TURF WARS

Aw Jeez - he's at it again! Warbs is moaning about artificial pitches before traveling to Rugby Park tonight. (It's good to get the excuses in early!) The guy's been in football for five minutes and already he knows better than everybody else. If artificial pitches are so bad, then why isn't everybody complaining about them? And how is it that tennis players can function on every surface from concrete to half-set custard without moaning about injuries? Away back to the stock exchange and play with your ticker-tape or something! God help him if his team had to play on blaes (or 'rid ash' as we called it in Glasgow) like most youngsters do.

Oh, wait! He's brought hauners with him. Unfortunately, the only person he could get is Sevco player Rob Kiernan. Kiernan goes down the same road as his boss, greeting about 'health and safety'. It's no' fair, apparently, since you can't even do a sliding tackle (i.e. two-footed lunge) without getting injured. I never thought I'd see the day when an Ibrox manager or player was on about 'health and safety'. John Greig probably caused more injuries in his day than any artificial pitch could ever hope to compete with and Ibrox has always had the dubious distinction of being the only stadium in the world with a triage section in the Away changing room. 'It's a man's game,' was what we were always told whenever a Rangers tackle sent an opposition player one way and his right leg the other. It looks like the new club needs to take that on board, instead of behaving like a bunch of big jessies.

So Aberdeen failed to draw level with Celtic last night and it's all the fault of Willie Collum. And it's not just Derek McInnes that's raging; the agnivores are up in arms that their 'great white hope' has been thwarted. Isn't it strange how Collum has suddenly become incompetent after one game when he was a top referee of impeccable professionalism and unimpeachable integrity while making other 'mistakes' game after game? What happened to all the 'evens itself out over the season' stuff; does that not hold true anymore? And Hugh 'No Pope of Rome' Dallas says that Collum is one of Europe's top referees. Surely that should be good enough for our media?

Meanwhile the Record thinks it's newsworthy to let everybody know that Anthony Stokes is friendly with 'bankrupt fraudster' Barry Hughes. Shock! Horror! Er...a quick newsflash for them - there's a convicted fraudster with gangland connections in charge at Ibrox. That piece of information seems to have bypassed them; it's certainly gone under Keith Jackson's radar. Not surprisingly I've received abuse for pointing this out on the DR forum. Apparently, I'm a bigot.

Speaking of bigots, it looks like North Lanarkshire Council is not, after all, going to fly the flag to commemorate the Easter Rising. It seems that it was the SNP behind it all, trying to stir up bigotry and hatred by doing something that the...er...bigots wouldn't like. Labour has pledged to use its majority on the council to stop the flag getting anywhere near a pole. Wait a minute here - I thought that Labour was full of Fenian, terrorist-supporting, bigoted scum? That's what the denizens of Airdrie and Motherwell have been saying for years. Maybe they're all going to take the weans to the Time Capsule at long last!

Strangely, the real story isn't being touched upon here and that is that a bunch of bigots terrorised the council into doing its bidding. Regimental Blues published the names, addresses and phone numbers of all the councillors, who supported the flying of the flag, on its website, telling people, or, rather, peeppul, to use the information as they saw fit. They also stated that "every meeting you sit in, every vote you cast and every move you make within the council will be known to us. We will be watching. We have the winning hand here and we strongly suggest you do not call our bluff." Now that is as clear a threat as you're ever going to see. Worryingly, I don't see any mention anywhere of the police getting involved.

On the Evening Times forum there are quite a few folk that weren't happy about this flag flying and are calling for the Orange Walk to be banned as well. The majority of complainers, however, echo the sentiments expressed in these two posts:

"Cue the serial offended on here, this was a disgraceful attempt by a wee bigoted group of throwbacks from oirland, This is Britain, something some of the posters on here forget, if you all love this ireland that much, and going by the state the Barras/Gallowgate has become, why are you all over here, i will say it again, This is BRITAIN, like it or lump it, too much pandering in this country to minorities with a huge chip on there shoulders."

"Brit born subjects who have this love affair with all things Irish are the product of Faith Schools and continue to muddy the waters of Scottish Society.
History shows the Irish have always failed to integrate successfully into any society they have emigrated to. Chicago along with New York in the1920s and 30s had civil problems with Irish immigrants. They even ruffled Al Capone's feathers for a time."

Perhaps if these two clowns had actually gone to school they would know not only about spelling and grammar but have learned that in Britain and America Irish immigrants weren't allowed to integrate, any more than Italians or Chinese were. In fact, talks to bring Brooklyn into New York nearly hit a stumbling block as the good citizens of Brooklyn didn't want to be associated with the Irish and Italian scum of lower Manhattan!

"Right, what smart-arse swopped my Masonic ring for a plastic one?"