David Beckham is in line for a shock move to Scottish football. The 36-year-old LA Galaxy star has been coy about his next step now his five-year stint in America’s Major League Soccer has ended with victory in the 2011 MLS Cup, but I can exclusively reveal he is negotiating with Stewart Milne, Aberdeen FC’s […]

Last Saturday morning I woke up and immediately checked the sports section of the online paper. I knew the Euro 2012 qualifiers had been played overnight (Hong Kong time), so I made a beeline for those results. I saw Ireland had pumped Estonia 4-0 away from home in the first leg of their playoff, and […]

In the days after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s vile regime, I was genuinely revolted by a gruesome picture published by the BBC, a so-called ‘respectable’ news organisation. That photo of Gareth Bale modelling a “Team GB London 2012” football shirt made me sick to my stomach.

Rangers owner Craig Whyte banned the BBC from Ibrox because he said a documentary they produced was “muckracking”. He should have banned them because it was just a pile of shit. “Rangers: The Inside Story” was sensationalist and shoddy, a tangled mess of half facts and guilt-by-association. And it didn’t answer the most important question: […]

After the Liechtenstein-Scotland game last Saturday, two Scottish players were taken into a small room inside the Rheinpark Stadion to produce urine samples for a drug test. UEFA didn’t think the Scottish performance was so good it must have been drug-fuelled; it’s just standard procedure after every international game to test two players from each […]

I don’t care for rugby, but I visited an egg-chasing friend at the weekend so was obliged to accompany him to his local boozer on Saturday to watch fifteen genetic freaks lumber around under the dreich Auckland skies playing against the Scottish team. After a stout performance where the underdog Scots won an early lead […]

Living in China, I’m used to reading stories of police wading into crowds to pull down banners deemed offensive to the authorities, and dragging away the ‘troublemakers’ who unfurl these slogans. Still, the most recent article I read about this was surprising.

Scotland, bloody Scotland. Less than three decades ago, home to a great footballing side, one feared, or at least admired, throughout Europe and beyond, for punching well beyond its weight. Now it has fallen on hard times: mediocrity has replaced magic. It’s a shift that didn’t happen overnight. But day by day, week by week, […]

The future of Scottish football sits on Celtic’s shoulders. Following a catastrophic set of qualifying results which saw all four Scottish entrants dismissed from continental competition, Celtic were handed a reprieve when UEFA (rightfully, in my opinion) expelled FC Sion from the Europa League tournament. The Parkhead side replaced the team that knocked them out […]