Here We Go Again

"DIAMOND geezer" Ray Winstone has a nice little earner going on Champions League nights on ITV, with his commercial for in-play betting with some online bookmaking firm. Winstone might look like a prototype Millwall fan (I think he has an affection for West Ham), but I don't think "footie" is the number one conversation subject down at the Groucho and the other watering holes wherein lurk the London Luvvies.

I don't bet, but, with little Lennie's touchline ban over, I might be tempted to see what the odds are against the Celtic manager being banished to the stand again between now and the end of the season - and make a small investment.

Lennie apparently intends going-on as he has in the past, charging around the technical area and down the track like a souped-up Duracell rabbit - he seems to think this the best way to gees-up the Celtic players. He should maybe have a word with a Lisbon Lion or two; one of that sainted group of players once told me nothing got him focussed or motivated quite like looking across at the Celtic dug-out to see Jock Stein, face like fury, just staring at him.

Brown pants time, time too to up the work rate and attempt to please the boss. Stein was often like a simmering volcano, but I don't recall him charging about, throwing wobblers to the same extent as Lennie.

Another thing which caught my eye today was, in a piece by a young whipper-snapper of a journalist, for whom I forecast great things, the suggestion that Lennie was about to exchange his place in the stand for: "the best view of the pitch" - from the dug-out.

Pure pish, the best view of the pitch is the bird's-eye one; the higher the perch the better you are able to survey your domain. Just look at the example of raptor birds, who soar to great heights, before diving down to take their prey.

Head coaches in American Football patrol the touch lines, simply because they have to make the big calls as to what players they have to put into the game for each play over a match. They can field any 11 from 47, so they need to be hands-on and at the head of their batallion.

But, they have half a dozen guys, as high up the stadium as they can be, surveying the field, watching the positioning and feeding them information.

In international rugby, the coaches are also sat high up in the stands, surveying, watching, deciding, but in constant touch with minions on the touchline, who get the message on to the players.

Have you ever noticed how, in rugby internationals, whenever there is a place kick at goal, the water boys and the tee-carrier, usually the kicking coach, are immediately onto the park. They're not there just to bring water, on-field coaching is going on.

But, football is a simpler game, it flows more naturally and has fewer natural breaks. Therefore, it is harder to change things on the hoof. So why doesn't the head coach ape his rugby counterpart and remain up high, but in touch with the accolytes on the bench? He gets a better view, he can still intervene if necessary and, crucially, in the case of Neil Lennon, he'd be well away from potential flashpoints with match or even fourth officials, or opposing coaching staffs.

Keeping Lennie out of the front line might not do much for Paul McBride QC's fees income, but just might work better for Celtic. I think it is worth trying.

I NOTE that Falkirk is the latest club to be facing financial problems. Why am I not surprised - until the SFA stops farting about and sorts out the game, financial failure will continue to be a feature of Scottish football.

Scotland is skint - our heavy industry is all but gone, we're the only nation on earth ever to strike oil and end up poorer. We've been shafted for ages by a political class of gold-ploated numpties, "advised" by a civil service who are not only uncivil, but serve nobody but their own best interests.

We cannot afford the number of full-time football teams we have. The Scottish football cake has been shrinking for years, but, what happens? Every time a team looks like going under, some kind of saviour comes along and hey presto, most of the debt somehow vanishes and they carry on.

On the few occasions when a club does go under, instead of consolidating with a smaller league, another club is brought in - Third Lanark begat Clydebank, enter Meadowbank, Inverness CT, Ross County, Elgin City, Peterhead, Gretna came and went, to be replaced by Annan. Airdrie went, and voila, Clydebank became Airdrie United.

We need fewer clubs in Scotland, not more, or even the same number. Scottish football was at its post-war peak of popularity with 30 clubs, today, with much-reduced crowds we've got 42, it's economic madness.

The decade between "normal" football resuming in 1946 and the start of European football in 1955 was boom time for Scottish football. OK, Celtic have never before or since under-achieved as badly as they did then, but, they were still contenders and managed to win one League Chamionship, two Scottish Cups and the Coronation Cup. Rangers won four League Championships, four Scottish Cups and two League Cups.

Aberdeen won a League Championship, a Scottish Cup and a League Cup; Clyde won the Scottish Cup, Dundee won two League Cups, East Fife won three; Hearts won a League Cup; Hibs won three League Championships; and Motherwell won a Scottish Cup and a League Cup.

Quite a few of these trophies were won by predominantly part-time squads, not so many years later St Mirren won the 1959 Scottish Cup with a squad which included two petrol tanker drivers, one brewer's drayman, a teacher and a driving instructor.

So, in the first nine post-war Scottish seasons, seven clubs other than the Big Two managed to get their hands on one of the three major items of silverware. In the last nine seasons, of full-time, so-called more-professional football, only four clubs, Hearts, Hibs, Dundee United and Livingston have caused the Old Firm to cut down on silver polish.

And the present-day Rangers squad doesn't have a defence like Brown; Young and Shaw, McColl, Woodburn and Cox, or attackers such as Willie Waddell or Willie Thornton. And they don't have a penalty taker like Johnny Hubbard.

I'd rather have Bobby Evans, Bertie Peacock, Charlie Tully, Bobby Collins and Willie Fernie than some of today's Celtic stars.

Where are the successors to Conn, Bauld and Wardhaugh, or Mackay and Cumming at Hearts? What price the not-so-famous Hibs Six: Scottish internationalists Tommy Younger, Hugh Howie, Jock Govan, Bobby Combe, and League internationalists John Paterson and Archie Buchanan - far less the Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond "Famous Five" up front at Easter Road in those days?

Aberdeen fans might bemoan the lack of quality in today's squad, when compared with "Fergie's Furies" - what about the 1955 title-winning squad, the likes of Fred Martin, Archie Glen, Alec Young, Jackie Hather, Harry Yorston, Paddy Buckley, Bobby Wishart and the young Graham Leggat - that was some squad too.

Clyde had international stars in post man Harry Haddock and scientist Archie Robertson, while at Bayview, East Fife's George Aitken came up the pit one Thursday, travelled down to London on Friday, helped Scotland beat England 3-1 on Saturday, travelled back up on Sunday and was back at the coal face on Monday morning. Couldn't happen today.

You can be a part-time footballer, but still be professional. Ah there's the rub - being professional. A lot of our so-called professionals are highly unprofessional in their life styles and demeanour.

Sort it out and we can again see great football in Scotland.

The Cry Will Still Be No Surrender

THE next settlement to the one wherein I reside, here in the badlands of East Ayrshire, is run be the Orange Order - the coonsillors refer to each other as "Brother", a flute band leads the Armistice Day parade and you never see a Celtic strip in daylight. Why the proddies even run the local branch of the Labour Party.

The Royal Black Perceptory (the bigots' bigots) is big down there and some years ago, on the eve of "the Black Walk" through this wee toon, I was invited to attend a reception in the Toon Hall - not through any membership of a fraternal order, but wearing my local press hat. I found myself being introduced to some of the biggest names on the proddie side of the then on-going "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.

Another time, I had to cover a conventicle on a local moor, addressed by "The Big Man" himself. The good Dr Paisley spoke at length, with fervour on the defence of the reformed faith.

I was at school with one of the local coonsillors, who is, as they say: "well up" in the RBP and I know him to be a fine man, committed to the betterment of his constituents. He is no bigot and on at least a couple of occasions to my certain knowledge, he has gone in to bat successfully to thwart closure of Catholic schools in his constituency.

But sadly, for every paragon such as my pal, there are any number of wannabes, small men, with small minds, who prove repeatedly that a little learning is a dangerous thing. These are the guys who join "the ludge" for the nice wee orange collarette, so they can march down the main road at regular dates during "the marching season", parading their intolerance and bigotry to the world. Very often they don't actually march, but saunter alongside the marchers, drunk on the admittedly intoxicating rythms of the party songs - not to mention cheap drink.

A wee aside here, I hope the Catholic Church has properly rewarded the monks of Buckfast Abbey for their continuing work in keeping the protestant underclass of west-central Scotland under.

The real members of the RBP and the LOL fight their organisations' corner doggedly, but there are among them some intelligent men, who, while they are very-much pro-protestantism and the continuance of protestant rule in this United Kingdom, are not anti-Catholic and tolerant of the practising of Roman Catholicism.

It's the hangers-on who are the trouble. And I would wager it is some of those hangers-on who man that rump of scum currently causing so much bother to the UEFA apparatchicks in Nyon and to Rangers FC.

They see it as their "right" to parade their bigotry at every opportunity; I don't believe the men at the top inside Ibrox want them; I don't believe the genuine believers within the RBP and the LOL want them. The rest of us involved in Scottish football don't want them.

But when we ask them to go away, they will say what they've always said: "NO SURRENDER".

At the end of the day, while some might argue their continuance is a particular problem within Scottish society. Their continuing ability to embarrass Rangers FC is that club's problem. The club HAS to bite the bullet, go on the offensive and kick out the offenders.

The fight will be long, it will be bitter but, if Rangers don't win it, they could well find themselves out in the European cold for a long time. By not acting, they are defending the indefensible.

Short term, it means empty seats at Ibrox, but, in the longer term, maybe it is time for the Scottish government to step in and abolish separate Catholic schools. For so long as wee Liam doon the road goes to a different school, then wee Billy's bigoted faither can drum his bigotry into his son - "Thae fenians is different son; they dae nasty things at that school and at their chapel - keep awa frae them...etc, etc."

Likewise wee Pat can tell wee Liam to stay away from wee Billy, cos all proddies are bad. Let the kids mingle at school, let them see for themselves how daft their fathers and grand-fathers are in perpetuating the old divisions.

It will not happen overnight, but, just maybe, 50 or 100 years down the line 1690 is just another year in history. And two Glasgow football teams can meet in friendly rivalry without the cancellation of all police leave, a red alert at the city's hospital A&E departments and calls for calm from the United Nations.

But, before the big guns get involved, it befalls the directors of one big football team to say - enough is enough, we're coming for you. Not because we find you an embarrassment - but because your time is past, bigotry has no place in 21st century Scotland.

The scum will not surrender, they will have to be purged. Rangers must carry out that purge. UEFA will demand it of them.

We're All Village People

LONDON, we are told, is a series of inter-linked villages. I believe this observation is even truer of Scotland, particularly when it comes to football. The backbone of the Scottish game is in the juniors - if you've no backbone, the unlocked-up psychos in the junior game will soon break you - and it's in the juniors that the ethos of the game in Scotland was forged.

The mutual animosity between Auchinleck and Cumnock, Bo'ness and Linlithgow, Pollok and Arthurlie and so on is mirrored, albeit in greater numbers between Ayr and Kilmarnock, Hearts and Hibs, at both ends of Tannadice Street, Dundee, across Fife and Lanarkshire and, with an added politico-religious flavour between those loveable Bigot Brothers in Glasgow.

So, since we are all Village People - we ought to Go West in our search for a cure to Scotland's football ills. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single league, up to its neck in shit, should maybe start again.

We've been down the traditional Scottish Ayebeenism road of tinkering round the edges of the status quo, maybe we should look seriously at the North American system - a suggestion I've put forward before, but, few were listening.

Hallalujah, however, regular reader of this drivel, 'Sausage Fingers', an "Arab" now relocated to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, feels I might be onto something.

We've tried the traditional Scottish way, why don't we try the North American pattern?

If the alleged top teams HAVE to run their own major league, then that show ought - like the American Major Leagues, be as professional as possible. It should also, like the American models be a properly democratic entity. Sure, in the USA the likes of the New York Yankees, the LA Lakers, Boston Bruins or the Dallas Cowboys might be "bigger" clubs, have larger fan bases or attract the bigger stars. But, when it comes to running their particular leagues, they are no bigger than their smaller rival franchises.

That's another thing about North American sport - they are franchises. The entire league membership decides how many teams they can carry and that's how many you have. There is no promotion or relegation, in fact, they go out of their way to try to level the playing field.

Each team has to meet stringent rules when it comes to stadia, facilities, management and funding. They don't have reserve teams, at the top end it is all about a single team, trying as hard as it can to win its league. There might not be a Yankees reserve team in Major League Baseball, for instance, but there are feeder teams in the minor leagues, tied to the Yankees organisation and bringing through new talent.

There is also the wonderful American Collegiate sports system, organised by the CAAA, the Collegiate Athletics Association, which organises college sports. Sporting talent will get even the poorest out of the ghetto in America. On the frace of it, over here sporting talent will get even the poorest out of our lowest sink schemes - the difference is: if the American kid doesn't make it to the professionals, and most don't, at least he has a university education - one which perhaps, without his or her sporting talent, he probably would not have had - to fall back on.

Over here, the talented young footballer from places like Easterhouse, Muirhouse or Pilton or Onthank usually leaves school at 16 to join a football team. Here he is assessed annually and can be tossed aside at any time. After that, he's on his own. If he's lucky, he is picked up by another full-time team, to try again with no greater guarantee of a long-term career. Otherwise it's down to him to find a Monday to Friday job and a Saturday berth with a part-time team, either in the lower reaches of the SFL or in the Juniors.

How many young players have been cast aside by this unfair system? How many guys who wrongly backed their talent to release them from poverty are back, on the broo, or existing in dead end jobs?

Let's start again. Have an SPL by all means. I would suggest we cannot afford more than a maximum of 20 clubs. And let's not have SPL 1 and 2. Let's have one SPL, with two equal conferences.

There might be a case for a national league below that, of maybe 12 or 16 teams, part-time maybe but with infrastructure and aspirations to enter the SPL proper, should it be a success and should the clubs feel it should expand.

Below that we should have regional leagues, involving proper community clubs. The SPL clubs should, Champions League style, be limited to say 25 players, but should be linked to one or more regional community clubs for player development and when necessary, temporary recruitment of players if required by an injury crisis. These minor league clubs MUST have links to schools, further education colleges or universities, so that the youngsters who don't make it into the SPL or to similar leagues outwith Scotland have an alternative career to fall back on.

These minor leagues should also have an upper age limit of 23. Yes, occasionally a late-developer will break through, but, by and large, if a player hasn't made it by 23, he isn't going to.

As in North America, the best will come through the system, while the sporting failures still can have successful careers ouside the game, and might well continue playing for fun in the amateur leagues.

Who knows, there mightr even be a case for a North American type draft system each close season for filling gaps in the top clubs' playing rosters.

We've guddled through with a flawed system for over a century. The North American system has worked over there for 100 years. Why cannot it work over here too?

I realise there are a lot of shoulds, mights, maybes, could bes, not to say speculation in this post. But, all our certainties in Scottish football in the past have come to little. Doing nothing isn't an option, so if we must do something, let's do something different.

It's All About Us

THE SPL clubs have, I see, re-written the McFly classic: for them it is not All About You, it is All About Us - hence their failure to come up with a re-shaping of a league which plainly isn't working: since between them the top 12 cannot put aside selfish interest for a league concept which will benefit Scottish football as a whole.

Of course, we shouldn't heap all our disapproval on the greed is good top band, the knuckle-dragging dinosaurs in the three SFL divisions are equally culpable - don't expect them to quietly roll over and give up the perks they have fought so long and so hard to maintain - in particular the eternal bribe they extorted from the top clubs when they toddled off to do their own thing at the fag end of the 20th century.

And, as I forecast at the time of publication, don't hold your breath for any of the very sensible suggestions hidden in the small print of Henry McLeish's Review recommendations. As we all know from experience, turkeys will not vote for Christmas.

Scottish football is in a mess, we all know this. What is becoming ever more evident however, is that there isn't the will within the game to sort the mess out. So, we get the Scottish government in to sort it out.

No way Jose, there is even less will there, not to mention less ability. I am already fed-up with the tit-or-tat petty squabbling we've seen in the early days of the election campaign. We all know that wee Eck Salmond is a giant surrounded by pygmies on the Scottish political landscape. But Eck cannot do it all himself and can we really expect Scottish politicians, who by and large treat sport as a good photo opportunity rather than a serious subject, to sort out the mess?

Let's just say, given a choice of being run by George Peat or Iain Gray, I'd go for big George. It is significant that, given he's no longer one of the power brokers in Westminster, Lord Reid prefers to preside over Celtic rather than, as he certainly could do if he got involved in purely Scottish politics, run the country.

So, it looks as if we're stuck with the same old, same old, for a few years yet.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x

THERE WERE some interesting noises coming out of the Rangers' dressing room after Tuesday night's win at Perth. As a long-serving journalist, I lang syne stopped taking notes at post-match press conferences; you very seldom hear anything sensible from managers and you NEVER hear anything sensible from players - maybe because they are seldom asked a sensible question by journalists who, particularly on a midweek night are more concerned about getting to their favourite watering hole before last orders and don't really want to be hanging around waiting for some over-paid moron to complete his personal grooming regime and trot upstairs to deliver his shafts of erudition .

But the Rangers' party line - the pressure's on Celtic now, does have a ring of truth to it. Remember how, in the early part of the season, Celtic, while not losing too often, weren't exactly winning with style. Then, as Lennie's new faces began to gel with the older ones, the club hit a rich seam of form and surged to the top of the table.

Now, as injuries and suspensions will start to click in, they have to summon-up the strength to finish the job and deliver the title. Except, Rangers overtook them on Tuesday night and now Celtic and not the other lot, is the team playing catch-up.

This is a different type of pressure to what Celtic have been under hitherto. The run-in will be interesting. I do not by the way, buy into the line being peddled by our friends in the Lap Top Loyal about Rangers' lack of strength-in-depth. It is certainly true that, on paper, Celtic has more mature players than their rivals across the city. It is not true, however, that Rangers are down to just 13 men and I wouldn't read too-much into the fact they didn't have a full bench on Tuesday night.

The title race will in all likelihood go right to the wire. We might even see another Helicopter Sunday; there will be other Dundee Uniteds along the way - for both teams.

I still feel, on balance, Celtic are the side better-equipped to take the big prize, but, I wouldn't put money on it right now. We do indeed live in interesting times.

R - E - S - P - E - C - T

DON'T you just love this Respect campaign which has of late been exercising the minds of our southern neighbours - yet another example of the English nation's liking for the occasional outbreak of moral indignation.

If the English had ever "got" Burns, rather than being in thrall to Shakespeare, they wouldn't have this problem with moral indignation - a couple of read-throughs of Holy Willie's Prayer and they would, like us, be able to tell the moralists, the unca guid and thought police to: "awa and bile yer heid".

"Where's he going today?" You might ask.

I refer of course to Master Wayne Rooney's latest escapade, unleashing the F word in the direction of a convenient TV camera following his hat trick goal at Upton Park on Saturday. Shocking behaviour, what; the end of civilisation as we know it and all that. Aye Right, as we say in the West of Scotland.

Master Rooney has always struck me as one of those sportsmen who wears his IQ on his back, although in his case, giving him the number 10 shirt just might be over-rating his intelligence. But, he is typical of what football has become.

The game's masters, be they directors or managers, distrust intelligence in players, other than that almost impossible to quantify intangible: "game intelligence". To put it crudely, they prefer "thick" players.

In this country, football is a game and even when it becomes a career, the guys running it want the players to still think they are schoolboys, who only have to turn up and kick the ball around.

The way Premiership stars continually get caught doing stupid things underlines their lack of awareness and how, like errant schoolboys, they continually seek to push back the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and take things to the limit.

Their bosses like this, it gives them a reason to continue to treat them badly. Sure, they pay them well, but in spite of the money pouring into the players' bank accounts, they continue to be very much the serfs in football's class hierarchy.

That small number of players who can demonstrate that their brains are inside their heads rather than in their feet are not trusted at all by the guys running the clubs. They get a hard time and, to quote from Gordon Smith's autobiography: 'And Smith Did Score' (reporting an exchange he had with John Greig during his spell at Rangers): "The clever ones don't last long".

So you have a situation whereby players who are from the bottom end of the intelligence spectrum go out on a Saturday, told since their school years they are wonderful, brilliant, world-beaters; asked to do nothing more difficult than ensure that one of the ten of them wearing identical shirts places the ball in that nice big net, held up by the 8 foot by 24 foot metal frame at one end of the park: when they cannot do it, or, as in Master Rooney's case when they do do it, have a wee swearie.

In charge of this rabble of 22 young men, there will be one slightly older man, more often than not from one of the professions: a teacher, or a lawyer, an accountant, perhaps even a policeman - someone who is there because he loves the game, wasn't good enough to play it professionally, but wants to put something back into football.

He is there, not because various people have thought he could play; but because he has gone on courses, studied the Laws of the Game he is being paid to enforce; been examined on his knowledge of these Laws. He then has to buy the badge and the kit and start climbing the ladder.

At every stage, his performances are overseen and rated by his peers, by guys who have been through what he is going through. At the bottome end, on the public parks of Britain, he discovers that, every step of the way, he will be ritually abused by players, team officials and spectators. If he is unlucky, he will be physically assaulted, but he soldiers on, until, years later, he emerges into the promised land of the top flight - where not only does the verbal abuse continue, but he is subjected to character assassination from millionaire managers, live on TV.

He gets all sorts of abuse, anonymous letters delivered to his home, threatening all sorts of violence, his every decision is analysed from every angle on TV and in print and if, after umpteen slow-motion replays, it is shown that the snap decision he had to make in real time, almost in the blink of an eye, was wrong - well he's a fool.

Then, if a big-enough stink is created, he is forced to resign from a paying hobby he loves. Yes, at the top end, referees are well-paid, but, for the abuse and aggro they have to take, they are grossly under-paid in comparison to the over-grown schoolboys they are asked to police.

They don't ask much - just a bit of respect for the essential job they are doing. That their decisions, even the wrong ones, and there are wrong ones, since nobody is perfect, are accepted.

This doesn't happen in football today, because, I think, the spoiled brats of players and the retired spoiled brats who have become managers seem to believe they are entitled to everything, even every decision.

And all the time, behind the barriers, are the myopic and occasionally moronic spectators, the followers of the clubs who seem to believe their side has a right to every decision and to win every game.

Respect ought to be given to referees for taking the job, without them, football couldn't function. It shouldn't need an organised campaign, it ought to be an essential ingredient of the game.

And respect will not work through a campaign which merely has lip service from the self-important, self-made businessmen who now run the game and, since they are largely self-made, worship their creators - because I for one, don't think the guys running football believe in the respect campaign.

Which means, we will have to get used to a few more outbursts from millionaire half-wits such as Master Rooney. Not that his Saturday outburst had anything to do with the Respect campaign.

But, if the moralisers and Holy Willies would save their disgust for the guys whose bad behaviour forced the need for a Respect campaign - the managers and administrators whose lack of respect for everyone else sets the tone in football - rather than having a go at a not very intelligent if gifted footballer who "lost it" on TV - then maybe Master Rooney and his successors would learn how to behave in public - and Respect might be a fundamental of the game.

Sport And Politics Don't Mix

AYE RIGHT!!

Sport and politics have always mixed and that will never change; just as Nero and the other Roman emperors gave the plebians bread and circuses to placate them, then today you have Gordon Brown's Raith Rovers fixation, Tony B Liar's great own goal about watching Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle United and Lord Reid of Kerrydale Street presiding over a football clubs, a section of whose support also support a terrorist organisation which, due to his job at the time, once had the said Lord Reid on its hit list.

I fear, perhaps, there is a political element in the current travails being suffered by Rangers Football Club, and, let's face it, being enjoyed by those of us on the sidelines who are not nor ever were Ra Peepul.

This is I should add, an indirect political element. I feel that the stance being taken by the Lloyds Banking Group over Rangers £20 million-plus debt is rather akin to that taken by the Blessed Baroness Thatcher over the poll tax.

You may recall the then Iron Lady insisted on trying out the much-maligned poll tax on the ungrateful and trucculent Scots, before foisting it on her natural English constituency.

I would suggest that, since a day of reckoning is surely somewhere down the road for the over-spending and profligate clubs in the English Premiership, a day which will bring wailing and gnashing of teeth and seriously bad publicity (in fact more seriously bad publicity) for those upstanding organisation the banks, then these same banks have to have a damage limitation plan in place.

Where better to try it out than on a basket case of a Scottish club - Rangers.

Rangers should not be skint. Their ability to compete at the top of the Scottish game has not been compromised by years of mis-management (in the business sense) by Sir David Murray and his minions.

But, they have over-paid journeymen players, failed to properly develop young talent, under-achieved in Europe and, as is so often the case with "a national institution" thought they could serenely sail along as they had always done.

In high finance, confidence is everything, rather as it is in sport. For as long as SDM had the confidence of his bankers, and for years there was the a cosy, clubable Edinburgh establishment relationship between the Murray Group and the Bank of Scotland, all was well.

Then came the credit crunch, those nice Merchant Company chaps who ran the bank and socialised with SDM were swept away, to be replaced by hard-nosed English bankers, who had a different outlook. They didn't have the same confidence in SDM's business acumen - cue trouble for the Murray Group and its highest-profile arm: Rangers FC.

As someone who has known SDM for 30 years and who also "kent his faither", the current travails of the Murray Group and Rangers has a familiar look.

I hear echoes of the way Murray grew his Murray International Metals basketball team, then saw it become Livingston Bulls and fade away. Echoes too of the way his late father could do no wrong in Ayr, before going bust and becoming a sad, shunned gentleman (believe me, even when on his uppers, SDM's dad was always a gentleman).

Gambling did for his father - gambling on European basketball success didn't work for MIM BC - gambling on big name Europeans for continental success didn't work for Rangers. But now Rangers and SDM are embarked on their biggest-ever gamble, that they don't have to cough-up £28 or £30 million to HMRC.

It's all very well a QC who specialises in tax law giving an opinion that Rangers are not liable for this. Said QC can write his own invoice for that. He then perhaps has to back-up his opinion with precedent, case law and the like and argue his point before a group of judges.

If he gets it right, his clients win and he pockets a hefty fee. But if he gets it wrong, disaster.

The judges in the Supreme Court will hand down the definite result on Rangers' case and these guys cannot be second-guessed. Like thousands of others, I have an on-going battle with a bank as regards whether charges accrued on my account were fair or unfair. The FSA, Financial Services Agency, were keen to have a definite ruling on the legality and fairness on banks' penalty charges.

They thought they had the right to rule, a High Court judge agreed; the banks appealled to the Appeal Court - and lost. They then appealed again to the House of Lords - and lost again; but, the Supreme Court was set-up, they appealed again to this new body - and won.

That victory makes all of Celtic's recent wins over the SFA seem small beer. Forget all the favourable opinions Rangers and the other big clubs involved in this battle with HMRC - until their Lordships of the Supreme Court hand down their judgement, it's all up in the air.

It could all still go tits up.

Funny thing though, Rangers, the ultimate Scottish Unionist institution, finds its fate to a large extent in the hands of a Unionist organisation - the Supreme Court. Things just might have been easier under Scots Law in an independent Scotland: politics and football - bloody hell, as another Scot with an interest in politics might say.

Here We Go Again

WE'VE all got one - our dream team/favoured formation against which all others are measured. I know Celtic fans who cannot see past the Lisbon Lions, Rangers fans who swear there was never a team like the Baxter-inspired side of the early sixties, while, being greedy and from Ayrshire I've got two.

Down here in Burns and God's Country - you have to have your dream junior team, in my case: Fraser, Love and Cathie, McEwan, Baird and Donnelly, Bingham, Collins, Sharp, Neil and Wilkie - the Lugar Boswell Thistle side from that wonderful 1955-56 season, when they won the league and reached the Junior Cup Final.

But, I've also got a senior benchmark team: Brown, Richmond, Watson, Beattie, Toner, Kennedy, Stewart, McInally, Kerr, Black and Muir - the Kilmarnock team of 1960. Forget the league-winning side of 1965, if they could clone Jackie McInally, Bertie Black, Matt Watson and Frank Beattie, who were common to both sides, I reckon the 1960 XI, spearheaded by the marvellous Andy Kerr, would have given the 1965 lot two goals of a start and a beating.

So given this Killie connection, you can take it I'm not best-pleased with wee Michael Johnson this morning.

To lose one good manager is unfortunate, but Jim Jefferies probably had reached his "sell-by" date at Rugby Park. Yes, he's done a great job since going back to Tynecastle, but that is his footballing "home" and probably the only place he can be happy at his work.

To lose two is coincidence, and I still reckon, if he had remembered his upbringing in management in Dutch football and gone back to basics, Tango Man Calderwood might have turned the club around.

But to lose a third with Mixu's return to Helsinki - that's downright carelessness. The big Finn was a breath of fresh air in Scottish football; sure he'd have faced problems next year, since Eremenko will certainly not still be at Rugby Park, while Bryson and Taouil also seem set to depart. But I reckon Mixu will have replaced them and kept the club going the right way. For Killie it's Tommy Burns revisited, just as Tam was never going to turn down the Celtic job, so Mixu couldn't reject his country. Sadly for Killie, in both cases the dream job came too soon.

Now, it's back to the drawing board and who knows, with the timing of Mixu's departure, Killie just might slide out of the top six over the next few weeks, unless Kenny Shiels can stick-up the "business as usual" sign in the dressing room and keep the lads focussed. Good luck to him.

Of course, my friends in the A Team of the SFWA are immediately on the case, speculating as to Mixu's long-term replacement. And, whadd ya know: same old same old as regards names in the frame.

Gus MacPherson, Yogi Hughes, Jim McIntyre, Gordon Chisholm - is that not last week's subs bench for Chick Young's Dukla Pumpherston? At least wee Durrantie's out of the picture as he prepares for life at Ibrox after his grand-father.

Speaking as a Killie fan, I'd write "none of the above" on my ballot paper, if I had a vote.

Killie don't so much need a new manager as a new approach. For generations more Ayrshiremen and women than attend Rugby Park for a normal league game have been bussed past the town en route to either of the cathedrals of bigotry in Glasgow - Killie need to get the county behind them again, re-connect with their core support and get local boys into the team (same thing goes for the other small-town Scottish clubs by the way).

Hell, they don't even train in Kilmarnock, but on the outskirts of Bears-bloody-den (how appropriate a name given Murray Park's location).

Get back to Kilmarnock, find the local talent and nurture it - that's the way ahead for Killie. And find a manager, like Mixu, who believes in football, rather than the hoofball which is so prevalent in the SPL today.

The club almost certainly cannot afford him, but, given he has to have a shot at being a manager in his own right soon, I'd go for Liverpool's assistant manager Stevie Clarke: Ayrshire boy, his big brother played for Killie, he knows his stuff and he has worked with some terrific managers.

It almost certainly will not happen, but, a man can dream.