flyingrodent

This is true. On the other hand, the panel would have a hell of a lot of explaining to do to justify why Spartans or whoever got booted out of the cup for committing an offence that Rangers would've committed with relative impunity, hundreds of times, over a period of years. Which is not to say that no such justification could conceivably exist. On the other hand, the punitive strategy that you are suggesting really is the definition and practice of corruption. I don't think it's up for debate, really.

Well, you've set it up here, Tedi - IF Rangers are found guilty, THEN this is what should happen. When the situation is posed like this, the question of Rangers' guilt is irrelevant - you're talking about a scenario in which they ARE guilty. If that's the case, then the relevant question is, what should be done? And the penalty for fielding ineligible players has been established, cemented in concrete and encased in Carbonite over the years, unless I'm mistaken - immediate punting out of the competitions in question, at a bare minimum, whether it was intentional or accidental. I can't think of any situations where this didn't happen in the last thirty years, although that's not to say that it never has. Which means that, IF Rangers are found guilty of fielding many, many ineligible players, THEN all those titles and cups pretty much have to go. Anything less would look and smell like a total wimp-out; any suggestion that the panel accepted the kind of deal you're suggesting, for the reasons that you're suggesting them, would amount to only one thing - corruption. And, to reiterate: Corruption = Failing to act properly when wrong-doing is brought to your attention, because it's in your interest to ignore it.

Correct me if I have that wrong, but is Tedi saying that Rangers should not be held accountable for the flagrant abuses of its former owner because 1) Rangers have lots of fans 2) Rangers fans won't like it if their club is held accountable for the flagrant abuses of its former owners 3) Holding Rangers accountable etc. would be complicated and long-winded, and Rangers would resist any attempts to hold them accountable, and 4) An unprosecuted Rangers will give lots of money to the league, whereas a busted Rangers might not? I mean, I can actually see the SPL and SFA going for this deal. They are, after all, unscrupulous, money-grubbing hacks with an eye on the bottom line, every time. But it's surely worth remembering this proposal - basically, an offer of a substantial and ongoing bribe to look the other way rather than investigate wrong-doing, with implicit threats - the next time one of the P&B Teds starts wittering on about "corruption" in Scottish football. If anyone wants to know what the word "corruption" means, then "agreeing to look the other way when wrong-doing is done, because it's in your own interests to do so" is more or less bang on the dictionary definition. Accepting that deal wouldn't just mean that Rangers used to corrupt the Scottish game. It would mean that it continues to, and that every league club in the game is complicit in that corruption.

Get outta here, there never is! It's almost as if this is exactly the point I've been making all morning... Anyway, have a good weekend all, and don't get caught out in the cold without a jacket. It's going to be a harsh one.

Aye - it's a conditional argument, Tedi. It's saying - If you are correct, then this may be the reason why the situation that you are asserting exists, exists. It's what you do when you want to answer an assertion without accepting it as factual. If - Then. Quite handy, really.

I was asking everyone else who's reading, rather than just assuming that your answer was automatically correct.

Take Celtic out if you like, I imagine our opinions have been fairly constant throughout the period.

Well, let's put it to an ad hoc poll, for fun. Who thinks Rangers were more generally disliked by fans of all Scottish teams in a) 1993 b) 2007, or c) 2013? I'd bet on c), myself. And if you sense less "malevolence" now than in 1993, can I suggest that this might be because you're a division three team who are lucky if they can keep ICT to less than five goals when you meet in cup competitions?

Okay, I'll bite. Assuming you're right - this Man United hatred exists... why? Jealousy? Anti-Manchester bigotry? A free-floating, generalised dislike, mysteriously infecting the populace like a virus? Or, could it be that people have sound reasons to dislike Manchester United that can be rationally understood, and even perhaps be justified? I would've thought that even you would be forced to admit that Scottish football fans generally have a far more negative view of you and your club now than they did a few years back, when you were winning trebles and destroying their teams. If you're right and this resentment is caused by jealousy, can you explain why lots of people clearly find you more repellent now that your club's been castrated and cast into the outer darkness than they did just a couple of years ago, when you represented some kind of actual threat? Because that's a seriously damaging anomaly in your theory, there.

Roughly my position at the time - schadenfreude for the famous prawn-sandwich eating glory-hunters, but a lot of sympathy for long-term fans who had been saddled with a massive debt by predatory billionaires who didn't care at all about the club's best interests. And to be fair, there was actually a lot of sympathy among Scottish fans for a many of the Rangers supporters who weren't utter bawbags 100% of the time. Funnily enough, that sympathy has almost completely ebbed away over the past year or so. I wonder why that might be? Jealousy, is it? Or is there a more credible explanation?

I might even be inclined to believe this, if your own position wasn't that nobody likes you because you're just so TOTALLY AWESOME and everyone else is crazed with jealousy, and perhaps overly fond of Celtic. And that's it - that's the entire explanation for why only Rangers fans think you've been badly treated, and everyone else thinks you've got off lightly, if anything. Unsurprisingly, it's not an argument that cuts much ice outside your own support. I mean, back when Man United were first having their troubles with the Glazers, I remember a lot of folk having a good laugh at their expense. Loads of folk thought it was payback for their We're-It-You're-Shit attitude over the years. Now, there was a case where you could legitimately say, well, a lot of that was down to envy, even if a much of it was down to the club's own behaviour. But even there, even when United have basically crushed 99% of the teams they've met for decades, there wasn't anything like the unanimity about United's predicament that there is about your club's total bawbaggery. Now, isn't that odd. Why do you think that is? (Prediction - this is because Rangers are relatively more awesome than United, and Scotland fifty times diddier and more resentful. I expect these responses because they keep the causes of Rangers' woes conveniently external to the club itself).

This isn't the strongest denial we'll ever read against the accusation that your fans are weirdly fixated upon being the Supreme Emperor Dalek of the universe, in a way that strikes fans of practically every other club on Earth as bizarre, unhealthy and not a little bit sinister. Also, not exactly a categorical denial of the implicit accusation that your mania for shoving your Herrenvolk mythology down everyone else's necks is what prevents you all from recognising any objective reality outside your own loopy worldview. Otherwise, pretty much the same Woe is us, everybody is inexplicably crazed with hate and out to get us for no sane reason whatsoever horseshit that we've long since come to expect.

Suggest better uses for this cash - sending it to the Lance Armstrong defence fund, or making origami flags for Belfast city hall. Or maybe just setting it on fire, which will likely prove just as effective. BTW, I can imagine fans of many other clubs being utterly impervious to reason, if their team was forced to forfeit ill-gotten trophies after being caught cheating. I can imagine them being irrational and stubborn and self-pitying... But I can't imagine any other support in the land going anything like as totally mental as the Zombies have, not even the English clubs whose fans have really bad reps for hooliganism. I guess it all boils down to this - if your motivation for following a football team is that it spends so much time shouting at everyone about how it has the biggest dick in the universe, and waving it in everyone's face 100% of the time, then you're going to respond badly to anything that looks like a pair of scissors. Or something.

Eh? So right, you're saying that - drawing a negative distinction between "Normal business practices" and "Blowing up your club in an explosion of bad faith and bad debt, then sticking the working man with the bill" = "Splitting hairs"? Splitting hairs, he says! Which would mean that sticking a train ticket or a Chinese meal on expenses is very, very similar indeed to those bankers who are on trial for rigging the Libor rate and stealing billions upon billons of pounds, right? No moral or quantitative difference whatsoever, oh no! Any attempt to say there is, is like, a double-standard, man. In fact, anyone who says different is crazed with hate, apparently. I suppose it might be a convincing argument, if your mother repeatedly dropped you on your head until you were about twenty four.

^^^^^^^^^^ Dim-witted person somehow can't grasp the difference between "a morally-dubious tax dodge" and "Building a vast empire of bad debt and stuffing your gullet with ill-gotten rewards, before exploding in a fireball of bad faith and selfish arse-covering, leaving taxpayers and small businessmen to cover the costs of your employees' vast salaries". It's absolutely impossible to confuse the two unless a) you couldn't give a shit whether there's any comparison, and are just saying anything, anything at all, to provide an illusion of controversy on the matter or b) you're so thick that you could be outwitted by a bacon double-horseburger. Or maybe even both, in your case.

Replace "Rangers" with "bankers" here, and "plastics" with "people who don't like getting repeatedly and deliberately ripped off by Croesus-rich criminals", and what you have here is a classic piece of apologism for fraudsters. Look at all these people we forced to pay for our profligacy and selfishness! How dare they be so upset about us making taxpayers and creditors pay for our ill-gotten success. Surely, any attempt to hold us to account for our behaviour is merely an attempt to buy off these crazy people's insane manias. Repeat, until the next crisis screws everyone outside the industry all over again and we have another brief moment of public anger about it. It should be hilarious, but it's long since tipped over into tedium.

Lobster walks into a bar. The barman says, "Hey you, get out - we don't allow lobsters in here". The lobster looks astonished and says, "Why don't you allow lobsters in your bar?" The barman says, "You come in here, giving it all that...." (Yakking mouth hand movements/ lobster claws) Probably works better in person than in print, mind.

You somehow manage to detect extreme emotional distress in half of my posts, Bennett, regardless of the subject material. If I posted the joke about the lobster that walked into a bar, while I was sitting on the cludgie, you'd probably tell me to calm down and stop seething.

He's blogged about it, and then been subjected to one of those cut 'n' paste jobs that you Rangers lads disdain so much - that's Leggo's post that Tedi is quoting directly from, there. Fear not, though - Leggo will tomorrow explain the "wide-ranging implications" that this astonishing verdict will have, as the judicial shockwaves continue to reverberate around the universe and beyond. I reckon they'll involve Leggat pledging to lead The People to victory over the the Host of Rome on the capital of Saturn, or something equally credible.

a) I doubt that anybody on P&B cares at all about Phil McWhatever, a minor and particularly tedious player in this whole escapade. b) Anyone calling the Press Complaints Commission "completely neutral" has not picked up a newspaper since this whole phone-hacking, Leveson Report thing began. The PCC shooting down a complaint - any complaint - against the Sun is about as surprising as the Grand High Council of Turkeys vetoing Christmas. c) There is no such organisation as the IRA to support. Thankfully, all that nonsense is in the past, for now at least. d) Your source for this appears to be David Leggat. It wouldn't surprise me if he has this one 100% correct, but let's note the irony in citing Leggo to mock PMcG, given that the former is even crazier than the latter.

Same reason why cash gifts that never need repaying are actually "loans", and why protests denouncing liquidation because it will kill the club are conveniently forgotten once the club is consigned to liquidation - because the actual situation is irrelevant. Rangers fans need excuses to justify their own high dudgeon. Therefore, excuses must be found. If the only excuses that can be found are mutually contradictory and often nonsensical, well, they'll just have to do. Happy New Year when it comes, all.

Obviously, I can't pronounce on a book that I haven't read. Maybe he's right! But then again, maybe he isn't - I don't know, and you haven't given me any strong reason to believe that he is. Equally obviously, I'm not saying any of these things. You are, for reasons known only to yourself. Look Cap'n, this is an internet forum - you don't actually have to prove an assertion beyond all reasonable doubt for it to be taken as a point worthy of discussion. Nonetheless, even by the lowly standards of these forums, all you're doing is producing one book and one quote, dubiously sourced at that. The historical method, this is not. http://en.wikipedia....storical_method This isn't to say that you aren't right. Maybe you're 100% correct! You don't actually have to go through this forensically and demonstrate that your every point is spot on. But you haven't provided any reason at all to think that they are, have you? (See youse later, folks - off beyond internet usage for the weekend. Quailing in terror, obviously).

Aye aye, Cap'n - I suspect there are few words that you would consider relevant, except maybe "How very correct you are about everything, big man".

Uh, I didn't even mention "Celtic's success" and/or "exploitation of sectarianism". You've pulled this claim out of your arse, I'm afraid. Like I say, I'm not about to stand up here and say "I can't believe that representatives of a Christian organisation would deliberately try to prevent their co-religionists from mingling with people from other sects". I can quite believe exactly this kind of thing went on then and still does now, not least because there's a lot about this in the original text. Nonetheless, an assertion in a book I haven't read, that appears to be based on a century-old article, is not my idea of a reliable source for this type of claim - it's the kind of thing that you really need to corroborate fairly convincingly before you can credibly go making grand proclamations. If you want to know why, go buy any newspaper today, right now, and highlight articles that contain misleading reports. Your pen might hold out as far as the sport pages, or it might not, depending on which one you buy. (And while I'm at it Cap'n, you might like to rein it in a bit on this general topic. While I've no doubt you're right on many of your statements, you remind me very strongly of the Scottish Nationalist character in Absolutely who used to cycle down to the border with England, jump over it and shout "Poofs!" at the top of his voice, then cycle off at top speed).

No behaviour of this kind would surprise me from religious types*, but I suspect that this claim might be made up and that any "evidence" to the contrary is a lot of ginned-up bollix being pushed by some fairly obvious fraudsters. I've seen this claim made by various people on these threads - none of whom are what I'd think of as "reasonable people", BTW - and their attempts at providing reliable sources have been pretty comical, so far. The Catholic Church and its representatives certainly are one of the least lovable institutions in Christianity but let's also note that, historically and in the present day, there are a hell of a lot of people who are willing to believe more or less anything about it, if it makes it look bad. The same goes for Celtic FC, since the two are synonymous in some folk's eyes. (*The Old Testament itself is jam-packed with this "stay away from the heretics" kind of stuff, including some fairly hair-raising parts about what should be done with the heathens in conquered cities).