JABBA THE AGNIVORE

WE DON'T WANT TO FIGHT BUT BY JINGO IF WE DO...

Battle lines are being drawn and the sides are squaring up to each other. The war for the dark soul of Trigger's Brush FC continues unabated. The only personality involved seems to be Cheerful Charlie Chuckles. Like some exercise in Logic, the choice seems to be Green or Not Green. The rest of the board, actual or prospective, are an irrelevance. On the side of Green we have Bill McMurdo and...well...nobody, really! Old Bill might claim that the Vanguard Bears are on the same side as he is, but a quick look at their website confirms that they don't trust anybody and are waiting to see what happens. On the side of Not Green, meanwhile, is everybody else.

Keith Jackson picked up the ball from Loony Leggat on Monday with a scathing attack on Green, disguised as worry for the future of Scottish football. According to Jackson, Scottish Football cannot survive without Trigger's Brush FC; if the team that play at Ibrox disappears, then so will all of Scottish football! Who told him that? His erstwhile sports' editor, probably! Anyway, Jackson is adamant that if Green gets back in charge then TBFC is finished. Charlie Chuckles needs to do one before TBFC can move forward.

Leggat returns today from a 'Lost Weekend' where he tried to blot out the very idea of Hampden draped in green and white. Thankfully, Lidl can provide the right sort of electric soup at a competitive price. He comes back with a bang, claiming that if Green and Ahmad return to Ibrox then the SFA would have no option but to rescind Trigger's Brush's licence. Er...didn't the 'independent' inquiry clear them both? If the SFA did want to rescind the licence then they would have to first carry out a real, genuine independent inquiry. If that happened then there would be more than Green's and Ahmad's sphincters quivering!

Leggat also states that, with Green out of the way, there would be a sound, solid core of shrewd, strong, dyed-in-the-wool Bluenoses working for the good of the club. (Punctuation errors fixed yet again!) In other words, the same scenario that Jackson envisages, although he's too scared to put it in those exact terms!

Old Bill does not name Jackson or Leggat but is absolutely blazing at the 'anti-Green faction.' He goes on to say, in true Charlie Chuckles fashion, that TBFC should never have been 'demoted' and that they should shun any attempt to get them into SPL 2. It's the top tier or nothing. As usual there's the perpetual guff about cabals and Peter Lawwell running everything! One poster even blames all TBFC's troubles on 'Lawwell's lies!' There's not much changed in their arrogant attitude, then!

Quite possibly Old Bill has one ally in the press: step forward Gordon Waddell. He talks about the situation in Scottish footbal where the tail is wagging the dog. His solution? Put the dog down! That the tail would die along with the dog means nothing to him, of course! He spins the case for the wee, diddy teams, saying that they should be allowed to have ambition and should be able to aim for the top. This is a rather strange thing to come out with. I say let the diddy teams have all the ambition they want. Let them work their way up the leagues and encourage more fans and better players. Let them go full-time with a workable business model. And let them do all this without hand-outs from Scotland's big teams!

You see, Gordon, the problem with your analysis is that these teams do not have ambition. They're perfectly happy to drift along, playing part-time football, pulling in crowds that rarely reach triple figures and expecting the big teams to subsidise them. They then have the absolute gall to insist that they have as much right to determine the future of Scottish football than the bigger clubs! If they demand that right then let them prove their worth without holding out the begging bowl every season!

Strangely, we've never heard any of this concern for the 'little guy' from Waddell before. What could have possibly changed to make him suddenly concerned for the teams below Division 1? Of course, we all know what has changed and that is Waddell's main, if not only, concern. Just like Green he wants to attack the SPL and build up the SFL. And if the SFL were to become the dominant, or only, footballing authority, guess which team would be running the show!

In a disgraceful, and disgusting, tirade against the SPL, Waddell does nothing to hide his hatred. He berates the SPL for its legacy:

'In 15 years on their watch, four of their 10 founder members – Rangers, Dunfermline, Dundee and Motherwell –have been declared insolvent. Two more who have passed through – Livingston and Gretna – both went into administration under their umbrella.'

Is he for real? Is he honestly blaming the governing body for what happened to these, what are essentially, businesses? Dunfermline, Dundee and Motherwell narrowly avoided liquidation, reaching agreement on a payment plan with creditors. Have you ever heard anyone connected with these clubs, or their supporters, blaming anyone else for what happened to them? Only one club blames the SPL for its woes and that is the club for which Waddell is arguing the case.

Livingston and Gretna? Both of these teams overreached themselves. Gretna was funded by an eccentric millionaire and when he died the money dried up. Livingston reached the heights for a short while but, in the end, it was unsustainable. In fact, the reason why all clubs in the SPL ended up in serious debt was because they were overreaching themselves; spending money they didn't have. And why were they spending all this money? That was because they had to match Rangers, who were spending a fortune on world-class players. The other teams had to spend or be left behind. Remember, Celtic almost went bust as well! Instead of being the victims they make out, Rangers were, in fact, directly responsible for the economic ills in our game. And yet, they are the only ones that blame the SPL for their downfall!

Also scoring high on the Vomitometer is a Daily Record reporter I've never heard of; one Colin Duncan. He decides, in today's paper, to have a real go at Hibs for not trying in the Scottish Cup Final. He sounds suspiciously like a bitter Trigger's Brush FC supporter; you know, the kind that claims that Barcelona are rubbish nowadays just because Celtic beat them!

I watched the game and thought that Hibs played well and tried extremely hard. Celtic, however, were just too good for them. Hooper's first goal, remember, was against the run of play as Hibs had been doing all the attacking at that point. The Hibernian heads went down for a short while but they were soon trying again. I think I must have been watching a different game to Duncan Disorderly, as I watched Hibs make many an attack on Celtic's goal. The problem for Hibs was that Celtic defended extremely well. But we can't have praise for the Celtic team, can we? Much better to accuse the other team of being poor or, worse, not even trying! This is what Agnivore Journalism has reduced us to: reporters that can't report honestly on a match but let their pent-up hatred and bile distort their view!

Hunbelievable!


P.S. I've been ignorantly maligning some poor individual by the name of Graham Roberts when the individual I actually meant was Chris Graham, he of Ze 'Enemies of Rangers' List. Apologies to anybody called Graham Roberts! Couldn't somebody have told me?

To Green or not to Green...that is the question!