Dear Scotland

It was back to the eighties at Fir Park, Motherwell, last Saturday.  No, it wasn’t a retro disco night featuring Kajagoogoo, shoulder pads, and men with snoods wearing too much eyeshadow.  Aberdeen manager Craig Brown and Motherwell chairman John Boyle recreated a classic 80s hooligan scene: the top boys from Aberdeen’s Soccer Crew and Motherwell’s [...]

The Tartan Army are still the world’s fluffiest football fans, thanks to the Sun newspaper. The blowhard tabloid rag proudly declared itself the saviour of the Tartan Army after it produced a photograph showing the banana thrown on to the pitch after Brazil’s second goal came from an area populated by Brazil fans.

If anyone ever asked me who my hero is, I would answer: Tank Man.  He is the anonymous person who stood in front of a column of Chinese Army tanks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue on June 5, 1989 – the morning after the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square.  No-one knows his real name.

This Sunday sees the sixth meeting of the Old Firm this season, and the first that will directly result in silverware – the League Cup. This tournament came into being in 1947.  I’m not entirely sure why – presumably to throw a few more games into the calendar and thus bring a few more pounds [...]

I’ve watched Rangers games in many strange places.  I listened to the 1994 New Year’s Old Firm in a flat in Dakar on a short wave radio; I watched Paul Le Guen’s first game in 2006 in a hotel in Bombay; and in January this year I sat in a ski lodge in Japan while [...]

Billy is still on his travels this week, although he probably found somewhere to watch Rangers get gubbed by Celtic for the second time in as many weeks. To cheer him up here is a ‘classic’ article where Billy looks at some memorable games in Scottish football history that all ended 4-1.

Billy is on his travels this week but if I were Rangers fan I’d be speechless after their performance on Sunday too. Anyway, in recognition of their ongoing UEFA cup run, here is a classic article Billy wrote last year about the day he went to Manchester.

The Scottish press have reported that the national team are to play in a ‘glamour friendly’ against Brazil at the end of March.  Looking for confirmation, I checked the Brazilian press and found no mention of any ‘glamour friendly’, though they did confirm that Brazil were playing Scotland at the end of March. The game [...]

This past week saw Dundee FC file a financial plan to allow them to escape administration at the end of the season – saving the club from extinction.  Good news for Dundee fans, though other Division One teams can justifiably complain that Dundee’s excessive spending has been wiped out at the expense of the club’s [...]