JINGS crivvens, help ma Boab - The Rangers FC is upset with the BBC. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear - tragedy for Rangers; as my old mate, the late and much-missed David Francey used to say.
When football sold-out to television, the "blazers" didn't know it, but, they were doing television rather than football a favour. For public relations and public perception of a brand or product to be really effective, it has to be managed.
Once upon a time, football managed its PR. You got the FA Cup final (occasionally the Scottish one), Scotland v England, and crunch World Cup games which had already sold-out Hampden. Otherwise, you made do with highlights packages.
I am old enough to remember the mid-fifties mid-week tv matches - Wolves v Honved and Moscow Spartak, the West Bromwich Albion one during which David Burnside did his ball juggling act, games which precipitated European football. However, even then, football had control; if you wanted to watch football, you had to attend games.
Today, it's the tv companies who call the shots - because football gave away the family silver far-too cheaply and the game is the poorer for this.
Football, at its best, is pure theatre, spectacular and almost akin to Grand Opera - except, while the cameras are at the San Siro on a weekly basis, they are seldom allowed through the doors of La Scala.
Would Pavarotti have been such a big name if, like Lionel Messi, he was on tv every weekend?
Television doesn't want football for football's sake. They are not doing football a favour by showing wall-to-wall live football. They are doing television a favour, by filling air time somewhat cheaply.
And with so-much televised football, each channel has to try to be different, ramp up the razzle, show how hip and right-on their coverage is. That way, you get title sequences such as the "Mad Men" sequence from Wednesday night, which has apparently upset The Rangers.
Then there is the concurrent spat about "Off the Ball" - pathetic. OTB is a national treasure, the single programme on the Scottish airwaves which takes the piss out of our sad obsession with 22 men chasing a wind-filled, leather-covered pig's bladder - which is what the original footballs were.
Nobody, no club or no institution is beyond a slagging from Messrs Cosgrove's and Cowan's wit. Uniquely among Scotland's plethora of football-related broadcast programmes, OTB isn't all about the opinions of former players, who, because they are members of the football family, are unable to come right out and say: "that was mince", when discussing an incident which every fan on the terraces showed up the players/officials/coaches involved as pedlars of low-grade mince.
If Celtic were bad, you'll never catch Murdo MacLeod admitting as much on-air; similarly, if Rangers under-perform, maybe only Billy Dodds of the many ex-Rangers on Sportsound's casuals rota will mildly criticise. Cosgrove and Cowan are not constrained by tribal loyalties - they let rip, and more power to their elbows.
Scottish football badly needs a mainstream football discussion programme, of the type the great Jimmy Hill used to deliver on Sky of a Sunday morning. Lacking such a vehicle - which will never happen, because our tribal football society crushes free thinkers such as Jimmy the Chin - OTB is a not bad substitute.
And, if Off the Ball is upsetting Rangers (or for that matter Celtic or any other club), then - it's doing its job.
AS a post script to the above thoughts. Some years ago, when I was Sports Editor of a local daily newspaper, we concentrated on the two professional sports teams - the football club and the ice hockey team in the city in which we were based.
The football team got the back page lead every day except Tuesday, when we concentrated on the ice hockey team.
I upset the ice hockey team's team manager one match night Sunday and was escorted out of the rink. My Editor was a fanatical fan of the team, witnessed the incident and told me to just go home, we would sort-out the matter on the Monday.
He then told me to down-grade the ice hockey coverage to a single paragraph, detailing the scores in the two weekend games, and to run this at the foot of an inside sports page. This caused me a bit of bother, finding an acceptable back page "splash", but, we got through.
The telephones were red hot on tuesday morning, with complaining ice hockey fans, but, at ten am, the ice hockey team owner came in, spent five minutes in the Editor's office - I was re-instated with full priveleges and nothing more was ever said about the incident; the team manager was helpfulness personified thereafter.
The moral of this story is - sport needs the media and if it comes to a fall-out, the media will always win. Charles Green, please read and digest.
I DON'T know John Terry, I have never met, far less interviewed the guy. However, I cannot help feeling all those highly-paid "Fleet Street" scribes who have recorded for posterity Terry's many failures to meet the (unreasonably-high though they may be) standards expected of England's football captain - and remember here, Bobby Moore was no angel - just might be right and he's a less-than-savoury piece of work.
When there is the amount of evidence of prattishness about a player there is about JT - knocking-off a team-mate's burd, charging business-men for access to "off-limits" areas and so forth; no amount of heroic goal-line clearances will de-toxify the "brand".
I am prepared to believe he did abuse Anton Ferdinand; so maybe the FA got it right and the combined forces of the Metroploitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and so-forth got it wrong. Or, is it just, as I have long believed - we're producing too-many lawyers these days.
My secondary school class produced: two doctors, three vets, two university professors, four senior bankers, one senior civil servant, one automotive designer, one senior RAF officer, two senior policemen (Chief Inspectors), one IT millionaire, one millionaire business-man (self-made), two hospital matrons, ten teachers plus the usual reprobates: one millionaire merchant banker and two published authors. However, the guy we all look down on, the lowest of the low of our lot, is the solitary lawyer.
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