Wings Over Scotland

…is roughly how often Aberdeen get to the final of the Scottish Cup these days. The last time was 17 years ago – a tournament which started in the last century and ended the year Rangers started paying their players with EBTs – when SFA rules meant that they had to play almost the entire game without a recognised goalkeeper.

(A tackle in the third minute broke veteran custodian Jim Leighton’s jaw, and because you were only allowed three players on the subs bench the Dons had no backup No.1 and had to put striker Robbie Winters between the sticks, with a predictable outcome. Leighton never played professional football again.)

In politics, Labour were only one year into the first ever administration of the modern Scottish Parliament, and still in the first term of Tony Blair’s rule at Westminster. The idea of the SNP winning an election, let alone holding an independence referendum, was the preserve of mad fantasists.

And the last time the Pittodrie side actually won the trophy was 27 years back, which is so long ago that most of Hampden was still open to the elements.

Still, it would be weird if we got to the final again next year and some of the Aberdeen support refused to go on the grounds that the matter of who was the best cup football team in Scotland had been settled forever today.

Or if Celtic won but had fielded an ineligible player and the SFA ordered a replay, but the Dons declined to take part because they’d played too many finals recently.

Just saying.

#COYR

From these small beginnings shall our ultimate victory come.

The votes for “God Save The Queen” being driven by Tories, English-born residents and supporters of a particular football club probably won’t come as the biggest shock in the world to anyone.

(Alert viewers will of course have noticed that due to MI5 INTERFERENCE in the poll, there were actually two votes for Hoots Mon, which have been suspiciously rounded down to one. We are conducting an investigation, by which we mean brutal purge.)

Just for fun.

(The combined figure for all football fans, incidentally, is Yes 52% No 48%.)

Just over three and a half years ago, we ran an article about how being an opposition MP or MSP is the cushiest gig in politics. You get all the pay, benefits, holidays and status, but you don’t have to actually do very much except whinge about how rubbish the government is, which most people are happy to do for free as a hobby.

Most of the time you don’t even need to turn up at your workplace.

(Sure, there are all your constituents to deal with, but if you’re not in power all that really amounts to is forwarding their letters to the government and demanding action.)

Tomorrow, the Holyrood opposition will give us a virtuoso demonstration.

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Old media and new media spoke with one voice in Scotland today:

But for once it was the dead-tree press that held the moral high ground.

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WARNING: this post isn’t about football, but it will refer to football for quite a while in order to illustrate its point. Get over it or go outside for some fresh air.

Today is the opening day of the SPFL Premiership season, and will see the top-flight debut of a four-year-old club which is legally entitled under company law to use the name and trademarks of a much older one which went into liquidation in 2012 owing creditors tens of millions of pounds.

The facts of that matter are beyond any empirical dispute, but human beings are adept at arguing things which are demonstrably not true and so the truth is hotly and furiously rejected by a substantial group of people, weirdly including the club itself (even as it insists that it can’t be held responsible for the old club’s debts because it’s not the same club).

We’re not going to attempt to settle that argument here, because (a) it’s already been settled, and (b) we have nothing new to say that would remotely convince the people who’ve already steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the proven facts.

Instead, we’re going to talk – not for the first time, sadly – about why the “debate” around “Rangers” won’t die, and what it tells us about the Scottish media.

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I was born to be a Rangers supporter. I had no real choice in the matter. My father was a Ger, as was his father and his father’s father. I was accepted that as soon as I was old enough to be lifted over a turnstile I would attend Ibrox, faithfully.

From 1964 (aged 5) I worshipped at the shrine of Rangers for almost three decades. Fortunately for me, my father was the least bigoted man you could wish to meet. His religions were the trade unions and Rangers. Because he wasn’t bigoted our next-door neighbour and dad’s friend used to take me to Parkhead to watch Celtic too, which I found thrilling as I was convinced the “Tims” could see right through me.

This caused me a bit of confusion at school, because some of my family were “Tims”. In fact my favourite aunty was a convert to Catholicism and was as devout and decent a Catholic as you will ever meet. The conflation of football and religion was as normal as the smog-filled air we breathed. It just was what it was. You were either Proddy Ranger or Timmy Celtic. It wasn’t to be questioned.

Except my dad questioned it, loudly and often. He tried to explain the wrongs of the situation to me many times. I remember asking him why he still was a Rangers man if he disliked the whole Proddy/Tim thing that went with it.

“They’re my team, son. The morons can’t change that”, he told me.

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We thought it’d be worth making a timeline of Hampden on Saturday for posterity.

Because a lot of nonsense is being talked on all sides. This is the reality.

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So a few things need said about the events of the weekend.

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On the rare occasions when this site discusses football, and in particular if we mention the three-year-old Championship club known as “Rangers”, we get complaints on two grounds: one, that football has nothing to do with politics, and two, that we risk alienating supporters of the club who also back independence, of which there are unquestionably a significant number.

The second complaint is one we’ve dealt with in detail here. But the first one is more important. Because whether you’re talking about the original club which died in 2012 and was put into liquidation or the new one currently challenging for promotion to the top division for the first time, “Rangers” is a totem of the Unionist establishment in Scotland, and the way it’s treated by the media tells us at least as much about that establishment and that media as any amount of political journalism.

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Alert readers will probably already be familiar with the philosophical proposition of Schrödinger’s cat. (The less alert can click the link for a short and easy primer.) The hypothetical experiment posited by 20th-century Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has entered into popular culture. But increasingly and disturbingly, it’s also becoming the guiding principle of mainstream media journalism.

Certain viewers should steel themselves at this point, because we’re about to briefly talk about football before moving on to other things later in the article. You can consider that your trigger warning. We’ll let you know when it’s over.

The lines above were issued to the press yesterday by The Rangers International Football Club plc, a football club (the clue’s in the name) formed in 2012, yet which lays claim to the history and achievements of a previous club of a similar name which was liquidated for bankruptcy the same year, having been formed in 1872.

And eagle-eyed logic fans may have spotted something of a contradiction.

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There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:

Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.

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