Aim Here

Just take a step backwards and think about it. This is Craig Levein, we're talking about - a self-made master of mindgames. A few weeks back, you guys were forever bigging up his Svengali-like masterstrokes, like the initially-successful 'Natural Order' bait, and the phantom injuries-that-never-were before the last derby. Hitting the Czechs with a surprise 4-6-0 strategy that they'd never in a million years expect. Instigating injury time dugout confrontations with opposing players to waste time. You all know what Levein's about by now. Craig Levein isn't signing Maclean for his football. He's signing Maclean to send a signal. It's his thing. And what signal would Hearts send by signing up a geriatric striker in his twilight years, probably for bobbins? Simple: don't expect too much from Hearts next season. Craig's talking right at you guys with this one. Hearts are doing next season on the cheap, and he's managing expectations appropriately. I'm guessing that if he goes all out for a 'we're going to get a Europe spot or a cup win next season', sign up some flashy superstar from Bundesliga.2 or the English League One and barely scrape top 6 again, you guys will whinge about stagnation, and next year's season ticket sales will plummet. Look where the inflated expectations of the Sevco fans are getting them? Every OF match, they're demanding the heads of Graeme Murty and Dave King for not beating the team that's only lost two league games in two years. The board are being pulled into risky financial behaviour and pawning their facilities to payday lenders to gamble on actually playing some European football just to keep their heads afloat. And that's so that those overentitled fans can feel like winners again like the old glory days to keep them buying those sweet, sweet, season tickets. Rangers are being squeezed on the pitch, in the stands, in the courts, and in the shareholders meetings. Nobody in Scottish football wants to be The Rangers right now. Not even poor oul' Brechin would swap places. Dave King's hedge fund is a riskier investment than the Glebe Park hedge, which at least provides a guaranteed income from the occasional curious football tourist. Budge is obviously smart enough not to go down the Sevco route, and Hearts are sticking within their means, even if that means the football will be decidedly mediocre in the near future. Perhaps they know there's trouble brewing, like those anonymous multimillion donations are starting to dry up - or perhaps Craig is lining up a proper signing later on in the year so you at least get a small frisson of excitement at some point. Either way, Craig knows his limits and he's priming you to avoid massive disappointment. Steady income, straightforward, mid-table football, low-profile signings, or better still, 15-year olds on work experience, season ticket sales down by only 10% or so over two years, etc, etc. Keep the business ticking over until next year, when maybe something will turn up. Last thing Hearts needs is a full stadium of hyper-excited fans in August drifting away before the winter break and swearing off ST renewals altogether. Besides, Maclean has form for going apeshit after scoring goals versus Hibs. Having him do that again, or, in the alternative, crippling Kamberi or Ambrose with a horror-tackle, will have you guys amused and gleefully posting gifs all over Kickback like nobody's business. Craig Levein knows how much the fans lap that stuff up. No need for spectacular results if he can keep you distracted and happy for a wee while. This is the entertainment business, after all. Meanwhile, your team is in safe, solid hands, with no chance of administration or relegation. Relax, guys. You should respect the mindgames of the most devious man in Scottish Premiership football. Craig knows what he's doing with this signing.

The tinpottery here is that her tactical input couldn't have been worse than what actually transpired.

That's clearly a very glorious thing indeed, and doesn't belong in this thread.

Hah, fair enough. The trouble with sarcasm on the internet is that the people who use it are indistinguishable from the many folks around that are genuinely that stupid!

You're showing your age, since if you were around in the 1990s, you wouldn't talk such utter pish. This was 1998, not 1978. Political correctness, as a mass media buzzword, was around since the *early* 1990s (it's use by the left as an self-deprecating joke was around for a bit longer). People were *far* from universally homophobic then (though the world has improved markedly on this issue since 1998, I'll concede). Overt racism was much less common then than it is now that those alt-righters have been congregating in the more disgusting shitholes on the internet and occasionally seeping out into proper society.

All the funnier when you remember that they have multiple 30-page threads on rangersmedia demanding that the club reduces Celtic's away allocation. Apparently us upstarts have some nerve to start acting the way they do...

I don't think it matters which type of match ticket you've bought previously; you have to have bought tickets prior to the current season.

More like it's only the Jambos who are pretentious enough to pass off 'knowing what the words they use actually mean' as postmodern French philosophy!

I've cycled from Inverness to the County game a few times. I always take the train home though. That does make sense; cycling is faster than the Inverness-Dingwall train.

I think we might have to ease them in gently to this one. They're already being multi-scunnered by the fixture list - midweek Derby, losing out on home matches in preference to a lottery for seats at Ibrox, and a Friday night out in Aberdeen. Telling them the brutal truth that their team doesn't even like them on the same day might send a few over the edge...

Did you guys spot the deliberate mistake in the Hearts statement on the post-split fixture list? From the statement: "The club cannot understate how much the first-team continues to appreciate the support they receive from the fans, as they bid to go undefeated since returning home in November." From the Oxford English Dictionary: understate, verb: Describe or represent (something) as being smaller or less good or important than it really is. The club are saying it's impossible for the team to be less appreciative of your efforts. The team thinks you suck. Don't take my word for it, that's Ann Budge telling you!

The Jambo bus is real. It is a thing. It is an official thing, available at the Hearts store. You can buy yourself some sort of bus made from pseudolego for the knockdown price of £80. The fact that this item is available to the general public has been bringing great joy to football fans all across Scotland. The Hampden exuberance lego is just a disgraceful and snide satirical sneer aimed at the makers of said bus, by jealous and cynical troglodytes of the Hibernian persuasion. I urge you to ignore those fellows, who clearly don't appreciate the finer things in life.

The only team owing something they can't pay off is Rangers. There's two different shaftings here - disparity of games vs Rangers and disparity of home/away games overall. Two teams need to suck up a hit for the first type, and only one team needs the latter shafting, and it can be done without any imbalance in the non-Rangers games on the schedule. That team can be one of the previous two. For instance, if Hibs get the second shaft, it's just a case of Killie and Hibs playing Rangers away, while every other game balances out the season's Home/Away fixture count for that pairing. Hibs play 18 home games to everyone else's 19, and that missing game is the one they play at Ibrox. That way, Aberdeen doesn't get their schedule unnecessarily mussed up by playing at Easter Road again. Other teams can be likewise singled out for the shaft, depending on the whims of the SPFL. The only matchups needing an imbalanced Home/Away count involve Rangers. As an aside, Killie most definitely won't be swapping away games for home ones, since they're the only team, besides Rangers, who have more home games played than away ones already - they'll be one of the two teams going to Ibrox. It gives us a one in four chance (one in three, since there's no danger that it's Celtic) of being the other team playing Rangers away. I suspect Hearts might even be more worthy of taking the hit than us.

Wouldn't it be Celtic, Killie and maybe Rangers at home? Those are the teams that owe us a home game.

I dunno about anyone else, but this triggers long-suppressed memories of terrible chalky sweeties with things like 'I wuv you' and 'You're my sweetheart' written on them. I wonder if that was the intended effect here.

You could turn up just before half time too.

That's normal for Dundee, with their half and half casual firm.

This *is* appropriate policing. Rearranging fixtures to avoid crowd trouble is a far smarter form of police work than the stupidity and inefficiency of actually attempting to fight and then process hundreds of fans after the trouble starts, and the best way of punishing the cretins making this kind of trouble is to gently arrange the world so it doesn't start in the first place. This isn't anything to do with changing the result, just ensuring that when the Celtic fans get the news they've won, they're not about to send 40,000 Rangers fans into a state of near-terminal goading. It's not as if league fixtures aren't routinely prearranged with the police - it's for that reason that Celtic and Rangers, or Hibs and Hearts don't play home games on the same day, and it's the same in the (presumably not quite so tinpot) English league system.

You say that like shitposting to P&B first thing when you get out of bed in the morning is something to be proud of. Most of us are sound asleep when you're treating the internet to your words of wisdom. Remember, not everyone in the world is like you. Estragon waits until noon before shitposting to P&B first thing when he gets out of bed.

Rudolph the Blue Nose Reindeer Walking in a Winter H*nderland The Little Drummer Boyne Ibrox Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

There's a time limit on the multiple-admin-event punishment, and it's 5 years, so the question is no longer applicable to Neo-Rangers.

Well you do, in the same way that someone that's just pawned their telly, their stereo and their microwave has got enough money to see them through to payday.

At one end of the pitch, the team with the second largest income in the league, but which still needs to pawn half the car park and a big chunk of their stadium to Wonga for enough beer money to last them until payday. At the other, the team that just wired their life savings to a Nigerian Prince for safekeeping. If it was the accountants facing off today instead of the players, this fixture would be a fiercely competitive relegation battle.

You missed out that the perpetrators seem to have a Scottish football-related agenda since there's a little Anonymous-themed message in the header. Also, digging around the page source for clues, some surprise cyrillic seems to have appeared: New users are described as having "Joined Пәнҗешмбе at 20:27". It's quite possible that some of the perpetrators location settings may have seeped into the page output. Google translate seems to think this is Kazakh for 'discipline', though in context it seems like it should really be a day of the week, or maybe 'yesterday'. Could Rangers be the latest target of Russian hackers? Is all of this Sevco banter really just a Kremlin psyop? Is Phil MacGiolla Bhain in the pay of Putin? In other news, the Jambo Kickback forum is powered by the same software as Rangersmedia. I'd hate for anything to happen to them!