This last year was worth the pain.......

This last year was worth the pain

Here’s why I think why……………….

Rangers Football Club has been around for 140 years, we’ve been through hell and back twice before this last year but in much more acute and personal ways. People died watching football at our stadium destroying families and loved ones lives. Something that should never happen no matter what team you support. So this last year is nothing compared to the pain the two disasters caused.

Before I go on I want to make something Crystal clear.

I’m one of the few people that’s involved either personally or vindictively that isn’t an expert on financial law, EBT’s (never heard of them till 18 months ago) corporate governance, how to run businesses in general never mind the confusing and tangled workings of high earning football players contracts.

I’m a lowly oil rig mechanic that works on drilling rigs. All I know is mechanics as its all I’ve done since I left school at 17 and joined the Royal Navy. Like many I’m surprised that Scotland seems to have so many “experts” on issues such as EBT’s, footballers contracts etc. Good luck to them.

One thing I do know though and was taught from an early age is to believe and trust the real experts that know how the aforementioned legal minefields work and the laws they are supposed to operate in.

Now, I’m going against my own principles here and going to mention our clubs history. The whole history saga was nothing to me and it bugged me that so many Bears used to engage with haters on this issue. Rangers have been and always will be Rangers football club, or as we called our club where I grew up in Glasgow and Troon “The Rangers”. I knew other fans would say our history stopped, that’s how “banter” (more about “Banter” later) works amongst football fans of opposing clubs, but even they know deep down that’s a lie our history is intact. It was the company that ran us that changed as it has in the past for us and many other clubs, not the football club, simple as that.

Like I said before, I was taught to believe the real experts and the powers in charge on legal issues. Everyone from The SFA, FIFA, UEFA, Law Lords, Lawyers and many other respected figures within the game have said we are still the same club yet these other “experts” now say that these people are wrong, even though we had lawyers hand picked by the haters to try and steal these titles, yet they failed, they thought Lord Nimo Smith would rip those titles from us because they “heard” he wasn’t a Rangers fan, yet as soon as he announced his finding completely exonerating Rangers of ANY wrong doing….he’s now a Mason that was never going to do anything other than destroy us. Why were so many online haters convinced we were going to have those titles stripped the days leading up to the finding??!!!!

This will all be confirmed when we win the top division next time, it will be title number 55. That’s where it ends for me. RANGERS are RANGERS are RANGERS.

Onto why I think this year will in the end turn out to be a good thing and actually worth the pain we went through.

We at long last got rid of the self centred and greedy David Murray, the man that caused all this grief. He should be in jail for this along with Craig Whyte and certain people with in Scottish football for what he did to our Football team never mind destroying the Scottish game. Although Murray is an oxymoron as his ego has in the end put us in a better place, not by his choice though.

After being burned by CW many of us were rightly sceptical about Charles Green. The best thing he will ever do in his time at Rangers will be to have refused to give up titles to stay in the SPL.

No matter what he does now, good bad or indifferent that action alone has saved us as a club and fan base decades of abuse. He was proved right to do what he did and I can’t thank him enough for that. At times he says things he shouldn’t and he has been caught out saying chalk then giving us cheese, that’s the way he is but he’s not breaking any laws or causing us financial, legal or on the pitch grief.

I am looking at yesterday as the “reset” button being fully depressed and released. No one has a single thing on us any more. It’s been proved beyond reasonable doubt that The Rangers (We the fans are The Rangers) were victims of crimes by other parties from the horrible BBC, Duff and Phelps, Craig Whyte, many people with in the nasty down trodden Scottish media pack and idiots from the outside that liked to mock the victims of the Ibrox disaster. People will hopefully be going to jail for these crimes.

The last year has also galvanised the fan base like I’ve never seen before in the 38 years of supporting The Rangers lead from the front by our modern day Bill Struth…..Ally McCoist. The way he’s conducted himself through all this has been amazing.

Thanks Ally.

Yes, there are issues between different supporters units, that’s the way it goes, so lets hope yesterday helps bring us closer again, draw lines in the sand lads, talk to each other and move on from petty issues it’s for the good of yourselves and the support..

I like what I see amongst the Bears and Bearettes. There’s great new blogs like the Copland Road Org, The Rangers Standard the various other podcasts that do themselves and the fans proud then the outstanding work of The RFFF. Then  guys like Chris Graham defending our corner in the hate filled media and Shane over in the States letting the greater footballing world know what has happened to us. All I can do is thank these various outlets and people for doing this for us. I hope they all keep doing what they are doing as they are very enjoyable to read and have a lot of very knowledgeable persons with in their groups

Now…….. “The Banter”

It’s gone, it’s no longer “Banter” it bile and hate.

It’s been brewing for decades and now come to the boil.
Personally I think the instigator of it all was Gerry McNee and his phone in on Radio Clyde and his columns in the various tabloids he wrote for. Believe it or not he’s a man I know as i grew up with his kids in Dumbreck. He was always decent to me as a kid I have to say.

That doesn’t matter though. He had an agenda against Rangers since the first phone call he took on the Clyde phone in, he was abrupt, rude and spiteful towards football fans in general that questioned him which in turn lead to a campaign against our club. He would criticize everything our players would do from the clothes they wore to the way they kicked a ball. The nasty and downright vile liitle man Graham Speirs took over that mantle from McNee, and boy has he covered himself in self glory in the way he’s acted this last 10 years towards us. At long last though he’s been caught out big time with his lies by being destroyed live on national television by Chris Graham, something that was wonderful to watch.
The Rangers have kept this man career going, 90% of his stuff is nothing to do with football it’s to do with issues with in our club he “sees” then twists and lies about. Yesterday he was caught out yet again right after the Lord Nimo Smith verdict. Instead of saying anything positive he tweeted parts of the findings yet missing out the important stuff. Why the hell is this man employed at all?

The “rivalry” between us and other SPL clubs is ruined for ever IMO. This isn’t something that will be smoothed over in a few years. Their hate, bile and jealousy of the countries biggest club has crippled them and the rivalry to a dangerous level. I blogged about this before in "The Damage done" There’s many to blame for this. For me it’s down to guys like Speirs, the once  proud but now toxic BBC and various others that want headlines of a nasty nature instead of trying to help smooth tensions.

I don’t see anything but hate filled games when we get back to the top.

As for the SPL and SFA, by Christ are they a laughing stock around the footballing world. The men at the top their should be sacked and rendered unemployable. Even yesterday, the day the biggest footballing crisis Scottish football has seen was to come to a “close” the head honchos were no where to be seen and refused to give statements. REALLY? That is unbelievable that a company would be run like that.

 I know if I performed like them in my trade I’d be on the next plane home. The sad thing is they won’t get the sack, they will leave on their own accord in a few years with huge pats on the back saying how well they did in their time in office. That’s how unprofessional the game is in Scotland…..along with big bonuses and pensions

There was one media outlet that was very fair balanced and honest through all this. That was STV and their lads on twitter. When yesterdays announcement was made I was looking forwards to their articles and tweets about it, only to get a giant kick in the balls from them. They didn’t report it in a balanced way, they looked for the tiniest bits of bad news they could and twisted it. I found that very, very disheartening. NO Rangers fan wanted a reporter to side with us, all we wanted was fair and balanced reporting, STV gave us this until the final outcome when they turned round and kicked us in the head. Such a shame.

One journalist who I feel has been fair balanced and respectful during all this has been Richard Wilson at the Herald. He’s given us the news, good or bad in laymen’s terms with no dramatic  or twisted words that bend the truth to sell papers like the Record and Sun do.

I feel we have been let down by the club though. They still won’t defend us against attacks that have been constant for a year. Yesterday Jim Traynor should have been in his office bright and early ready for the attack and be there for us, the fans to extinguish any fires that were started in the media, he wasn’t., he was no where to be seen yet again. He should have been on that panel last night with Spiers, Chris Graham and Toxic Thompson. What is his job exactly???
The club need to fix this now, we are sick of being attacked then the club doing next to nothing.

I’ve rambled on wwwway too long and I bet most won’t have read this far, and I don’t blame you.

Anyway. It’s simple. For us the pain is over, no one can touch us now.

This last year has set up a solid bedrock for the clubs future, now it’s over, I’m actually glad it happened as I want a stable club for my kids to follow, it looks like we have that now Bears.

WATP 54 and counting

****Late edit. I've been told that Jim Traynor has an illness in the family that kept him away from rangers duties yesterday. I hope his family member gets well soon. Apologise for misinformation on my part****

Franky

Rangers not guilty!!

I have to admit that i thought we were going to be guilty as hell over the EBT thing. How wrong was i?!?!?!

I arrived home in Thailand at around 4PM Thai time (I'm 7 hours ahead of the UK) I have 4 weeks off as that's how my rotation works, 4 weeks on 4 off.

You can imagine the first few hours home are busy getting stuff sorted at home, having fun with my daughter etc.

Around 11PM i went to bed and turned on the Ipad to see what was happening. My timing was perfect as thats around the time Twitter was coming alive with the news we were NOT GUILTY of cheating the taxman therefore giving Rangers an unfair sporting advantage over other clubs. You and i all know that was poppycock anyway, we won our games and trophies by scoring more goals than the teams we played, thats how football works. But with the vigour, and lets be honest at times intellectual way our haters explained why we were going to be found guilty did sound plausible.

I rarely talked about the EBT issue on here, my Rangers facebook page, my Rangers twitter account for a few reasons. The first being i'm not a financial person at all. My job involves nuts, bolts, oil and drilling for black gold, so it would have been foolish for me to talk about something i can't give a good honest opinion too.
The other reason, and the main reason was i was shit scared and had my head buried in the sand. I also was sure we would have titles stripped, i didn't know how i was going to handle it if/when that happened. The chances of that happening now are pretty slim, next to none so the REAL experts say like Cathcartboy whom is a financial wiz kid. Someone all Bears should pay attention too.

I'm not one for gloating, its not a classy thing to do, but you know what Bears. I'm absolutely loving the Gloating thats going on today. This is a huge moment in our history so enjoy it for days, weeks and months to come.

THE HATERS WERE WRONG!

Imagine this.................. imagine that yesterday unfolded a different way, Imagine we had been found "guilty" The feeling we would all have now is of sheer emptiness. Going into work would have been a nightmare for many, but alas, we won, and by Christ are we loving it and so we should.

There are many many Bloggers and journalists that have more than egg on their face, they have a battery farms worth of egg on their face!!

We all know that the vile little man Graham Spiers has been keeping his career going on the back of his hate for our amazing club and fans. Last night our very own Chris Graham owned him, absolutely owned him live on TV. Obviously the picture at the top of this blog shows the moment in this horrid knew he'd been caught bang to writes. Right after this picture he tried to squirm out of Chri owning him by saying he had "Never said TBTC was cheating" Really spot? Well you've been caught and had your brown half mast cord trousers took down and your skinny litttle arse well and truly slapped

From the bottom of my heart Chris......Thank you. its a moment all us Bears have been waiting on for YEARS and boy did you deliver. I owe you more than a pint mate, i owe you a night out no hold barred.

I'm a very insignificant blogger compared to other Bears, but the standard of bloggers this time has produced is something all rangers fans should be proud og. Guys like Chris, Shane and his crew at The Copland Road Org, Bill McMurdo, John DC Gow, the lads at The Rangers Standard and my favourite Rangers message board Gersnet ran by Franky (not me BTW)

I could go on but each and every online Bear, message board etc had a huge part to play in this.
We are not out the woods yet, there's a lot of legal wrangling to go but with the intellect we have amongst the  fanbase we will get there in the end with each and every hater that went out their way to kill us getting their just deserves.

My final and most important point. We MUST take this opportunity to come together. Please forget any niggles we have with each other, talk to each other as the more unified we are the stronger we are. Swallow some pride and contact those Bears you joust with and draw a line in the sand.

Together as one we can take these bastards down.

Franky