The Celtic Support knows exactly what happened – Alastair Johnston, Tangled Up in Blue

EARLIER THIS week the one-time Chairman of Rangers Alastair Johnston decided to re-ignite the debate on the myth that Rangers survived liquidation in 2012. He claimed that some Celtic Supporters believe that Rangers died in February 2012 and questions our mindset for holding such beliefs.

Yesterday we responded to Johnston’s remarks and indeed many other Celtic sites also did so. You can read our article in response to Alastair Johnston – Alastair Johnston and A Statement from Celtic Supporters, “Air of unreality as 140 years of history is formally ended in less than nine minutes,” The Herald, 15 June 2012 – HERE.

Today we have a new extract from Stephen O’Donnell, who is the author of Tangled Up in Blue, and who also wished to respond to the remarks made by Johnston on Thursday, that were so gleefully covered by all the newspapers, who never seem to question or challenge these people at all, just publish the propaganda message that they wish to get out there, for whatever reason.

No doubt we’ll find out soon enough why Johnston wanted to re-ignite the Rangers didn’t die debate.

He is of course correct to say that Rangers didn’t die in February 2012. On 14 February 2012 they entered Administration but plenty of clubs have come out the other side and therefore lived to tell the tale. Rangers didn’t. They had a CVA rejected in June 2012 and entered liquidation in October 2012 so he is completely wrong to say that Rangers didn’t die, it just didn’t happen in February 2012.

And Mr Johnston no Celtic supporter thinks that was the date that Rangers died.

Here is today’s extract from Tangled Up in Blue from Stephen O’Donnell and we also include an earlier extract from last year and an interview with the author, plus you will find links to review of Tangled Up in Blue by David Potter on The Celtic Star and Auldheid on Scottish Football Monitor, so plenty of high quality reading for you on a Saturday morning…

An Extract from TANGLED UP IN BLUE…by Stephen O’Donnell

Rangers had died, and the media buried them: “Rangers Football Club Born 1872, Died 2012”, lamented The Herald over its entire front page; the tabloid Scottish Sun carried a picture of a coffin, tastefully adorned with a Rangers’ wreath, being lowered into a grave; the Daily Record’s page one spread featured a photo of Tom Vallance’s Gallant Pioneers, the Rangers team who had taken on Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup Final of 1877, under the headline R.I.P. RFC, with the paper declaring: “Rangers football club were plunged into liquidation yesterday by the taxman – bringing the curtain down on 140 years of history”; while the headline story in the Glasgow Evening Times focused on how short the creditors’ meeting had lasted: “140 years of Rangers ends in eight minutes”.

Charles Green’s Holding Company, S*vco Scotland Ltd, acquired the bones of Rangers for £5.5m, an amount which barely covered the administrators’ fees. Green paid £1.5m for the ‘heritable properties’, namely Murray Park and Ibrox Park, which had been valued at £119m in 2005 when the club was trying to fight off insolvency by overstating the value of its assets.

Half of the purchase price, a total of £2.75m, was for ‘player registrations’, which, given that the club would soon be liquidated and the players’ contracts would be null and void, didn’t augur well for those concerned about Green’s competence.

The new owner insisted that all contracts held by Oldco Rangers had been automatically transferred to his Newco, but several high-earning squad members, including Allan McGregor, Kyle Lafferty and the three Stevens – Whittaker, Davis and Naismith – all disagreed and declined to join Green’s new entity, citing their right to have their contracts cancelled under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment), or TUPE, code of practice.

TUPE regulations were designed to allow employees in such circumstances to join a new company on the same terms as they had previously enjoyed, but there was no obligation to do so. Refusing to accept that Green’s club was the same Rangers and instead referring repeatedly to the new entity as ‘S*vco’, Naismith insisted: “I am disappointed and angry that Rangers Football Club no longer exists in its original form…My loyalty is with Rangers, not with S**co, who I don’t know anything about”, while Whittaker concurred: “We owe no loyalty to the new club. There is no history there for us”.

By this time, a very strange thing seemed to have happened with regards to the new Ibrox entity; certain media outlets, who had confirmed the demise and death of Rangers, and all its history, when the club was consigned to liquidation, now instead started talking in mysterious terms of ‘a traumatic summer for the club’ following the events of June and July 2012, while others began referring retrospectively to ‘some initial confusion’ at the time over the universal response to HMRC’s decision to vote down Charles Green’s CVA offer.

Everyone had naturally assumed that bankruptcy and liquidation spelled the end of the club which had dominated Scottish football for one hundred and forty years, but Newco Rangers, on their website and elsewhere, had always maintained that they were still the same club.

For the most part, this was largely seen as defiance and an attempt to sell season tickets, but it now seemed that the Ibrox club really had risen from the grave, and liquidation, the terminal end which had to be avoided at all costs, was now viewed as merely something that had happened to somebody else.

It was the company, Scottish football was latterly informed, namely The Rangers Football Club plc, Company Number SC004276 and incorporated in May 1899, which had died, while the ethereal ‘club’, along with all its history and heritage, had in fact survived the insolvency process and been bought up by Green as part of his acquisition.

References to Green’s purchase of the ‘business and assets’ of Rangers were amended to the ‘business, history and assets’ and anyone who suggested otherwise, or used references to Rangers being a ‘new club’ or a ‘relaunched club’ would face public intimidation and be flooded with abusive communications.

Now, nobody in their right mind was claiming that the Ibrox supporters shouldn’t continue to follow the new entity as if it were the old Rangers, and carry the club with them in their hearts, but that was not what was happening, with everyone from Rangers fans and directors to the media who had buried the club, to SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster now claiming that the old and the new Rangers were legally one and the same thing, and woe betide anyone who should suggest otherwise.

It wasn’t long before the ‘same club’ contention became the almost universally accepted position in Scottish football, except amongst fans of other clubs, needless to say, who, despite being the only group not to have performed an Orwellian volte-face on the issue, were once again marginalised and denigrated for alleged narrow-mindedness by the more powerful mainstream narrative.

‘Rangers’ seemed to be having their cake and eating it, keeping the parts of the old club which they liked, such as its history and honours, but conveniently shedding its debts and responsibilities, including any potential sanctions as a result of the SPL inquiry into the alleged use of undisclosed payments to players at Ibrox.

Stephen O’Donnell

Stephen O’Donnell is the author of Tangled Up in Blue, the best-selling book on the demise of Rangers FC.

Extract from Tanged up in Blue, by Stephen O’Donnell which is out now on Pitch Publishing and available at selected Waterstones stores and also on Amazon – you can order your copy HERE.

The Celtic Star last year published various extracts from Tangled Up in Blue and if you missed them the first time around you can catch up below…

CLICK below to read ‘Tangled up in Blue – Stephen O’Donnell on how Rangers lost track of their Foundation Date’

Tangled up in Blue – Stephen O’Donnell on how Rangers lost track of their Foundation Date

BELOW is an exclusive edited extract from Tangled up in Blue; The Rise and Fall of Rangers FC’ by Stephen O’Donnell, which was published this week and is available on Amazon and at selected Waterstones Bookstores.

The Rangers supporters have predictably enough targeted this book and indeed the author as you probably have noticed if you are on Twitter. They have also been flooding Amazon to leave bottom ratings and abusive reviews for the new book. None of them will have read it of course. They are completely blinded to the truth.

They claim that Celtic fans are obsessed, many drop in random references to child abuse, but they importance of Stephen O’Donnell’s Tangled up in Blue is really to document the truth of what actually happened to Rangers FC in 2012 given the myths and lies that their support so readily believe.

In England we are witnessed the sad demise of Bury FC. Compare and contrast this situation with the liquidation of Rangers FC in 2012 after the failed CVA that summer. The truth is out there online – on the award winning Rangers Tax Case site for example – and was documented in 2012 by Phil Mac Giolla Bhain in his excellent Downfall book. But that remains the only proper account in print and it does not have the benefit of the perspective that O’Donnell has as a result of having had seven years for the dust to settle around the story of the fatal collapse of Rangers FC.

This first extract isn’t about the events of 2012 though, but deals with something you have probably thought was strange. When Rangers FC did go into liquidation the myth emerged that it was not the club but the holding company that ran the club that went bust.

That holding company running the club had never been mentioned, ever previously. It was obviously the best kept secret in Scottish football.

Here Stephen looks at the how Rangers actually lost track of their own foundation date, and it is a fairly remarkable tale…

Auldheid has reviewed Stephen’s new book on SFM.scot and you can read that HERE. Over to Stephen…

HOW RANGERS LOST TRACK OF THEIR OWN FOUNDATION DATE

Down the decades, Rangers fans and others associated with the club have generally paid little attention to the club’s history. The tradition of storytelling, of exploits recollected and hardships overcome, so common at other clubs, is not strong at Rangers, and the club has on the whole been poorly served by erstwhile historians.

The relatively small market for books on the subject has, at least until recently, offered readers little beyond the established pattern of inane hagiographies of former players and managers, and uncritical, self-congratulatory chronicles of the team’s achievements, usually written with the club’s approval, which reflect on little beyond Rangers’ seemingly unending association with sporting success.

Reading these books it is often difficult to get to the truth behind controversial issues and incidents involving the club, as rational analysis is sacrificed in favour of the more partisan perspective. There is also a predilection for the mundane and the jejune; when one writer, Robert McElroy, co-author of Rangers: The Complete Record was discussing his new book with a club director in the early 1990s the only significant question he was asked was: “How many photographs are going to be in it?”

This general level of disinterest in discovering and enjoying the past has meant that the early period has often been overlooked, resulting in some particularly curious anomalies.

By 1972, one hundred years had elapsed since the club’s foundation, but the centenary was allowed to pass without any acknowledgement or celebration, because the mistaken notion that the club was founded in 1873 had not been properly investigated and revealed. Victory in Barcelona in the Cup Winners’ Cup Final, achieved with a 3 – 2 win over Dynamo Moscow in May 1972, and arguably the high water mark of the club’s on-field achievements, would have been a fitting way to salute such a historical landmark, but unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Rangers lost track of the fact that they were founded in 1872, and they wrongly marked their centenary the following year, in 1973, a season in which the club had been banned from Europe due to the behaviour of their fans in the Nou Camp.

It might seem strange that a famous football club should be unable to accurately pinpoint the date of its foundation, but then Rangers are a club with a fairly dismal record of producing historically reflective books. One early example was The Story of the Rangers by sports journalist John Allan, published in 1923.

If traditional books about Rangers have offered little more than facile, obsequious eulogies, preaching to the already converted, then The Story of the Rangers is certainly no exception. Allan at the time was an influential columnist with the Daily Record, who would later go on to edit the paper, and he was a fervent supporter of the Ibrox club and its interests. He was described by manager Bill Struth as having ‘the clasp of a loyal Ranger’, an early reference, no doubt, to dodgy handshakes and secret societies.

Allan, the uncle of Willie Allison, the loathsome Ibrox PR guru of the 1960s whom Alex Ferguson described as ‘a religious bigot of the deepest dye’, was also editor of the official Rangers handbook, the annual chronicle of Rangers’ sporting record. For season 1920/1, the annual lists Rangers’ foundation date as 1872, but in the following year’s edition the date is omitted. It is also missing the season after that, but by 1924 the year of the club’s establishment is once again included, but listed as 1873.

Allan does not discuss any controversy surrounding the timing of the club’s foundation in The Story of the Rangers, and, had he been in any doubt, a minimal amount of basic journalistic research would have confirmed to him the correct date of 1872, which had been universally accepted up to that point. It seems that Allan, in his determination to publish his history of the club in time for its fiftieth jubilee, perpetrated an Orwellian rewriting of events and simply altered the year to suit his own purposes.

By 1923, Allan was simply in a rush and misused his position as editor of the club’s yearbook so that his deadline could be met. Incredibly, he altered the date just to give himself more time to write his book, and as a consequence of this historical vandalism, Rangers’ Cup Winners’ Cup victory in 1972 was allowed to pass without being properly celebrated as part of a centenary season success story.

As late as 1996, Allan’s date was still being used on club merchandise and retail outlets, and his gratuitous alteration is also the reason why visitors to Ibrox Park today can still see the year 1873 erroneously emblazoned on its listed building façade.

Stephen O’Donnell

Extract from Tanged up in Blue, by Stephen O’Donnell which is out now on Pitch Publishing and available at selected Waterstones stores and also on Amazon – you can order your copy HERE.

CLICK below to read our interview with ‘Tangled up in Blue author Stephen O’Donnell.

Interview with ‘Tangled up in Blue author Stephen O’Donnell

The Celtic Star Editor interviews ‘Tangled up in Blue author Stephen O’Donnell on the eve of Celtic’s trip to Ibrox last September and that turned out to be another Beautiful Sunday…

STEPHEN O’DONNELL’S latest book, Tangled Up in Blue is certainly causing quite a stir.

You just have to look at the hateful book ‘reviews’ that have been posted on Amazon by these people who certainly haven’t read Stephen’s book and probably haven’t turned a page or two in years.

Not since Phil Mac Giolla Bháin covered the death of Rangers 1872-2012 in Downfall has anyone put the Rangers story down on paper. And with so much of the facts surrounding the decline, fall and death of Rangers in 2012 being ‘altered’ it is perhaps the appropriate time for a well written account to record the events leading up to and in 2012 and beyond for the RECORD.

Last year both Bury and Bolton football clubs reached the brink of financial collapse yet the Scottish media is left with the difficulties caused by their euphemistic reporting of the Rangers collapse. Clubs don’t die at Ibrox, just the holding company that operated the club. Liquidation doesn’t mean that the history is lost at Ibrox but inconveniently it does at Bury.

Then there’s the UEFA charges that have been brought against the current Ibrox club for their RACIST and sectarian singing. Yet you listen to the BBC reports and the RACIST word is not used. Surely if the charges clearly state RACIST and sectarian then the BBC should report BOTH words and not take a decision to delete the RACIST for whatever reason?

Who made such a decision and why?

Tomorrow Celtic go to Ibrox. If you look at the papers today you will see that there have been running battles in the streets of Govan last night as the sectarian tensions rise in the city.

Racist and sectarian chants were absent from Ibrox on Thursday night because UEFA took action and emptied 3000 seats. They also imposed a second 3000 seat closure for their next Europa League match and if there are further charges they face a complete ground closure for a Europa League match which would cost the Rangers around £1million in revenue.

But it is the Scottish football authorities in charge tomorrow and the media, who got very upset a fortnight ago about some remarks made by Tom Boyd on the subscription only Celtic TV broadcasting via the internet to Celtic Supporters outwit Britain and Ireland, will have their usual deaf ears regarding the songs that UEFA regard as RACIST and sectarian.

So tensions are high. The game tomorrow will give both sides, who have had three wins each in the Premiership to date, the chance to go three points clear. The fans will be in the spotlight, how the Scottish football authorities and the Scottish media reacts will be discussed and debated. There could possibly not have been a better time to publish Tanged Up in Blue.

The Celtic Star caught up with author Stephen O’Donnell earlier the week to talk about his new book and everything surrounding it…here’s what happened.

Why did you write Tangled Up in Blue?

I felt it was a book that was crying out to be written. Everyone knows the vague outline of two aspects of Rangers history, namely that they had an unwritten ban on Catholics at the club, which was operated for decades and was a feature of the famous rivalry with Celtic, and also that the club recently suffered a catastrophic financial collapse which ultimately led to liquidation.

I thought I’d put the bones on both stories and try to bring it to as wide an audience as possible.

Too often in Glasgow it’s almost as if you can’t see the woods from the trees because of the intensity of the rivalry. I thought I’d try and get above that and write a balanced and objective account, although where I feel the club deserves criticism, over its exclusionary employment practices for example, I don’t shirk from giving it.

You must have been expecting a backlash from the Rangers fans. How has that been?

Inevitably, there will be a backlash from an element of the Rangers support, simply because they don’t take too kindly to criticism of the club, even when it’s justified, and it’s a book about Rangers not specifically aimed at Rangers fans.

It’s a universal story which in the end cannot avoid criticising the subject being examined. There will be people who don’t like that idea and yes it has started already. Ever since April when the publication of the book was announced Follow Follow have had a couple of threads on me, with people posting my picture and slaughtering the book without obviously having ever read it.

I had a photo on my twitter timeline of me in the Celtic shop standing next to copies of my novel Paradise Road which was being stocked there. That was posted on the thread and was more than enough to set a few people off.

Did your own opinions change during your research for the book?

Not really. I lived in Scotland through most of the David Murray years so I’d already followed quite closely what was happening. Murray was the prime culprit because he mismanaged the club’s finances. Even after the warning of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, when he declared that Scottish football was basically bankrupt and stepped down from the chairmanship, he still allowed Walter Smith to return to the club a few years later and run up debts of £30m.

Then the credit crunch hit and delivered a potentially fatal blow. In the end remember it wasn’t the EBT bill which killed the club, but the deliberate policy of living beyond their means. Murray managed to get out and hand over the club to Craig Whyte. Whyte immediately expressed his intention to bring the spending and debts under control, but he was hopelessly out of his element and in the end he was the one they blamed it on.

How does Celtic come out of all this?

Celtic took the decision, back in the final decade of the nineteenth century, that the club would be open to all, explicitly rejecting the ‘Catholics only’ model which had been employed by Hibs in the early years.

They were congratulated on this decision by the Irish owned newspaper the Glasgow Observer at the time, but on the whole there were no fashionably modern notions about political correctness or diverse and pluralist societies back in the day, so it was a bold step by Celtic at the time, but the correct one.

At other times, during the pre-Stein era, it seems clear that Celtic were a club who had lost their sense of direction, playing the role of happy-go-lucky losers in contrast to the stern disciplinarians across the city.

In more recent years, it seems that Celtic have outgrown the ‘Old Firm’ tag, which served both clubs well in the past, but now it seems somehow demeaning that a club like Celtic should be locked in this eternal rivalry with a team from across the city when in fact there is the whole football world out there that Celtic can compare themselves with and set the bar for success and failure against.

Tangled Up in Blue goes back much further that the financial collapse of 2012. When does the story start and why did you go back to the very beginning?

The book goes back to the foundation of Rangers in 1872 by a group of teenagers from Argyll, and explores the largely unknown story, at least until recent years, of the club’s early history. This gives the proper context for what happened subsequently, because Rangers were a mismanaged and wayward club even before Celtic appeared on the scene. The book then concentrates on the two major issues which dogged the club up until 2012, namely religious bigotry and financial malpractice, and tells the full story of both of these aspects of the club’s history.

Were ‘Rangers’ ultimately too big to be allowed to fail?

I think so yes. The two English businessmen who were in the most senior positions in Scottish football in 2012 were literally wetting themselves about the prospect of losing the Ibrox cash cow.

Phrases like Armageddon and social unrest were being used at the time, but in the end those scare tactics failed to get past the fans of the other SPL clubs, who gave clear instructions to their clubs about which way to vote on the Newco in the SPL debate. Similarly, the chairmen of the SFL clubs held their nerve when confronted by Regan and Doncaster’s coercions and simply said no, this is wrong.

In the end when the new club was obliged to enter Scottish football’s fourth tier, few were surprised that the world still continued to spin, with clubs like St Mirren, St Johnstone, Hibs, Inverness, Aberdeen all winning major trophies.

The book ends with the fallout from 2012 concluding with the Supreme Court verdict, yet Lord Nimmo Smith had already reported based on the assumption that the EBT scheme was lawful and this has never been challenged in a court. The wrong decision therefore seem to stand. Why has this been allowed to happen?

The LNS inquiry is a complete anomaly. On the face of it, it reads like a fairly severe rebuke to the activities of Oldco, but in the end it amounted to little more than a slap on the wrists for over a decade’s worth of cheating.

It’s astonishing that Rangers essentially got away with what they did. No wonder Charles Green was elated when he heard the verdict and it provided their fans with the whole ‘obsession’ line of argument, expecting the rest of Scottish football to effectively move in.

The problem with LNS is that the enquiry’s remit was limited. It covered only the EBT years and excluded the earlier implementation of the DOS scheme, which Rangers had already admitted liability for. This meant that the focus of the inquiry was on a tax avoidance scheme which had not yet been established in court as being unlawful.

This had profound implications because the gist of this was, the scheme was not illegal, other teams could have used it if they wished. The length of time before the supreme court verdict arrived, condemning the EBT scheme, allowed the SFA to simply wash their hands of the issue and come up with the whole ‘rake over the coals’ argument.

To a very large extent, Rangers effectively got away with what they did, and it’s only my opinion but I don’t think any other club in Scotland would have been allowed to do that.

Are there any examples of new information you have uncovered and included in Tangled Up in Blue?

I came across quite a few shocks and surprises when researching the book that I had previously only vaguely been aware of or had never heard of before. For example, in regard to the close connection between Rangers and the Belfast-based shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff. Many people know about the historic relationship between the two organisations, but not the specifics.

It was H&W who loaned Rangers £90,000 in 1912 as the club were still struggling with the impact and fallout of the first Ibrox disaster in 1902. It seems certain that as a condition of the loan, Rangers agreed to go down the no-Catholics route, much like H&W themselves.

1912 was also the year that John Ure Primrose assumed the chairmanship of Rangers, a man who was so opposed to Irish Home Rule that he split with the Liberal Party in the 1880s and had, on occasion, shared a platform with Edward Carson, the founder of the UVF to express his opposition to the policy.

I also uncovered details of the 1971 Ibrox disaster, which have been around for some time but seem to have been suppressed, and from speaking to people who were involved in the Maurice Johnston to Rangers transfer saga there’s new information on that in the book which has never before been made public.

There are numerous other examples, including some more light-hearted revelations, such as Willie Waddell telling his captain John Greig to take care of Claudio Sala, Torino’s new 19 year old wonder boy in the Cup Winners Cup quarter-final in 1972. In fact Sala was 24 and had been around for years, but it worked and Greig scared the life out of Sala in Turin to such an extent that he never even played in the second leg at Ibrox.

To this day, I assume, Greig still believes that Sala was a soft target, a vulnerable youngster, because that’s how he describes him in his autobiography.

Inevitably Tangled Up in Blue will draw comparisons with Downfall. How do the two books compare?

Downfall is a good book and I used it as part of my research for the final chapters of Tangled Up in Blue. I also took a trip to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to see Phil’s initial reporting of the EBT revelations in the News of the World, a story which I cover in the book.

But really there are not many similarities, if any, between Tangled and Downfall. Phil’s an investigative reporter and his book is a basically a collection of his work as a blogger, with some added notes at the beginning of each chapter. I try to be more of a storyteller, stripping things back all the way to 1872 to see how Rangers’ problems and issues developed over time.

Stylistically, and even in terms of content, the two books are totally different, but hopefully both have their own place and value.

Thanks Stephen, all the best for the book.

Thank you for the support that The Celtic Star has given me, it means a lot.

Tangled Up in Blue is available now on Amazon – order HERE -and at selected Waterstones stores. Please feel free to add a review.

David Potter reviewed Tangled Up in Blue on The Celtic Star earlier this week and you can read that HERE.

And just for a reminder, here is the Statement from Celtic Supporters that was published in the Sunday Herald the week before Celtic’s first ever meeting with the new Rangers club…