Victor von Doom

I'm going DUNFERMLINE FORFAR EDINBURGH CITY I think the Loons and Embra will come in a fair bit before kick-off. I doubt Pars will move.

I've not been over for a few years, but Bohs have successfully jumped aboard the St.Pauli / Dulwich Hamlet bandwagon. "Right-on!" students and hipsters attend in numbers. "The Notorious Boo Boys" do some good displays, but the club has become very "Save the gay Palestinian rhinos from plastic". There are more impressive beards than entire 50-year-plus membership rollcall of the The Dubliners could muster between them. That lot don't live in Phibsboro. This skit from a Shelbourne fanzine four or five years back was very apt.

Slovan Bratislava! If people think football in Scotland has fallen a long way, try being a fan in Eastern Europe. Fifty years ago, Slovan beat Barcelona in the Cup-Winners Cup final. They’d beaten Dunfermline in the semis! Slovan had to get past Porto and Torino to make it that far. The Pars had beaten W.B.A. and Olympiakos to make the last four. I’ve known a couple of Yugoslavian 1980s hooligans. I still see the Radnicki Nis lad. He used to love getting in a train on Saturday to fight fans in Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, or just going up to Belgrade to fight Red Star and Partizan fans. Plenty of clubs getting 10,000 or 15,000 fans every week. He speaks fondly of European excursions when they got to the UEFA Cup semis one year and lost to Hamburg. The break-up of Yugoslavia has seen even the bigger clubs followed by three men and a dog in diddy leagues. For Serbia, think Rangers and Celtic playing the roles of Red Star and Partizan and moving to the West Juniors, with Kilmarnock taking the part of Radnicki Nis. (I’m sure a fair few on here would be keen on Rangers, Celtic and Killie going to the Juniors.) Speaking of hooliganism though, Sergeant Wilson is correct about Bohs v. Rovers. I went to one of those a while back. This season and last, there have been English and Eastern European fans arrested at those games. The fixtures are now such good “craic” that tourist hooligans seemingly adopt one side or the other and head over to Dublin for a good old-fashioned “Donnybrook”. What makes the fighting inside the stadium so funny is the peculiarly “Irish” attitude of An Garda Siochana to any bout of fisticuffs. They administer a stiff telling-off: “Ah Jaysus, lads! Will youse not be at that at all now?! Cop yourselves on, lads!” while attempting to manhandle the odd miscreant back to his seat. No rugby tackles or arrests. I often used to wonder how the typically humourless and taciturn Polis Glesca officer might fit in, if an exchange programme took place. Back on topic… The GAA’s huge advantage is that it’s strictly amateur. Managers at county level get generous “expenses” and there are undoubtedly brown envelopes going to some of them, but these will be from sponsors. Gate receipts are not siphoned-off. Some club managers also have generous packages. GAA clubs in Ireland play exclusively in leagues within their own counties. The winners go on to contest knock-out provincial championship in Munster, Leinster, Ulster or Connacht. The four winners of those contest the All-Ireland semi-finals and final. Players, no matter how good, do not get paid – not even via brown envelopes – so gate money goes on development of the game. The system works rather like Rugby Union in the amateur days. A good player of low social status might be found an army, police or teaching job doing relatively light duties. A better educated one will get a white collar job with a bank or suchlike and do as much PR duty as actual work. As I say, clubs only play games within their own county. Many counties have fewer than 60,000 people. Longford, which I’ve never visited, has 40,000. However, the lack of greedy players and agents mean facilities at many clubs in villages of 200 people, well off the beaten track, are astounding. A stand with 500 seats, with decent dressing rooms and a weight-room underneath, is not uncommon in a location that’s no more than a crossroads with a church and maybe a pub, as most local village shops disappeared a while back. As Denltfc points out, just about every GAA club in Dublin has all-weather training facilities. Some of the county stadiums are impressive. Croke Park is five-star by anyone’s standards. Wexford have a shiny, newly renovated 25,000 job. They even have a cryogenic chamber there. The number two ground – Semple Stadium in Thurles in Tipperary – is more “lived-in”, as is the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick. Some of the county grounds are a mite 1960s though. I went to games at Pairc Tailteann (Meath) and St.Conleth’s Park (Kildare) and it wasn’t necessary to actually go into the gents to be just about certain that it would be a “pish-against-the-painted-wall-and-watch-it back-up-in-a-concrete-gutter” job. Both counties have endured a long period of underwhelming performance though, so a lack of interest, sponsors and funding is understandable. Considering the excellent facilities at Shelbourne dog track – and the adequate ones at the recently demolished Harold’s Cross dog track – League of Ireland grounds are embarrassing, right enough. I didn’t venture to Shamrock Rovers’ new ground in Tallaght (Not sure my life insurance covers me for Tallaght, or what inoculations I’d need), Derry have renovated the Brandywell and Cork’s Turner’s Cross is tidy. The rest are eye-openers. I genuinely don’t think there’s anything in Scotland to match them, though I haven’t been to Cliftonhill Park for 30+ years. Rule 27 “The Ban” on anyone connected with the GAA playing “garrison games”, mainly soccer, rugby and hockey, was lifted in 1971, as Denltfc says, but it could be enforced with a rigidity that would make Rangers blush. Just before “The Emergency”, as it was known in Ireland – World War Two to everyone else – the President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, attended an Ireland v Poland soccer match in his capacity as Head of State. He was patron of the GAA. He had founded the Irish culture and language organisation, the Gaelic League, in 1893. This cut no ice. His “crime” was so serious that he was “warned-off” in racing parlance: banned from all GAA activities for life. Jack Lynch won All-Ireland titles in hurling and football with Cork. He watched his younger brother play soccer or rugby just after his retirement. Someone snitched. Banned for life. He was still banned for life when he became a cabinet minister, though The Ban had been lifted by the time he became Taoiseach (a fantastic Gaelic word for “Prime Minister” - adopted by Fine Gael’s “blueshirts” at a time when Der Fuehrer, Il Duce and El Generalissimo were all doing rather well!) It seems to have depended who you were though - and whether anyone would grass! Denltfc will know that there is an urban myth that outstanding Roscommon GAA player Dermot Earley, who was Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces at his fairly recent untimely death, was fairly blatantly playing soccer as “Dermot Late” at the time The Ban was lifted. As his county’s best player, he was confident nobody would alert the authorities. Separation of the codes is still strictly enforced in other ways. American Football at Croke Park – or in Limerick – has never been a problem. Gridiron, though hardly Gaelic, is not viewed as a “garrison game”, so it can be tolerated. Allowing soccer at Croke Park while Lansdowne Road was redeveloped was a one-off concession, which required an emergency amendment to the GAA’s constitution: the temporary suspension of “Rule 42” for that particular purpose. Outside of that agreement, “garrison games” are not permitted at GAA stadiums. Teams playing “garrison games” are not allowed to use the facilities at GAA clubs. A few years back, the Munster Rugby team were preparing for a European Cup semi-final. They were struggling for training facilities at a training camp in Cork after heavy snowfall. They used the state-of-the art facilities at Nemo Rangers GAA club in Cork City. Nemo are the biggest and best GAA club in County Cork. Four full sized artificial pitches, with floodlights, and a full-sized indoor one. The pitches are rented-out to all and sundry, in all codes – even though this is against the rules. Nobody complained about local sports teams paying a GAA club fair wedges of Euros. When news got out that Munster had been there, however, the GAA sprang into action. Charges were swiftly brought. Consensus was that Nemo were lucky to escape without a suspension. This illustrates a problem soccer faces up and down the land. Soccer clubs are not officially allowed to use GAA facilities. Young soccer players in those villages of 200 will have to change in a cowshed, while young GAA players have heated dressing rooms. As for Home Farm, they’ve almost always been a junior team – in the Irish sense of an underage & schoolboy club. Maybe third behind Stella Maris and Cherry Orchard as a production line for young Britain-bound players in Dublin. They joined the League of Ireland after neighbouring Drumcondra went belly-up in the early 1970s. The Home Farm board saw some mileage in taking-over the defunct professional club, so it was a merger to continue Drumcondra’s existence and hopefully get the De Drums back on track with Home Farm youth players moving straight through… and get a few punters through the gates in the days when Dublin clubs still got half-decent attendances.

My treble also won - Ross, Cove, Elgin ... and I backed it. It paid £199.50 for £20 with Bet365. But all three selections were cut seriously by kick-off. A tenner returned only £60.80 at SP, for a profit of £50.80. Annoying. But not as annoying as Partick's failure to beat Alloa sinking a 55/1 £10 sixfold acca

... and maybe there could be a Hielan team calling itself the Glen Campbells. ... I'll get me coat.

Other clubs should call themselves the Wichita Linemen or Rhinestone Cowboys. Just to enter into the spirit of the thing.

Silly question... I know the boy's a mixture of Joey Barton and Anthony Stokes... with a wee bit of Benny fae Crossroads, Gripper fae Grange Hill and extras fae "Deliverance" thrown in... but does anyone know what state Corey Cadby's likely to be in over the next three weeks? He's 28/1 with Victor for Brisbane this weekend. ("Queensland this week, Victoria next week and NZ over the Bank Holiday" is not the correct answer.)

Nothing to do with being proud about it. Nothing to do with what it should stand for. Protestantism is, by its genesis and its very nature, anti-Catholic. That's how it came about: as a movement opposed to Catholic doctrines and the interpretation of the Bible by the church of Rome. I'm an atheist. I have no time for any of this scheidt. I'd make the whole f*****' lot of 'em - Christians or Mohammedans - wear ropes around their waists, silly little hats, ringlets and black clothes if they want to worship the God of the Jews.

As I've said on the other thread, I'm getting pished-off with our Board acting like William Ulsterman in Harry Enfield's "cheddar cheese and pineapple on a stick" sketch. Our Board is a f****** embarrassment. "Rightly or wrongly, a gate was forced..." (!) To paraphrase Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, "I don't even know a f*****' English n***** who'd have the balls to say that." I wasn't there, but, as has been said, there cannot have been crushing issues outside Rugby Park. The topography outside the stadium doesn't allow for that. It's not Tynecastle, never mind Hillsborough. And what the f*** does, "We had made Kilmarnock aware of concerns over facilities for the disabled" mean? "We have a 50,000 capacity UEFA A-Grade stadium, you have an 18,000 capacity scheidt hole"? Shut the f*** up! Sort-out the problems with the behaviour of a significant minority of our support quietly, in-house and in a dignified fashion. Have some f****** standards and f****** stick to them or f*** off! Ensure the fans stick to them and get the ones that can't/won't tae f***! Get our f****** house in order! Cut this veneer of political correctness too. It's possible to defend what the Club stands for - Unionism, the Protestant religion, anti-Catholicism, singing "The Sash" or "The Billy Boys" et al - without defending the idiocy of a significant minority of our support. I have visions of Don Revie, Brian Clough and that large Protestant centre-half who played for Llanelli ushering/wrestling their own fans off the field when they were behaving like bams. What the f*** was Goldson doing there? There were loads of fans already past him and on the pitch when he was standing there, encouraging more to run on. We seem to have accomplished the Herculean task of training Morelos not to react to significant provocation by Broadfoot and others, yet half the bloody team and hundreds of fans behave like Anthony Stokes on the lash! Misbehaviour is a widespread problem amongst a significant minority of football fans. Ignoring it or tolerating it - for whatever reason - is the default position of the vast majority of other fans and clubs. It makes me laugh when I see self-righteous posts about "sectarian" singing on messageboards that are filled with content that makes David Icke's website look like the Dalai Lama's by comparison. The game toleartes and encourages mindless, one-eyed "bigotry" on every level: from a French manager's millionth repetition of, "I deed not see ze eenceedent..." to the blatant cheating of players on a minute-by-minute basis in every game - cheating on a scale that doesn't happen in any other sport. I read things on forums some times that make me wonder just how incompetent and stupid extremist politicians must be to be unable to rally significant numbers of idiots behind them. The season before last, after a few decisions went our way, there was an enormous "Is Kevin Clancy a Mason?" thread on one of the messageboards of the "Wee three" (Hearts, Hibs, Sheep) - I forget which one. The following week, Clancy took charge of a Celtic game v. one of the other members of the "Wee three" and a few decisions went Celtic's way. The "Kevin Clancy is a F***** b******" thread was as long as the one alleging his membership of a Lodge. My absolute favourite was the Hibs thread a while back: "Is Tom English a H**?" A bloke from Limerick, working as a f****** navvy/labourer on building sites in Kilburn/Cricklewood when he wrote a few articles for a fanzine of some diddy London club a Cockney mate dragged him to, then got a local paper job and somehow blagged a gig at a national. There were scores of earnest posts along the lines of, "There are some Protestants in southern Ireland", "His surname must indicate English ancestry", "I heard he followed Hearts as his Scottish club in his youth", "He has Roy Orbison amongst his "likes" on Facebook"! You could not make this stuff up. It's way beyond 9/11 and Area 51 conspiracy theorist territory. How do seemingly otherwise intelligent and rational folk believe this scheidt? There's loads of it on here. Not as much as there is on Rangers, Celtic and Hibs sites, but still bundles. The game needs to stop encouraging this scheidt. At the moment, our Board is comfortably the worst serial offender on this score. I find it embarrassing, juvenile and indicative of insecurity. We should shut the f*** up and concentrate on things we can control, not whinge about others' inadequacies - even genuine inadequacies, never mind teh imaginary ones we keep inventing. We're worse than the other lot... and that's saying something.

Looks like we've rectified that situation now. Honestly, it's not as if we're getting as bad as the other lot when it comes to indefensible idiocy and a victim-complex. We're so far in front of them that they're not even visible in our mirrors. Advice to our Board: "Shut the f*** up! Deal with what needs to be dealt with in-house, in a dignified manner. Get our f****** house in order! Cut this veneer of political correctness too. It's possible to defend what the Club stands for - Unionism, the Protestant religion, anti-Catholicism et al - without defending the idiocy of a significant minority of our support. Let's get some f****** standards and uphold them. Those who can't uphold them can f*** off. And that goes for the current Board. Squealing like a ****** who's been called a nasty name, every f****** time we're involved in any stushie, is unbecoming of what the Club should stand for. It's almost the equivalent of "playing the race card." Shut the f*** up!" I'm f***** off with this continuous "statement" crap from the current Board.

https://www.flashscore.com/match/KKTYSqr6/#match-summary Just as an example.

They stay up on Flashscore for a week or so. Bet365 sponsor the Flashscore site. Click on the individual match result and the stats come up. The odds at kick-off are at the bottom of the stats lists. I'd say that's why Bet365's odds are the basis for the competition. It's not necessary to be taking screenshots or writing notes at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon to get the starting prices.

The sound folk I knew as a lad tended to be into music, motorbikes or - if they were exceptionally intelligent - simply academic vocations. But then I went to a school where rugby and Latin were compulsory, while rowing and Greek were encouraged. Possession of a round ball designed for playing anything other than Eton Fives had only just ceased to be a caning offence. Few students with any capacity for rational thought paid any attention to football, which was viewed as merely one brand name of "The Opium of the People" even back then. I'd agree that there's a generally reliable scale of ranking people on intellect by reference to which social activities they indulge in and that this extends to which football teams they follow, with Old Firm fans being towards the bottom of the list. I'd venture to suggest a similar excercise, using musical preferences, would be vaguely accurate for the same reasons. You are right about the "bread and circuses" situation though. The plebs have scummy lives and need distractions - prefereably distractions that don't encourage them to do anything subversive, such as thinking. Affiliating to banners, like those waved by football clubs, serves the purpose of the patrician classes very well. Of course, the adminstrative middle-classes - what I call the "stipendiary parasitocracy" - now need similar distractions to assuage their guilt complex: a guilt complex arising from discomfort at living in relative luxury, as beneficiaries of an exploitative, "imperialist" Western world, that enjoys its position of hegemony through the virtual enslavement of the majority of the planet's population. The fact that most middle-class functionaries create no wealth and earn no money - being paid a stipend to perform useful but unnecessary administrative/bureaucratic functions - exacerbates their discomfort. Many of them now affiliate to football clubs too... but, quite naturally, they need to convince themselves that the reasons they follow a football club are vastly different to the reasons for which all the Nasty Evil People Not At All Like Us have traditionally followed football clubs. I'd prefer it if such parasites buggered off from football and salved their consciences by deluding themselves that they are victims of the system that sustains then, rather than beneficiaries. The ways in which it becomes acceptable to indulge in that self-delusion are multiplying rapidly: ethnicity, heritage, prefered orifice for sexual gratification, dietary preferences, etc. Being born at the end of the school year and being left-handed might be added to the list soon, but they're things that cause genuine difficulty and are genuine circumstances of birth, so we probably won't see "communities" being defined on them just yet. Seriously debilitating circumstances of birth - being deaf or handicapped or being a dwarf and suchlike - won't be added, as guilt-ridden members of the parasitocracy can't suddenly become one of these and can't consequently "identify" as "victims" and members of "communities" on the basis of "identifying" on such criteria. But yeah - most Scottish Celtic and Rangers fans are thick ****s!

Threads like this one should be smothered at birth... ... and so should any babies born to anyone using the words / phrases "Vibrant", "Offended", "Send out a clear message", "Right-thinking / right-minded", "Zero tolerance", "Strict liability" and anything ending in "-ism" or "-phobia". Scotland in particular - and the UK in general - needs to remove the stipendiary parasitocracy from its position.

I lived in Phibsboro - which is where some of those "few" pubs in the "north inner city" are located. And, "Yes" - you are right. In Dublin these days, the "normal majority" are depoliticised twits with far too much spare time and spare money to believe in anything meaningful... Just like the "normal majority" in Scotland in general - and on here in particular! They do indeed get irked by "republican" demos that disrupt traffic. They tend not to disrupt traffic much in Phibsboro, Cabra and Drumcondra - or in Crumlin, Drimnagh or (Heaven forefend!) Dolphin's Barn south of the river. Must be a terrible inconvenience for commuters from Foxrock or Malahide to have to endure the Great Unwashed disrupting their working day in the middle of town.

For what it's worth, the Bet365 SP's fo the winners were: Celtic 1.16 Hibs 1.44 Ross 1.60 Ayr 2.00 Arabs 1.85 Forfar 2.50 Raith 2.00 Annan 2.20 Cove 2.00 Elgin 1.90 Albion 5.00 Q.Park 2.40

Strewth! It's not like the guy's submitting a tender or checking-in for a flight! He'll get around to it! Lad's running this competition in his own time, giving us some entertainment into the bargain, and there are posters on his back already - even if they're being a mite tongue-in-cheek.

Humza Yousaf would make a braw First Minister for Scotland.

Well said. Just like lines about smiting / killing the likes of infidels / stabbers, taken from ancient "religious" texts, are perfectly acceptable.

What the actual feck!?!? Speaking as someone who lived in Dublin fairly recently, you must've lived somewhere rural or not gotten out very often. It's not just in rabidly "Celtic-minded" watering holes such as The Players' Lounge that rebublican or rebel songs are commonly aired. Threads like this - and there are a depressing number of them - are comical. We could start by banning the words "sectarian" and "sectarianism" from this board. "Terrorism", "Racism" and - bugger me rigid! - "Homophobia" could also simply be automatically edited out by software. Together with anything else ending "Ism" or "Phobia." There are no isms of phobias. If somebody dislikes you, your behaviour, your ideology or your cultural practices, they will have developed that dislike for reasons broadly similar to the reasons you dislike whatever it is that irks you; not because of some mental deficiency that doesn't afflict the "right minded."

"Who will defend the witch?... And thus condemn himself to death by burning when the witch is found guilty."

"The enemy of my enemy is.... ehhh.... No.... hang on.... errrr.... The friend of my enemy.... No.... That's not right either.... Ummmm.... I'm confused!"

"Of fannies" sounds like a clue to the Roger's Profanisaurus Crossword in Viz. I think "C - something - N - T - something - S - something" is the answer.

I'm half tittering at the joint-best Aussie sportsman in a team game bashing the Poms at cricket, after returning from a ban for disgracing his country... while the other joint-best Ocker sportsman in a team game is "suin' ass" after being sacked for Tweeting a quote from the work of fiction that all state officials must swear an oath on when they take office. Not even Scotland's that f***** up! ..... Yet.

#WHATCANIBEOFFENDEDBYTODAY!?!?!?