Take A Press Release Mr Young

ANOTHER busy week for “the stenographers” (tm. Phil Mac Giolla Bhain) – selling the lie that all is well at Castle Greyskull to the gullible hordes of Berrs out there.

As regular readers will know, when it comes to matters Rangers, the best source of news and comment is not to be found by reading the dead trees press, or listening to the gurglings of BBC Sportscene or Sportssound, and certainly not from listening to Radio Clyde. No, if you want a clue as to what is actually going on behind that large red brick edifice on Edmiston Drive, log onto Phil Mac Giolla Bhain's blog – but never, ever, read the below the line comments.

Phil, from his base in Donegal, has been consistently ahead of the game and on the money where Rangers is concerned, and, at this latest time of turmoil for the Establishment club, I say again, read what Phil has to say.

The most-pressing item facing the men at the top of the marble staircase right now is surely sorting-out th team management. Graeme Murty, thrust suddenly into the hot-seat will give the job his all, but, in-truth, he is hopelessly out of his depth and may already be floundering.

Graeme Murty - out of his depth

Bringing in an experienced Real Rangers Man in the short term, to see-out the season, might well work, in that short term, but, that would be little more than putting a sticking plaster on a gaping bleeding wound. Nothing of note will happen at the club until they put in place a permanent manager, or, what we are being told is the preferred option – bring in an experienced Director of Football, and appoint an experienced Head Coach, able to work over the close season to ready the club for next season.

But, assuming the club can at least hold onto third place in the Premiership and get into Europe, that close season will be a short one. The playing staff is quite simply inadequate for a European campaign – there are players featuring regularly in the first team who are patently not “Rangers Class” and who will need to be moved-on. This could come at a huge cost, and, as Mr Mac Giolla Bhain is forever pointing out: “this is a club without a credit line at any bank, reliant for survival on loans from directors”.

He has also recently revealed, the three directors who have been bankrolling the club of late are now a gang of two while nobody any longer pays any credence to the utterings of the absentee Chairman, who, we should never forget, is tagged as: “a glib and shameless liar” by a South African judge.

The club is also engaged in one or two on-going legal disputes. Honestly, given this scenario, can you see any worthwhile contender for the role of Director of Football or of Head Coach, touching such a toxic club with a barge pole.

Certainly, there will probably be one or two Real Rangers Men out there who fancy they could turn things around, but, in all honesty, the one towering former Rangers player, himself a one-time fan, who has the stature, the knowledge and the ability to do the job will not go anywhere near the club.

Well, if you were Sir Alex Ferguson, would you relocate from leafy Cheshire to Glasgow, give up your front row, directors' box seat at Old Trafford and all the perks which your success in England had earned you to take on restoring Rangers – under that Chairman and that board.

No, and neither will Fergie – perhaps the only man who could turn things round – provided the financial side was sorted-out.

ELSEWHERE, one or two of “the stenographers” (tm. Phil Mac Giolla Bhain) have been waxing lyrical about the inadequacies of Hampden this week. Of course Hampden is not fit for purpose. Of course it is outdated and the sight lines, indeed, almost the entire spectator experience, is not what it should be.

But, if anyone seriously thinks the SFA and Queen's Park will do anything to sort out the mess, they are deluded.

We may, some day, see the ideal scenario, a 100,000-capacity, state-of-the-art truly National Stadium, to be used by our football and rugby teams built on a greenfield site somewhere central, with excellent rail and road links. BUT, this will only happen once Scotland is an independent, thriving nation, sure of its place in the world.

So, at 70 next week, I will never see it, indeed, my youngest grand-son, who is coming up on five, just might see it – it is that far away and that far down the list of priorities in this country.

I don't know what the answer is, but, I think we can look forward to many more years of the Hampden Experience, grim though that can be.

PROJECT Brave continues to be hyped-up in the press. Aye well, this is, for my money, yet another in the long list of failures to bring Scottish football up to date.

I don't know all the answers, but:

1. Immediately bring-in a three foreigners rule
2. Go to a single 16-club league, all-seater stadia, full-time squads
3. Regional leagues below this level
4. A strict limit to squad numbers, (say 25-plyr squads)with fringe players (who should all be under-23 dual-registered with teams in the regional league
5. Seventy per-cent of each 25-man squad must be “Scotland-qualified”.

These changes would, I am certain, do for a start.

Roger Hynd

BIG Roger Hynd died last week, after a long and courageous battle against cancer. Of course, the tributes stressed he was: “ex-Ranger Roger Hynd”, although the club which got the best service from him and where he was happiest was Birmingham City – they even inducted him into their Hall of Fame.

With Shankly as a middle name; his mother Jean was the great man's sister – Roger was minor football royalty, Wullie Shankly was his nephew, and he was always a great supporter of the Glnbuck/Shankly legacy. He was also a fine PE teacher and had a lot more to him than most footballers.

In Scotland he is best-remembered for his short spell as an emergency centre forward for Rangers at the end of the 1966-67 season, including wearing the number nine shirt in the European Cup-Winners Cup final against Bayern Munich.

There is a legend down here in East Ayrshire, in the Shankly heartland that big Roger only got the centre forward gig because of a typical own goal by the Rangers of those days.

Jim Forrest and George McLean were cast into the wilderness following Berwick, but, that season, there was a young centre forward from Cumnock who was scoring goals for fun in the Rangers reserve team. He had scored over 40-goals and, knowledgeable Rangers fans wanted to see him given his chance in the first team. He was duly pencilled-in to start in the first team one week, when an ex-Rangers player from this area telephoned Ibrox and informed Scot Symon that the young lad was engaged to a Roman Catholic.

He never got the first team call, and was eased out of the club the following season. Roger Hynd got the first team gig – the rest is history and to some extent legend.