BARRY looks back on the second anniversary of one of the blackest days in Rangers history and at how two men almost destroyed the club he loves…

( Almost ? How many times do we have to explain it to them ? )

ROSES are red, violets are blue. There must be a reason most romantic poems start that way.

Well, anything is better than Green and Whyte. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

But on this valentine’s day, the second anniversary of one of the blackest events in the history of Rangers, I can’t help but reflect on what this pair have done to my old club.

( Nor me  )

Craig Whyte. Just the mention of his name sends a cold shiver down my spine. No Rangers fan will ever forget what he did and all the pain he has caused.

Until he arrived on the scene the thought of Rangers going into administration was unimaginable. For people like myself, Rangers was always more than just a football club. It was untouchable. Unbreakable.

( At least three of those words would have had better effect with an “h” in front of them . More accurate, too. )

But, in less than a year in charge, Whyte changed all that for good.

Every Rangers fan will have his own memories of February 14, 2012. It was our JFK moment.

( Good analogy. He was killed as well. )

I think I had been training that morning but, to be honest, I couldn’t say if it was New Year or New York.

( Not quite was most people would accept as the meaning of a JFK moment )

All I really remember is picking up my phone and seeing a huge amount of missed calls and text messages. I opened up the first one from a mate of mine and it read simply: RANGERS ARE IN ADMIN.

( He thought it was a country in southern Europe )

I couldn’t believe what I was reading so I switched straight on to the Sky Sports News app on my iPhone.

( Whilst eating his richmond sausages and drinking his typhoo tea. ) )

To tell you the truth, even though I could see the headlines flashing up on “breaking news” I still couldn’t and didn’t want to believe it.

I flicked over to the BBC to make sure it wasn’t a mistake. And then the emotions began to hit.

( Spooky. When I saw it the emotions hit as well. )

It was a mixture of shock, sadness, anger and confusion. The club that had played such a huge part of my life was in serious trouble.

( And there was every chance of they were skint, they would ask him  for his  loan back. )

I was worried too. Worried not just for my pals in the dressing room but for all the other employees around the club – people I had known and who had looked after me since I was an eight-year-old kid.

( Who also had loans they hadn’t paid back.)

I thought about them all – the tea ladies, the secretaries and all the other staff behind the scenes. People who had given their lives to Rangers. People whose whole life revolved around that football club.

( Their lives ? Like the ones who fell down stairs and out of boats ? )

I knew how hard this would hit each and every one of them. I could feel their devastation. I was devastated with them.

And most of all I kept asking myself how this man, Craig Whyte, could have placed them in such a position.

I must admit, even as I write this, I can feel the emotion building up inside me again. But it’s different now. It’s just sheer anger. That’s the only feeling I have for that man.

I put my hands up. He fooled me hook, line and sinker. Like most fans, I looked upon him as the club’s saviour. Rangers had come through a difficult financial period and here was the man who was going to fix it with all of his millions.

What I didn’t know – what no-one knew until they read it in the Record Sport a few months later – was that they weren’t his millions at all.

( Thats right. The Record said he “was off the radar “, then it was down to billions, later reduced to millions, then he suddenly didn’t have a pot to piss in. It must have been quite a shock. )

He had bought Rangers with money from Ticketus, after ?mortgaging off season tickets which hadn’t even been sold yet.

He had paid for the club with money that was still in the pockets of the very fans who had put so much faith in him.

( but not for long ! lol )

In fact, looking back, what he did was absolutely disgusting. He took each and every one of us for mugs. He didn’t give a damn about the damage he caused or the people he hurt.

It really does turn my stomach to think that he’s still wandering around out there, not in the least bit sorry for all the misery he caused.

Angry? You bet I’m angry. I’m even angry at myself for ever thinking this guy was the real deal.

If Whyte was good enough for Sir David Murray then he was good enough for me, and the vast majority of Rangers fans, no question.

( At that point, had Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin and Pol Pot put in a bid to Murray he’d have snapped their hands off. )

Having spoken to David Murray since, I know that he feels a sense of regret for what happened next. He was as deeply shocked and saddened by the rest of us because he was given assurances that Whyte had the cash required to take Rangers forward.

( Of course he was. Here, see when you were talking to him, did you ask him who gave the assurances ? No? Neither has anyone else, oddly enough. )

Whyte did have the money. He had millions of it. The only problem was, it just wasn’t his to spend.

The guy didn’t sink that money into Rangers as he had promised. He just sank the club.

And, although I’ve never actually come straight out and asked David Murray why he sold Rangers to such a man, I know he feels a deep sense of regret, and anger too. Whyte is the one big black mark he’ll always resent.

( Somehow, I doubt that. Murray knew the club was dying. He just needed someone else to arrange the funeral. )

And then there was Charles Green. Another man who should hold his head in shame. Another man who took advantage of the Rangers fans, just when they were clinging on to the hope that things could not possibly get any worse than they already were.

( Well, if the media, or explayers and management  had told them the club was dead, then Green couldn’t have skanked them the way he did. You lot in the media and others associated with the club are at least partially to blame. And you wonder how Whyte and Green can sleep at night ? )

We were entitled to think that administration was our club’s rock bottom. But we were wrong. Green made sure of it. Just when we thought this guy had arrived to fix the mess that Whyte had made, what we got was a man who was only interested in building up his own bank balance.

( Unlike current manager Ally McCoist-go on, say it Barry. )

My friends in the dressing room – guys like Lee McCulloch, Allan McGregor, Steven Naismith, Kirk Broadfoot and Steve Davis – were in an impossible position when Green failed to bring the club out of administration through a CVA.

( And was henceforth liquidated. It had ceased to be. Yet you all pretended it wasn’t, and helped Green fulfill his dream of a nice new house in France. )

They each had to make their own decisions but I know for a fact they were all heartbroken about what was going on. These are real Rangers men who were feeling the same hurt as the supporters.

And even today, two years on, the boys who left know a lot of fans will never welcome them back to Ibrox.

That’s a pain they will have to carry around with them forever and a day.

(Thats because they knew what was going on, and didn’t want to be a part of seeing their fans bled dry of their hard earned money. Which is a view you won’t see anywhere else. Maybe because its not true, but its certainly my opinion. )

Like me, all they ever dreamed of was playing football for Rangers. That dream was taken away from them by the actions of Whyte and Green.

( I think David Murray deserves an honourable mention as well. Credit where credits due. )

Two years down the line my mate Big Jig is the only one who remains. And you know what? I’m starting to think the worst is finally behind him.

( The players in front of him aren’t that good either. )

It’s been two months since the agm and things appear to be calm. After all the chaos, no news is good news where Rangers are concerned.

There is also excitement about what is happening on the park because of the prospect of a run to the Scottish Cup Final.

There’s still a couple of rounds to go but the draw has opened up nicely and if they reach the final I’ll be at Celtic Park on May 17.

Nothing would make me prouder than to see my old pal lift that trophy because that’s what loving Rangers is really all about.

It’s a shame guys like Green and Whyte will never, ever get it.

( I think they’ve got pretty much what they wanted, though. )

Right, now heres a much better article, from Glenn Gibbons, written shortly before he was banned from the Scottish sports media for telling the truth. It’ll help to restore your faith that there are some who won’t repeat the company line when it comes to Toxic FC and its descendents.  before you set about your weekends business.

ON THE approach to 4 March, the 20th anniversary of Fergus McCann’s acquisition of Celtic, we will witness a predictable, spreading rash of revisionism among many, from supporters to media, who passed most of his five years in Scotland casting the entrepreneur as a figure of ridicule and who now clamour for his immortalisation in marble or bronze.

This outbreak will be accompanied by an equally unsurprising rush to relate Rangers’ troubles in recent years to those of their great rivals two decades ago and to conclude that what the lurching Ibrox club require above all is a latter-day Fergus McCann.

The first of these two phenomena will be occasionally hilarious as the rewriting of the public and media perception of the Scots-Canadian proliferates; the second of them will be merely laughable.

To draw parallels between the circumstances that drew McCann across the Atlantic from Montreal in 1994 and those which caused Rangers to slither into administration two years ago yesterday is to dwell on a comparison that has no validity.

The would-be rescuer’s confidence in Celtic’s prospects of being restored to health and prosperity two decades ago may be detected in the fact that he attempted to bring his influence to the club several years before, only to be rebuffed by a hopelessly aloof board of directors. McCann had ­clearly recognised the potential for recovery, but it was most tellingly articulated by Len Murray, the ­well-known Glasgow lawyer, during an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders when the financial crisis was at its most dangerous.

Murray told the assembly that the club’s debt stood at around £7 million and that its basic value was £20,000; that is, 20,000 ordinary shares at £1 each. “No company in the history ofbusiness,” Murray concluded, “has ­survived liabilities amounting to three hundred and fifty times its ­capital value.”

The lawyer, of course, did not mean that the debt had become unmanageable, but that the club was ludicrously undervalued. This was due to the anachronistic, scandalous regulations of the private limited company, which decreed that shares could only be traded with the blessing of the directors and that board members should have first refusal on any that became available. Most significantly of all, the shares were not allowed to “float” to their true value, as a result of which directors were able to purchase them for around £3 each.

They were, naturally, allowed to soar to their proper price when McCann came buying. Bulk holders such as Michael Kelly, Chris White and David Smith commanded around £300 per share, a form of hardball that left McCann understandably resentful over the disappearance into their pockets of funds that could have been used in the resuscitation of the business.

What mattered most to McCann, however, was that the outdated management of the club had created a mess in which crowds were down to well under 20,000 – in one or two instances, struggling to reach five figures – and that the previous regime had insisted on a limit of only 7,000 season tickets, on the preposterous basis that “season tickets are more trouble than they’re worth”.

It is a measure of the persuasiveness of McCann’s personality and his formal business plan that Dermot Desmond, the Irish money machine who had no previous interest in football, should be so readily recruited as a major investor. The two men were introduced by Robert Lee, then a young professional golfer and now a pundit on Sky Television, who told Desmond that “there’s somebody here I think you should meet”.

In a lengthy conversation in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London a couple of years later, Desmond told me that he had taken one look at ­McCann’s business plan and asked him one question: “How much do you want?” When he was told that taking £4m worth of stock in the upcoming share issue would be advisable, ­Desmond asked a second question: “Do you want any more?”

The Irishman added that “it was clear from the start that Fergus would make a success of it. There was no way this was going to fail. I told him that if he wanted any further investment down the line, I would be very happy to oblige”.

McCann not only built a new, 60,000-seat stadium, but finished up with 53,000 season-ticket holders, a miracle of marketing that brought full houses to Celtic Park for opposition teams who would, in the past, have lacked the drawing power of a ­Christmas cracker magnet.

The single most significant difference between the commercial naivety of clueless directors that brought Celtic to its knees and the appalling 
financial excesses of David Murray that led eventually to Rangers’ ­liquidation is that the latter club was left with little or no scope for recovery. Rangers hit the wall when they ­already enjoyed capacity crowds, record season-ticket sales and ­maximum annual turnover.

These details are among a number of reasons why it is impossible to imagine a conversation and a transaction between two possibly life-saving investors in present-day Rangers such as took place between McCann and Desmond 20 years ago.

Far from thriving on new-found revenue streams, Rangers are haemorrhaging money because they have no credit lines, the need to pay for services and supplies on delivery being the most damaging consequence of their previous actions in leaving creditors seriously disadvantaged.

Fergus McCann once agreed that “it would have been cheaper to go into liquidation, but it would not have been the right thing for Celtic to do”. It was a nifty seizure of the moral high ground, but, given his record, he should be credited with the nous also to have realised that, in the long term, administration and liquidation would have been an unacceptably ­expensive business.

Which makes me feel better already.

Pat Stanton was the player you would have arrived at had you solved yesterdays little teaser, today , thanks to Lisbon lion on twitter, we have another happy memory.

Whats going on here ?