ONE of my rugby-playing friends owns an upmarket pub/restaurant in Glasgow. He enforces a strict “Nae Bams” rule, which because of where he operates within the Dear Green Place, well there aren't many Bams to be found. Elsewhere in the city, he might have problems.
Not that Glasgow has the sole rights to Bams, they are, sadly, to be found all over Scotland, but, perhaps, the city has a higher concentration per square mile.
Your average Caledonian Bam/Ned/Heid Case/Bawbag is also, sadly, too-often found in the wild at football matches. It's almost as if being a Bam at the fitba is a right of passage for Homo Scoticus.
Now, in an effort to bring HS to heel, the Unco Guid elements within the Scottish Government, in what some might see as yet another desperate effort to avoid doing their number one job – getting Scotland out of this Hellish, one-sided Union with England – is to introduce English-style laws on football supporters' buses.
When, in my mid-teens, I exchanged school life in rural East Ayrshire for college life in Glasgow, going into digs with one of my aunts in leafy Springburn, my uncle would take me to watch Rangers playing on a Saturday. One of the first things I noticed was how, as we arrived at the ground, inevitably a big furniture van would draw up and disgorge a multitude of supporters from the back. Or perhaps a platform lorry would stop and a group of fans would jump off the load platform.
Buses to games, not on your nellie. If one guy in a pub had access to wheels big enough to carry everyone, he was immediately the designated driver. I am told this no longer happens, it's coaches all the way now.
Then there are the vested interests. The common-sense view of the Scottish Government's anti-football hooliganism bill was, that it was a good law, one which was needed. During the talking stage, the influential Celtic Apologists wing of Scottish Labour was all for it; here was a law which would hit the FTP wing of Ra Peepul.
Yes it was going to mean something of a rethink to Ra Peepul's set list for match-day choral practice, however, as the Celtic Family quickly discovered, some of their favourite ditties also fell foul of the new legislation. Cue outrage and the bill was killed – even more effectively than Una Thurman managed over two Tarantino movies.
That bill was a good move, it had popular support, but, as with so-much SNP/Greens led legislation, it was badly-drafted and implemented. Oor wee pretendy parliament doesn't have a good track record in righting obvious wrongs. Somehow, however, I think this latest move will join the lengthy list of badly-worded, badly-implemented laws to come out of Holyrood. I am not confident of it being workable, far less making it onto the Statute Book.
IT IS entirely possible – that incredible triple save which Jordan Pickford made for Everton on Saturday not withstanding – that the two best currently-active English goalkeepers are both playing in Glasgow. Joe Hart and Jack Butland are that good, or at least, playing that well.
However, I said at the time, and today say it again – The Breengers buying Butland was an unnecessary purchase. This view was reinforced this week when Robbie McCrone, a man who has surely inherited Ally McCoist's one-time title as The Ibrox Judge – so much time has he spent on the bench, was called-up into Stevie Clarke's Scotland squad.
Good goalkeeper that Butland is, and well though he is playing – I don't think he has made any saves that young McCrorie could not have made. By promoting the young Scot, Rangers could have saved themselves a good deal of cash. But, gone are the days when Rangers bred their own players, just as, gone are the days when the club was a power in Europe.
GONE TOO, apparently, are the days when the two clubs had a bit of a cachet, if not in mainland Europe, certainly in England, of being rather good; that is the view we could take from Alan Shearer's rather cruel dismissal of them this week.
Normally, when an English critic talks down our football and our team, we Jocks bristle somewhat; however, I have not seen, from beyond the ranks of the faithful in both camps, many people prepared to tell the bald Geordie to away and bile yer heid, or any similar Scottish put-down.
Because, we know, even if the massed ranks of the Lap Top Loyal will never dare agree with him, Shearer isn't wrong – these are two rubbish teams at the moment. The Emperors have no strips.
I NOTE, Stephen Naismith is once again Head Coach at Heart of Midlothian FC, having had to temporarily relinquish the position during their short European run, because he lacks the necessary European coaching qualifications.
We have had a thing in football management these past 60 years or so, for the track-suited manager. I suppose Willie Waddell was perhaps the last business-suited manager in Scotland, and he stopped being Rangers' manager in May, 1972.
Interestingly, that club had only five managers in its first 100 years of existence: William Wilton, Bill Struth, Scott Symon, David White and Waddell.
In its last 50 years, the club has had more than 20 managers. This perhaps indicates how much the necessity to win trophies impacts on a manager's tenure these days.
Rangers perhaps changed the managerial road map, when they appointed John Greig to the top job in the early 1980s. This was one of the first instances of a top player going from dressing room to manager's office in a big club, without first of all serving an apprenticeship at a smaller club, or in an assistant's role.
It didn't work with The Greatest Living Ranger, but, to give the club credit, undaunted, they tried again when they recruited Graeme Souness, and this time, for good or ill, they totally changed the Scottish football landscape.
Now, however, with this need for UEFA coaching qualifications, might we see a return to the days when great managers, guys such as Bill Shankly, Brian Clough and Bobby Robson, had to go out and serve time in the game's equivalent of Smallville, Kansas, before strutting their stuff on the big stage? I suspect the game might be none the worse for such a reversion.
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