Wings Over Scotland

[FOOTBALL KLAXON.]

Okay, this has gone on long enough. We’ve been trying for quite a few months now to get anyone to explain something to us, and nobody ever has an answer. We’ve sat and watched with our heads in our hands as the SPL and SFL have competed to come up with the most bonkers, convoluted proposals for the reconstruction of Scottish football.

The SPL want two leagues of 12 splitting into three leagues of eight then merging back into two leagues of 12 again at the end, plus a league of 18 that just bumbles along feeling a bit left out of all the splitting fun. The SFL counters with a bizarre 16-10-16 (or possibly 16-10-18) system that has nowhere near enough fixtures in it, but proposes to fill the gaps with playoffs and by padding out the least popular competition in the Scottish game – the League Cup.

And all the while everyone pointedly ignores the most successful league system ever created in Scotland, which by coincidence was also the least embarrassingly stupid one, and which never ended with the team in 8th place in the final table having more points than the team in 5th place while all the other leagues laughed at us.

Please, for the love of God, someone tell us why.

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Crivvens. We were rooting around in Google Analytics (the thing that records website traffic) today. It’s a service we only signed up to at the start of March, which among other things means our cumulative lifetime pageviews statistic is probably understated by around 100,000. But the startling thing we discovered was something else.

Since we started tracking “unique visitors” in March (statspeak for the number of different identifiable people who’ve come to the site at least once), Wings Over Scotland has been read by just over 125,000 people. That’s… wow. That’s a lot.

Obviously many just pass through after following a link from somewhere and never come back, and a typical single month will only see about a fifth of that number, but around 80% of our readers each month are return visitors – increasingly, people who come here once come back again. (So once more, we’ll be making no apologies for publishing the occasional story about Rangers when merited…)

That’s not just down to the editorial contributors – we’re proud to have some of the most informed commenters in the blogosphere too, who not only tip us off to stories worth covering but also provide new angles and ways of thinking about stuff that hadn’t occurred to us. So if you’re one of the 99% who read but don’t comment, speak up. We, and an increasingly large number of other people, want to hear from you.

There’s already been an avalanche of cobblers talked about yesterday’s surprise verdict of the First Tier Tribunal on alleged tax evasion by Rangers. RFC fans are triumphantly howling vindication for their claims that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy, insisting the verdict shows the club hadn’t been cheating for a decade and that it should still be playing in Scotland’s top division. The club’s former chairman even told Scotland Tonight that it wouldn’t have gone into administration at all, let alone liquidation, if not for the pressures caused by the infamous “Big Tax Case”.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is mostly painting a picture of unadulterated victory for, and terrible injustice against, the Ibrox club. But let’s see if we can cut through the persisting fog, establish some solid facts and lay a couple of myths.

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Well, it’s all been a pretty confusing business in Scottish football this week, with the SFL or SFA or B&Q or someone releasing some rather vague documents with baffling talk of “Hotspots” and no mention of half the things that people had been trailing (like Celtic and The Rangers “colt” teams, which is a dynamic, thrusting new way of saying “reserves” that someone’s apparently just invented) and whether the new leagues would have splits or would prefer an Orange Maid.

However, to keep our readers as immaculately informed as they’re used to, we’ve been digging deep and speaking to all the right people, and we think we’ve finally managed to definitively figure out the complete plans. They’re actually reasonably easy to follow as long as you concentrate, so take a deep breath and jump in.

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We don’t know if there’s ever been an official competition for “Most British Place In Scotland”, but if there was it’s a pretty safe bet that Ibrox Stadium would win it at a canter. So we don’t suppose we ought to be surprised that this is what happened there just before the kick-off of yesterday’s SFL3 match against Peterhead:

The display was only one part of a touching and solemn commemoration of the fallen of two world wars which also included the firing of an artillery gun on the pitch (“Hey, survivors of enemy barrages, here’s a fun trip down memory lane for you!”), Broxi Bear standing with his big comedy foam head bowed in the centre circle for the minute’s silence and – we promise we’re not making any of this up – a bunch of Royal Marines abseiling down from the Govan Stand roof with the match ball.

Now, we’re sure this whole grotesque circus was conducted with the best of intentions. But anyone juxtaposing the poppy with a national flag – with any national flag – has misunderstood what it is that the poppy is supposed to stand for in the most complete and catastrophic way imaginable. This was the poppy as symbol not of remembrance and sacrifice and tragedy, but of victory.

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Ed Miliband spoke to the Labour conference for over an hour this week. The transcript of his speech ran to almost seven-and-a-half thousand words. The vast bulk of them, however – well over six thousand – comprised a collection of well-worn anecdotes and homilies which the party’s leader has been peddling for many months already.

So given that we all live busy lives these days and you probably don’t want to sit through the entire speech including 20 minutes of guff about how he’s from a family of immigrants and went to a comprehensive AGAIN, we’ve filtered it down a bit for you.

Below is an edited transcript redacting all the waffle, the stuff about how the other parties are simply beastly and the things he WON’T do, and leaving only the actual bits of policy (a term we’ve interpreted as broadly as possible), helpfully highlighted in red (or at least as close to red as Labour is prepared to get these days), along with our own brief analysis in bold. We hope you find it useful.

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We apologise for running two horn-tooting stories in one week, but we’re blown away, we really are. Back at the start of August we predicted, in all sincerity, a big drop-off in pageviews for this site, because the June and July figures had been inflated by a hefty sprinkling of Rangers stories as that particular circus ricocheted between slapstick and farce on an hourly basis. We were linked from many dozens of different football sites and forums as far apart as Inverness and Portsmouth, and thousands of readers with little to no interest in Scottish politics arrived for a brief visit.

There was indeed a fall in August as we stopped covering the Great Govan Debacle, but a much tinier one than we’d anticipated – just 4% (and more on that in a moment). And this month, to our considerable amazement, we’ve not only recovered the losses but hit another record high: up over 15,000 to 265,203. We only broke the million-views barrier in August, and in September (albeit the 29th) we passed 1.5 million. Wow.

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The last seven days have been the biggest week in the history of Wings Over Scotland, eclipsing even any of the ones at the height of the Rangers fiasco. The site saw a total of 86,522 page views over the period – 15% up on the previous best – in a historic week which also saw us break the 500-posts and 10,000-comments barriers.

So thanks to all of you for reading and sharing, thanks to everyone who marched for independence in Edinburgh last Saturday, and most of all, our very special thanks to Johann Lamont. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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We expect next month’s Wings Over Scotland viewing figures to take a pretty big fall, as politics will still be on holiday and there won’t be any more stories about the Rangers saga to fill the gaping NewsChasm (tm) left by the summer “silly season”. So we hope you’ll allow us this toot on our stat-trumpet before the inevitable slide.

July saw yet another record-smashing month for the blog, piling almost 40,000 page views onto the previous high – a 17% increase – and boosting the number of unique visitors by an even more startling 27%, to just shy of 30,000. The running total of 986,764 pageviews since we started nine months ago means that in August we should at least be able to boast of breaking through the 1-million barrier well within our first year, which will be some small degree of consolation.

It’s traditional at this point to cough modestly and hopefully towards the “Donate” button – we’ve got just about enough cash from generous viewers now to get on with moving to a more robust server, under our “official” domain name that won’t see the blog blocked for some readers for having “game” in its address – but mostly we just wanted to say thanks once more to the people who are increasingly making Wings Over Scotland their first stop for Scottish political news with just slightly too much focus on football. We’ll try not to let you down.

We hope you’ll forgive us this last one, just for fun.

All the best odysseys begin in a hedge.

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