BILLY BREMNER MEMORIAL JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN
Date: 2nd May 2025
(Photo:@Homesoffootball)
New Thinking Wanted
First of all, “Well Done the Bairns”.
Talking to some friends this morning over a coffee and bacon roll we got on to how Scottish Football has to grasp the nettle and do more to protect its communities.
And a major flaw is our laws and statutes are wide open for abuse in the full light of day.
They are not ‘Fit and Proper’.
Business and corporate law simply isn’t good enough.
We collectively need to make our clubs less attractive to carpet baggers who see the country full of football assets, mostly land, as undervalued.
In the same way as football has a unique ‘Football debts must be paid first’ ruling, or you can’t be a member, then it’s time to protect the community assets that have made some of our clubs a very soft target for ‘owners’ with particular plans.
Someone out there will know what to do to protect our assets so that our clubs are no longer worth raping or pillaging.
There will be a cost but think of the future carnage it will help prevent.
Football should look after its own.
All in all, a right and proper way to make rogue directors move on to other easier scams whether it is land, money laundering or whatever can’t be anything other than good.
Andy’s Sting in the Tale
1. Trans Sport Decisions
2. Pyramid Update
3. Deconstruction
4. Advantage Hibs
5. Over Coached?
6. Hamilton Rapps
1. Sometimes Inclusion Can be Unfair
I don’t pretend to be an expert but I have been told that footballers in the women’s game who have previously undergone full male puberty before changing over have an athletic advantage.
If that is true I get the recent decisions by the courts and support them.
A difficult decision with no winners.
2. Kilby Upper Hand
The ‘wee’ Rangers host Kilby at Dudgeon Park tomorrow but have a mountain to climb after a 4-1 thumping last week.
Playing against 10 men they lost two late goals.
It’s now probably too steep a hill for the northmen but neither Bonnyrigg nor Forfar will relish a trip to K-Park let alone negotiating the mythical ‘Whirlies’ Roundabout to get there.
Bonnyrigg are play-off favourites for now but had a great win last week against Spartans and tomorrow have a tough but winnable game away to Stranraer.
Forfar host Stirling but should win and squeak through.
I love the pyramid and how it has unified football, in the central belt with all the ex-junior sides but so far it has serially failed all the community clubs who have fallen out of Neil’s SPFL.
That’s what happens when all the money in the game stays at the top.
And that’s what happens when clubs make all the decisions and self interest is the basis of every decision.
Scottish football needs to learn to value its community roots more.
And aspirant clubs should all have to meet community criteria because football is about more than league placings.
3. Thoughts on League Re-Construction
I have to say that I am host to a cynical gene, a kind of self-preservation shield that has helped me over the years.
It’s like Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder with this.
In the last few weeks there have been meetings and discussions about changes to the structure of our leagues and our game and surprise, surprise, there has been no change.
No football logic was part of the discussion, just commercial delivery.
Our Top League which in reality has been a two horse race with 12 effectively foreign teams for too long is now totally dependent on Sky, Sponsor money, and the mercenaries that both help to fund.
Four Celtic v Rangers (at least) games on PPV telly is a non negotiable starting point at the top.
Fans might want 16 teams, or more, and none of the 4 times a season fixture nonsense but it is a fact that the financial numbers don’t work if that happens.
So maybe it’s time for ‘out of the box’ thinking like rugby did when professionalism arrived, almost out of the blue, and after the English and French got on with their own projects and were leaving us all behind and not caring a jot.
Some non English/French genius realised ‘collaboration of under classed natives’ was the way to counter the big guys and we got the Guinness League, a league idea that has gone from strength to strength.
Yes Uefa/Fifa might not like it at first if we, Scotland, were the catalysts to replicate it, but why not realise and accept that other countries have domestic giants who could be part of a new entity and commercialise the glaring opportunity.
As for the lower leagues and reconstruction.
Yes 10 club leagues are business planning madness.
Ask any of the current financial directors.
And elephant in the room time.
Let’s not ignore the bigger picture.
Too much of the money in the game is channelled to the top to the long-term damage of community clubs and the very grass roots that used to feed all of our clubs.
The lower leagues should be bigger and part of a bigger integrated grass roots solution.
Funding has to be more equitably shared and properly channelled, not just pissed away on short term badge kissing mercenary wages.
We, the fans, might be part of the discussion and solution.
The SPFL have said to us that fans will be part of the dialogue and if that happens I will share it with our members, with Sting readers, and with anyone who can help add to the best solution for all stakeholders in our game not just the top clubs.
4. Hibs Edging Ahead
Four games to go and Glasgow City trail Hibs by 3 points with Rangers 5 points off the pace.
Dog eat dog just about describes the conclusion but why is there a fixture clash between Sunday’s City vs Celtic at 1pm, and nearby Ibrox for Rangers vs Celtic at 12?
Next Sunday’s Glasgow City vs Hibs might even be the title decider.
5. Send for Carlos
I thought of Senor Santana on Wednesday when I watched Kilmarnock lift the under 18 match at Hampden and well done to Killie who were thoroughly deserving winners.
‘Let the Children Play’ was the rythym that popped into my head as my mind drifted back to the finest youth match I think I ever had the pleasure of watching.
England vs Scotland under 15s at Wembley in 1980.
Scotland won 5-4 and Paul McStay, John Robertson and Ally Dick took on Paul Rideout’s England in front of a packed stadium.
It was live on World of Sport.
It’s now on YouTube.
Our team that day were coached but not overly so and I think that was the difference because on Wednesday at Hampden we had two over-coached sides.
I think over-coaching destroys all the things that used to make Scottish football special.
But what do I know?
6. The Appeal of Hamilton
I’m glad I am not a Hamilton fan because the machinations at that club have been ugly for a good while.
The wrong kind of owners, serial bad news, all kinds of rumours and a club that now will play in their new lower division at Broadwood in Cumbernauld rather than at New Douglas Park.
Yet homeless Clyde who used to play at Broadwood in Cumbie will still play at New Douglas Park.
Once again.
Clubs are an integral part of communities all over Scotland and football needs to do more to protect their assets.
We need some new and big thinking.
Sting is:
A wee read on a Saturday morning for a growing band of football fans who want more than gossip and engineered news.
Sting has, I’ve been informed, mentioned and quoted in at least three parliaments and on tv channels in UK, USA and Australia, so a bit like Krona margarine only less good on toast.
I can’t believe I’ve gone a whole week without talking about Infantino and other wannabe mediaeval kings that our sport seems to attract.
Andy’s Album of the Week
Lindisfarne : Fog on the Tyne
A quite brilliant album that is as fresh as the day it was released and still defies categorisation.
After all those years this melodic, mostly acoustic rock, album still bursts with Geordie pride and introduced a younger Andy not just to so many different musical genres/ influences but also to a lifelong love of Newcastle the town and the Amber Nectar from Tyne Brewery, Newcastle Brown Ale.
Sadly, time brings changes.
Some members of the band have passed away, Tyne Brewery is now flats and NBA is brewed by a Dutch brewery in bloody Tadcaster and Holland.
But the album still works beautifully some 50 plus years later.
What makes and keeps this, their second record album, quite so special was the foundation, genius, and wordsmith/band leader that was Alan Hull.
Add in contemporary influences of Dylan, Neil Young and where Bob and Neil had come from and then factor in the input and predilections of the members of the band especially Si Cowe and Rod Clements.
With 20:20 retrospect you can smell the Appalachian folk traditions right through the Fog with soft bluesy leanings everywhere and wonderful harmonica edges.
Bob Johnston, the producer had come from working successfully with Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen and the Zimmerman phenomenon too and just let it all come together.
Bob had the confidence and insight to let the band’s default to ‘soft blues’ flourish, and avoided over production.
And Hull’s lyrics are spellbinding.
“City lights don’t shine, they glare
And in your streets the girls have forgotten why they’re there’.
“You need me, need you, need him need everyone”.
(In disjointed, uber-aggressive 2025 that message alone makes the actions we currently see daily on our tv screens from fractured self-interest, international politics look so wrong.
My favourite track on the Album is not one of the more obvious choices.
It’s ‘Uncle Sam’, written by Si Cowe and an anti-war song of the highest order.
But January Song, Allright on the Night are brilliant too.
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