flyingrodent

Utterly deranged.

Christ on a stick. So when the geezer was crowdfunding his reporting on the phone-hacking trials, was he ripping steak-bakes out of the mouths of the children of obsessed Murdoch-despisers? I've seen some hilarity on these pages before, but this one is properly demented. Imagine, a guy does a job, and asks to be paid for it! Truly, a baleful conspiracy.

Excellent. Just keep clapping, you dafties. Alasdair Lamont ‏@BBCAlLamont DK closes meeting - standing ovation from shareholders.

For every other club in world football, paying back money that you've borrowed is just taken for granted. For this one, it's headline news.

Rangers fans really grilling the board today, asking all the difficult questions: Alasdair Lamont ‏@BBCAlLamont Ricki Neill of Rangers First - what is best way we can give money to club?

Googled "Campbell Ogilvie" for old-time's sake, just to see what I'd get back. What I got was this pile of manure from the despicably anti-Rangers Graeme Spiers, just before he went a bit freelance: http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/13116622.Campbell_Ogilvie__on_his_EBT__leaving_Rangers__and_the_SFA_vision_for_Scottish_football/ By general consent, Campbell Ogilvie is one of the most decent men you could meet, yet the Scottish Football Association president has endured a horrible past 18 months. "There have been plenty times when I have walked in here at the SFA and thought: 'I've had enough of this,'" Ogilvie told me, citing the venom and poison he has had to face. The SFA is currently undertaking one of the biggest initiatives in its history - implementing the Henry McLeish Report - yet Ogilvie, as president, has had to endure another acute worry. He has felt tarred by his association with the whole EBTs controversy at Rangers. If anything, this certainly disproves the idea that there's some kind of collusion going on between high-ranking SFA officials and sport journalists. Oh no, the venom! The poison! Why, who but a nutter would suspect Campbell of anything except for honest service? He's had to endure acute worries, for Christ's sake! The fiends! God, the past that this decent man has had to face, and the tarring, the endless tarring. It's almost as if there was some kind of suspicion that he might have been involved in a well-publicised fraud, whether during his time at Rangers, or while he was working at the SFA. Such a shame for the poor guy. I'm sure he never drew anything more than an honest penny. Edit: And while they were implementing the Henry McLeish Report, as well. It's like we have no shame.

To be fair, Tedi has been consistently calling for Scottish football fans to unite against a soulless, predatory, cash-fixated entity that couldn't care less about sport. And that's fair enough, so he has my sympathy, to some extent*. Mind you, he's doing it while also arguing that another soulless, predatory, cash-fixated entity that couldn't care less about sport should face no reasonable penalties for actively cheating, so it's swings and roundabouts, isn't it. *Although if I have to pay my debts - and I do have to pay them, or I get forced to pay them - then so do Rangers, so there is a bit of a f**k 'em sentiment going on here.

I imagine there's nothing in the rules to prohibit clubs from robbing banks or selling cocaine to raise cash to buy players either, but if we're saying that there's literally nothing we can do to deal with bad sportsmanship in sport, we might as well pack up the game and move on to tiddlywinks instead. The entire situation is absurd, but only because the football authorities have absolutely no desire to confront it.

So basically, much like huge cash payments that never have to be paid back were "loans", cheating isn't cheating unless there's a specific rule that declares that precisely this form of cheating is cheating. The really glaring thing about every defence that's come from Rangers over their cheating - or financial malfeasance, or bad sportsmanship, or whatever you want to call it - is that you can only make sense of it if you screw your eyes up, stand on your head and work from the assumption that it's perfectly normal for people in sport to tell stonking great lies, if it's in their interest to do so.

You have to feel sorry for these players. It's not like they had any reason to suspect that the club's owners might not be entirely trustworthy, or that anyone at Rangers might try to cheat them out of money owed. Edit: I see that the fan response is "Rangers are under no obligation to fulfill these players' contracts, because fans were dissatisfied with their performance on the park". The exceptionalism continues.

The really big monsters have a hard time negotiating the environment, and fanny around for ages trying to get round cars and huts. Keep trees or other obstacles between you and them as much as possible. (This is probably cheating, but what the hell, he's about fifteen feet tall).

In every sport all over world, cheating means the removal of honours won. There's no debate about the possible effect of the cheating, or whether the athlete/team would've won without the cheating. As soon as evidence of cheating is uncovered, the honours are removed, no ifs or buts. Cheating = the opposite of sport. That's except for viewers in Scotland.

If you wanted a stark illustration of how catastrophic Scottish football's dalliance with high finance has been, well, there it is.

It's usually a cast-iron rule of scandals that, if the only defence you have is "pretending not to understand what's going on", you're boned. That's probably not the case here though, since the people in charge of the Scottish game clearly couldn't be less interested in ensuring that it's conducted with transparency and fairness.

The difference is, FIFA's corruption was so bad that the Americans had to step in to get some prosecutions done. Nothing would've happened otherwise. There's no equivalent of the Americans in Scottish football. Only people who all make a living directly out of Scottish football.

I'm assuming that Dave King is giving the same message to the public that he is to the football authorities, just because sending a different one would weaken his position. And these football phone-in level pronouncements are surely the best case that he and his public relations team can make, or he'd be making better ones, or at least paying PR people to make better ones. And the message is: f**k you, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. You don't need me to tell you that this is a fairly desperate response. It's a direct challenge to the other clubs' willingness to deal with Rangers' cheating, and a blunt middle finger to the football authorities. The really horrible thought here is that King knows that he can say whatever he likes, and nothing will be done about it, ever. Because he knows that there's no appetite at all within the game to actually deal with corruption head on, because everyone who could is scared of the consequences. The other interpretation is that King is absolutely desperate, because the forces of justice are closing in. I won't hold my breath for that.

My memory is hazy, but I think you're in a fairly strong position in Scots law for retaining something that you bought in good faith, even if it later turns out to have been stolen. Although as ever with Rangers, the idea of "good faith" can't be taken for granted.

I was trying to think earlier of another example of an athlete or team who were proven to have cheated, but then somehow retained a large measure of support from the sporting authorities and the press, to the point where many public figures were willing to defend the perpetrators against the logical consequences of their actions. I couldn't think of a comparison, but I imagine that you'd have to go to Russia or China to find one. Edit: Got one - the Uruguayan authorities and lots of the national side's fans convinced themselves that Luis Suarez was unfairly treated for biting that Italian defender. Even then, the rest of the world just laughed at them and the authorities got on with it as expected.

Same reason why they blocked and stalled HMRC for years on end, deliberately dragging out the process for as long as possible. They knew - or at very least strongly suspected - that if they fully revealed their financial dealings, they'd have to pay all their taxes, just like every other club in the country. And they couldn't afford to do that, because they were deliberately operating a scheme designed to let them field players that were well beyond their ability to pay for.

This is about the size of it. I'm yet to see a single attempt to disprove this that doesn't basically amount to pretending not to understand it, from journalists, club employees or supporters.

I suppose the difference is that that would be in the same season. But if "retrospective punishments" mean "You can't void the result after the competition has finished", how do we ever deal with cheats? That's the thing about cheating - it's designed so that people don't detect it at the time. I mean, are all those cheating Russian athletes safe with their medals, just because they did their cheating years ago? None of these defences ring true, not one.

Richard Wilson on the radio making a big deal about how Rangers thought that the EBTs as used were fine at the time, and how retrospective punishments are unacceptable. Which kind of raises questions about why Rangers felt it necessary to conceal the terms of their contracts from the authorities in side-letters, then refused to comply with Hector. It also makes me wonder what kind of punishments aren't "retrospective". They all are, aren't they? Even a red card is.

This really is a key point. If there was a suggestion here that Rangers had made an honest, unintentional error with the tax scheme, or if they'd been misled by a fly-by-night Lionel Hutz type, there might be a bit more sympathy for them re: titles stripped. Not a lot, but a bit. But that's not what happened. We know as a matter of fact, not of conjecture, that Rangers sought to conceal the EBT scheme at every step of the way - from the football authorities while they were cheating, and from HMRC and everyone else after the fact. They fought tooth and nail to keep it all secret, because they knew they were cheating, or at very least suspected that they were. The competitions they won should be voided* and asterisks attached saying "No award due to financial corruption at Rangers FC". It's a nonsense to do anything else - it says that crime does pay, that cheats do prosper. *I know this won't happen, but it really should.

Very easily. Although I suppose we might have won, if we'd been cheating.