my survival without losing too much face scenario of a few days ago. If they do fail, then the landscape of Scottish football will be changed for ever. However, even if some sort of compromise is cobbled together, which allows the club to continue, major earthworks on the fabric of Scottish football will have to be undertaken.
Interestingly, I noticed in this morning's Herald, a piece from my big mate Shuggie MacDonald, in the course of writing which, be took advice from some insolvency and tax experts - one of whom mentioned that he had been involved in a First Tier Tax Tribunal - you know, the guys who are handling "the Big Tax Case" against Rangers. This case concluded in January, 2011 and judgement was issued in August, 2011. The new season could well be underway before the 10,000 lb gorilla shits on Rangers - very interesting.
Of course, with Charlie Green's credibility - of which he never had much - waning by the day, the question is: will there still be a Rangers by then?
Speaking of Green's loss of cridibility - re-naming Murray Park!!! FFS - is that the biggest issue facing Rangers right now? Thought not.
THE Olympic Games football tournament kicks-off in seven weeks' time. Stuart Pearce, the team manager of the Team GB men's squad, is due to name his squad within the next week - the likelihood is it will be "Sir" David Beckham and 22 others and that Scottish input or interest will be minimal.
I have, of course, already warned ad infenitum about the illegality of Pearce's likely squad and of the threat to the independence of the four Home Nations - so don't blame me when the smelly stuff hits the fan.
However, following a posting by former SFA communications chief Andy Mitchell on the excellent SCOTTISH LEAGUE website, I dug out my old "Rothman's" for season 1971-72, the last in which a British men's team entered the Olympic Games football tournament.
They lost to Bulgaria in the pre-tournament qualifiers and didn't make it to Munich, while just one Scot - Albion Rovers' Bill Currie - was involved.
Of course, times were simpler then, the selected squad was strictly amateur, but I noticed that, prior to the two games with Bulgaria, Team GB played ten trial games between November 1970 and April 1971. The actual qualifying games were played on 24 March, 1971, at Wembley (Team GB won 1-0) and on 4 May, 1971 in Sofia (Bulgaria won 5-0).
In all, 28 players were used in these ten games; only three of them - the aforementioned Bill Currie and the Queen's Park duo of Eddie Hunter and Ian Robertson were Scots, while, as far as I can ascertain from scant information, goalkeeper Grenville Millington was the solitary Welshman tried-out, while Distillery's Savage was the only Northern Irishman to get a look-in - interestingly the Irish Amateur international side of that year included a certain Martin O'Neill of Distillery in its ranks. Scotland were rank rotten that year, finishing bottom of the amateur Home International championship, so only having three players near the team was pretty good.
Compare those preparations: ten games, 28 players tried-out, with the shambles of 2012 - one game, pencilled-in for the week before the Games kick-off. It's a vanity project for the FA and, by the SFA not fully sticking-up for Scotland, we risk losing our international independence to the forces within FIFA pushing for a single United Kingdom FA. We are sleep-walking to disaster.
No comments:
Post a Comment