Celtic play Rosenberg tomorrow night, which is exactly what I said in yesterdays diary.
Which surprised me, as I’m sure that I read somewhere it was tonight. Just as well I didn’t book the train, or I’d have looked jolly silly standing outside the ground typing a piece about how these games aren’t attracting the fans any more.
We might get the occasional story wrong, but that would have been a doozy.
So, tomorrow, Celtic will try to cross the halfway stage in this years qualifying campaign by defending and possibly improving on a 3-1 lead.
The club have decided not to appeal Jozo Simunovic’s red card after they viewed the incident from another angle.
With Mikael Lustig not quite ready for a start, and Dedryck boyata not answering his phone, it looks increasingly like we’ll have Ajer and Hendry in central defence again.
It could be worse, I suppose.
However, and lets not lose sight of this, despite the one mistake, bith of them looked pretty comfortable in the first leg, and I’d expect them to build on that.
Who knows, maybe Boyata won’t get back into the team….
Worryingly, though, Scott Brown has done the Rosenberg team talk for them..
They know they have to come out and score two goals so here’s hoping we can open them up a little bit,
Nobody wants to be opened up. And in most countires its against the law.
Brown has had a lot to say over the last couple of days, most of it sensible, but a fair chunk of it almost certainly hand written PR…
The sensible… on tomorrows game…
“We’ve gone over there and won before, so the aim for us is to go over there, score goals and create chances and play good football and we believe that we can do that.
“It’s always hard going over there, but last season we went over there, we were 0-0 at home, we went over there and got a great victory and it’s a great goal by James Forrest.
The aim this season is just to take every game as it goes, make sure we try and go as far as we can in the qualifiers and try and get into Champions League football and then on Saturday start the league campaign with a good victory and a good performance as well.”
The PR…
“I put a lot of trust in the manager and he’s produced a lot to be fair. I trust him with my life.
“The way he’s doing things at Celtic he’s improving us in every single department so yes I have a lot of trust in him.
“If the manager doesn’t believe we need anyone then I think we can do the business with the squad we have.
“We’ve got a great squad in that dressing room. We stick together on and off the park.
“We have Ryan Christie and Scott Allan back and we have Mikey Johnston and Calvin Miller coming through too. Two experienced ones who’ve played in the Premiership and two young ones back in the squad.”
And of course, the inevitable question about the challenge from over the river…
“We will see what happens, we play them in the fourth game of the season.
“We are looking forward to it but we have a lot of games before then so we need to make sure we focus on that and not too far ahead.
“Everyone is going to be working to be that team to beat us. It’s about how we react this season.
“We believe we have come back in better condition and we are looking sharp already.
“There will be a lot of challenges this season. Aberdeen will be up there, Hibs will be there, Rangers will be there and Hearts have brought in a lot of players too, so we will need to figure it out to be perfectly honest.”
Rangers ready to challenge Celtic again after Mike Ashley surrenders merchandising deal
( Telegraph, Roddy Forsyth, June 2017 )
Dave King: Rangers’ refusal to cave in to Sports Direct was the key to striking new Ibrox retail deal
Despite a frequently venomous relationship between Dave King and Ashley – who tried to have the Rangers chairman thrown into prison for contempt of court – the two sides finally agreed an end to a contract so onerous that fans had boycotted Sports Direct stores.
It took a significant effort from both parties to get the deal across the line, although details of the ongoing bargaining were revealed exclusively by Telegraph Sport in March, when King first indicated that he believed a conclusion favourable to Rangers was possible.
In his latest statements, King indicated that Ashley – who is seeking a buyer for all or part of his holding in Newcastle United might relinquish his 8.9% stake in Rangers. “I can’t talk about that at the moment but I would expect an announcement on that fairly soon,” he said.
In the meantime, the door is now open for Rangers to claw back some of the clout which once made them the most successful club in the UK in terms of merchandising. Ashley pounced on incredibly weak terms offered when Charles Green’s Sevco consortium was in charge at Ibrox and struck a deal which gave the club only seven pence for every £1 spent on its own merchandising. When Dave King’s subsequently unseated the puppet regime installed by Ashley in March 2012 he declared that his priority would be to tear up the agreement.
The new deal lets Rangers take the bulk of profits from sale of merchandise through their Megastore and Webstore outlets along with an equal share of profits from sales at Sports Direct stores. Asked if the deal had effectively placed Rangers in a stranglehold and hindered their efforts to regain some form of parity with Celtic, five years after the Craig Whyte went into financial meltdown, King said: “Yes. Without bringing in another source of revenue, the only way you could compensate for it was to get people to lend money.
“You had a structural deficit within the ongoing operations. So, one of the priorities for us over the last couple of years – the biggest priority if you are ignoring the football side of getting back to the Premiership and into Europe – was the resolution of the retail deal.
“It has been very time intensive. I’ve spent more time on Rangers litigation over the last two years than I have on my own businesses in South Africa and globally – much more.
“We have gone week after week after week, every single day – Saturdays and Sundays – working on this. It has been a really monumental effort, taking a massive amount of time and resources to get to this point, but it was so critical to the club that we got something sorted out.”
King added that he believed the deciding factor in Ashley’s decision not to maintain his siege of the Ibrox board was the endless cost of legal battles. “I don’t think they came around to our way of thinking,” he said.
“What happened was the level of intensity in the litigation, with all our directors being sued in a personal capacity and issued with injunctions which meant we couldn’t talk about Sports Direct, that I could have gone to jail last Christmas for saying unkind things about them.
“We had a level of ferocity at us from Sports Direct for about a year. I said ‘you can do what you like, you can try and put me in jail’. We had come to do a job for the club and we will not back down.
“Sports Direct applied their mind and asked themselves whether they felt Rangers were going to back down. The answer was ‘No’, so was it not better to seek some sort of negotiated outcome? It was a realisation from them that the initial strategy of trying to blow us away hadn’t worked.
“I get Mike Ashley’s position. Mike Ashley is saying, ‘I came across a weak board in a weak position and I took advantage’. Let the buyer beware.
“We knew that wasn’t good for us, because we were giving Celtic that unnatural advantage because of the lack or our retail performance. And in my calculated estimate, it can’t have been good for Sports Direct, because Rangers certainly wasn’t a good model for them to go to other clubs.
“Celtic have obviously had three advantages over Rangers over the last couple of years. One is they have had retail operations and we haven’t, so we have had find that money from somewhere else.
“They have had access to European income and we have had none and they have had a player squad of a level of quality that they could bring cash in if they had to. We have taken the retail opportunity out of the equation completely and I think that will go back in Rangers’ favour again.
“What we have got to do now is bridge the other two gaps and I think it is fair to say that now we are back in Europe we will be back in Europe every year.”
And this…
“And that, Farquhar, is what happens when we give membership to bloody women”
Today…
Comments are closed on this article.