Tom English: ‘Walter’s Agony’? What about agony of the fans

THIS Rangers story can sometimes feel like a Hollywood B movie, such is the bonkers nature of the plot.

There was one of these things on television recently, the Creeping Terror it was called (otherwise known as the Crawling Monster), a horror that came out in the 1960s in which a giant slug terrorises an American town after escaping from a crashed space ship. Frankly, after five months covering the outrageous twists and turns in the fall of Rangers the notion of some killer alien mollusc doesn’t seem so ludicrous any more. Nothing does. Even the loopy directors who made those crappy horror films would struggle to do justice to Rangers: The Movie. As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Yesterday evening saw another development, the entrance into this great drama of Allan Bulloch, a Glasgow businessman who was once disqualified in the 1990s from being a company director for seven years and who was then declared bankrupt (twice) before re-inventing himself as Allan Stewart under which name he is said to be preparing an £11 million bid to buy Rangers along with his partner in their property developing firm, Stephen McKenna. Social networking went insane at the news. In a heartbeat their history was unveiled and it didn’t look good. HMRC once went after the pair of them for an unpaid tax bill of £78,000 and eventually wound up their company. Deja vu.

Here was the thing, though. Here was the equivalent of the alien slug in the crashed space ship. The surreal ‘You cannot be f****** serious!’ element was not so much their colourful past (Rangers people are almost unshockable about such things these days) but the suspicion that McKenna is, wait for it, a suspected Celtic fan! Could it be true? ‘Rangers sold to one of THEM!’ The Kafkaesqe nightmare would be complete at that point.

Is there any substance to these guys? You could do worse than assume a default position of presuming everyone who says they want to save Rangers is a bluffer. Stewart and McKenna, we are told, are about to drop out of the sky with £11m. Yeah, whatever. Only a few days ago most of the Rangers support believed that Walter Smith was poised to ride to the rescue backed up the fortunes of Jim McColl and Douglas Park and look how that turned out. Last Thursday, Smith issued a statement that said in its opening paragraph “I am leading a new bid for Rangers Football Club” but his leadership didn’t extend to cutting short his holiday to come back to Glasgow to do some face-to-face talking with the people who mattered.

Neither, of course, did it amount to much of a bid. Smith and McColl spoke of the necessity of getting the club out of Green’s hands and into the bosom of Rangers people who would stabilise it and then nurse it back to health. Clearly their fear was that Green would wreak even further damage on the beleaguered institution. So, their motives were pure, but where was their money? A bid of £6m was never going to cut it. You expected them to go higher, but they didn’t. They retreated. It was feeble stuff.

Those who can see no wrong in Smith are banking on his consortium returning if Green’s group doesn’t have the finance to keep the club going. They see it as a tactic rather than a piece of time-wasting worthy of some of the other time-wasters who have been involved in this story in the past. It was amusing to read of “Walter’s Agony” on Wednesday. What about the agony of the Rangers fans who believed that his group would do what needed to be done in order to get the club out of Green’s hands? Indeed, what about Smith’s mate who broke down in tears on the telephone? That, we were told, was the catalyst for the great man to try and save the club. McColl and Park have several fortunes between them but obviously not the interest to part with enough millions to back up their fighting talk with action. Maybe they’ll come again. That’s a straw that all Bears will be clutching right now.

In the meantime there is Green and a lengthy list of questions about who, precisely, is in his consortium and how much money they have. Oh yes, and the triple whammy of potential knockout blows, the 4 July SPL vote, the double contracts iceberg and Lord Carloway’s revised verdict on the sins of the Whyte era. Throw in the state of flux with the playing squad, the uncertain future of Ally McCoist, the disappointment of Smith’s apparently stomach-less consortium, the berating they’re getting from Celtic supporters as a club with no name and now the appearance of a potential new bidder with more baggage than a travelling orchestra and you begin to feel the pain of the Rangers fan in the street.

Walter’s Agony? Frankly, I could think of an awful lot of people more deserving of sympathy than the former Rangers manager.

Platitudes from Platini on race issue are pants

When Nicklas Bendtner revealed his sponsored underpants when celebrating a goal for Denmark against Portugal last week it wasn’t just a logo that was exposed, but also Uefa’s hypocrisy. For gadding about with Paddy Power branded pants, Bendtner was fined £80,000 and banned for one match. For their fans’ racial abuse of Mario Balotelli, Croatia were fined £65,000, a figure that includes a sanction for the setting off and throwing of fireworks in their game with Italy.

So, to Uefa, Bendtner’s advertising gimmick is more of an affront than the monkey chanting direct at Balotelli by an estimated 300-500 unreconstructed Croatians.

In fairness to Michel Platini and his gilded chums, they are nothing if not consistent.

Their penalties for racism are unfailingly feeble, while their rhetoric is dependably phoney. This is what Platini has been saying for years: “Football must teach values to Europe – honesty, courage, fraternity, tolerance and peace. Football includes, integrates, and welcomes. It excludes no-one, it discriminates against no-one, it persecutes no-one.”

Platini has said this kind of thing so often that he can now trot it out without bursting out laughing at how ludicrous it sounds. His mates in Uefa sit about and watch Platini put on his Mr Angry face as he swears vengeance on the racists and they all applaud him and say: “God help the next bigot who throws a banana – Michel will have him for breakfast.”

But nothing happens. A slap on the wrist here and there is worthless. Remember Uefa’s stated policy. “We will abandon games and dock points and throw teams out of major championships,” said Platini in 2009. No you won’t, Michel. You will posture and you will turn a blind eye, you will threaten the likes of Balotelli with a yellow card if he walks off the pitch in response to sustained abuse and you will treat branding on somebody’s underpants as a greater offence than monkey chanting.

“Courage is needed when there is racism in the stands; that’s Uefa’s mission,” said Platini a few years ago. On the race issue, Platini is a charlatan.

Wedding planner Barclay stretches ‘new man‘ to breaking point

Instead of travelling onwards from Fiji to Samoa with the rest of the Scotland squad, John Barclay has come home to help plan his wedding on Saturday week. Each to their own, but giving up a chance to win another cap for your country in Apia this weekend in order to put the finishing touches to your nuptial preparations seems to me like stretching the “new man” thing to breaking point.

It’s just as well that Barclay has earned a reputation as a warrior on the rugby field because, if you didn’t know any better, you might have your doubts right now.

Players bail out of tours for all sorts of reasons – injury, marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, but this is surely the first example of an international rugby player leaving because he has a party to organise, albeit a momentous one.

I shudder to think what the old guard would make of this. Imagine, back in the day, what Jim Telfer would have said if one of his players came to him with a Barclayesque request. A reaction of stunned fury I’d wager, followed by horrendous retribution by way of a beasting on the training ground. How times have changed.