Craig Whyte and the modern face of boardroom ‘support’

Ibrox, home of Rangers Football Club. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are people far more qualified than me to explain the mess in which Glasgow Rangers’ finances currently find themselves. One aspect of the fall-out from the Scottish FA’s damning verdict on the club last week, however, is worthy of note.

It concerns the man many hold out as the villain of the piece, Rangers’ owner and “keen supporter” Craig Whyte, who was banned for life from Scottish football and hit with four fines totalling £200,000, for bringing the game into disrepute and failing to follow Association orders.

Now even if one were to put the most positive spin on Whyte’s tenure at Ibrox and concede that he inherited a fiscal time bomb not of his making and simply found it too complex to defuse, I believe Rangers’ fans would still be entitled to expect certain things of him. This is a man, after all, who said when completing his purchase last year:

 “Rangers is a great club with a great future. It has the best supporters in the world and I will do everything possible to protect and enhance the club’s standing going forward…The guiding principle from the outset has been to get the right deal for Rangers.”

So a degree of solemn reflection in light of the Scottish FA’s decision might be expected, surely? An appreciation that cheap point-scoring was best left to another time, out of sensitivity to fans who feared their world was falling apart.

And also a little humility, perhaps, given how guilt wells up in even the most blameless of decent men when calamity occurs on their watch.

What Rangers’ fans got, however, was this:

“Moments after the SFA announced the panel’s findings late last night, Whyte told Press Association Sport: “Tell me how it is going to affect me? I couldn’t care less.

“It makes no difference to my life whatsoever – and good luck collecting the money. It’s a joke.” – RTE Sport

Say this for Craig Whyte: if he does nothing else for the game, the dismissive, toe-curling callousness of that line has surely revealed to all but the most hopeless dullard the true nature of the new money that now controls too many of our professional football clubs.

These are not “keen supporters” the way you and I understand the term. Their enthusiasm, I suspect, tends to last only until an accountant’s spreadsheet suggests that their support might be more keenly applied elsewhere.

Glasgow Rangers might consider themselves well shot of Craig Whyte. Sadly for football in general, I fear there are plenty more where he came from, all of them, I’m sure, adamant that their guiding principle is to get the right deal for “the best supporters in the world”.

Hockey hits also happen in the seats

The Stanley Cup is awarded to the NHL champion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don’t close the lid on that ‘special relationship’ coffin just yet. It seems there is still stuff that unites John Bull and Uncle Sam after all.

The publication of the kind of NHL standings that the league office would probably rather keep mum about, ranks all 30 NHL hockey arenas in the order of their beer prices.

At current conversion rates (all prices are apparently in $US) that makes top whack £6.16 a beer and bargain basement £3.87. Note that a UK pint is equal to around 19.2 US ounces.

From this not so much mouth-watering as eye-watering display of profiteering pricing strategies, it would appear that English Premier League football fans can take heart.

Their North American cousins are being every bit as royally screwed as they are.

Cheers!

Forget talking shops – this fan talks only language football clubs hear

Excuse the cynic in me but there’s a reason I roll my eyes whenever football fans in the UK talk about ‘having a dialogue’ with their club or with the game’s administrators whenever there are rumblings of discontent. I’ve watched the way businessmen operate for so long that I can’t hear the term ‘fan forum’ without the phrase ‘peeing in the wind’ passing through my mind.

You really want to make a difference in the game you love? Then you have to take the one step of which too many fans seem scared.

You have to stay away.

Yes, I know it’s your club and you’re proud of that loyalty that goes above and beyond what its proprietors often deserve but you need to know that those people dance to one tune only. The bottom line.

Across the Atlantic, this man gets it. It won’t be the thinly-veiled scorn of his reply to a season ticket demand that registers with his beloved Cleveland Browns, magnificent though that is, it will be the sting in the tail. Withholding money.

Ten thousand other fans do likewise and suddenly it’s the Browns who’ll be wanting ‘a dialogue’ and at the earliest possible opportunity.

Thanks to Jay Flemma for the tip-off. Now watch and learn, people. Or nothing ever changes…

Give me a break from bank holiday moaners

Cartoon of George C. Scott as 'Scrooge' (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So they’re back again, the latter-day Puritans whose warped work ethic maintains that unless you’re on the verge of stroke or nervous breakdown, you’re not working hard enough.

Like the harridan who keeps her eyes shut during lovemaking because she can’t bear watching men enjoy themselves, nothing exercises these curmudgeons of commerce like the fact that at least four times a year, the workforce is spared that Monday morning feeling.

Just as football commentators can’t seem to let a major final pass these days without informing us how much money it’s worth to the winner, so Cromwell’s cohorts can’t just sit back and enjoy a bank holiday with the rest of us but instead must make clear exactly how many billions of pounds in lost labour are going down the pan with each tick of the clock.

Newsflash for them and Clive Tyldesley alike: we don’t give a toss.

Some of us happen to measure life in more than just pounds and pence. Some of us know exactly what William Henry Davies was getting at when he wrote, What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare? Some of us, what’s more, have the wit and imagination to know exactly how to spend those precious Mondays and wedging our head up our rear ends to bewail a dent in the GDP isn’t it.

What do you want for this po-faced breast-beating exactly? A medal?

And spare me the smokescreen about how scrapping Bank Holidays gives workers the freedom to use the days elsewhere in the year, as additional annual leave. Some of us, to our shame and irritation, never enjoy annual leave quite as much as we do a bank holiday, for there is no guilt attached to the latter. Everyone is off on a bank holiday, whereas annual leave is our day and no-one else’s and deep in our subconscious, a little voice does its damnedest to make us feel bad about it.

Who saddled us with that irrational guilt complex? The same kind of neurotic bosses who like to rain on everyone’s parade whenever a long weekend comes along.

We need a T-shirt for these executive Scrooges. Something with ‘Hello Bank Holiday, goodbye £19bn’ on the chest. Make it bright red; loud and unmissable, so that whenever the wearer enters a bar, the rest of us can leave. Before they ruin that experience too.

Related articles

• Does the UK have too many bank holidays? (itv.com)

Centralisation’s curse means craic appearing in Irish society

“Cork licensee Con Dennehy believes publicans and hackney drivers should work together to provide discount fares for elderly customers so they don’t live in rural isolation.”

Ha! I bet he does, was my immediate reaction to this report in the Irish Examiner. Nothing self-serving in that, I’m sure.

Reading the rest of the report, however, swiftly removed the smile from my face. Much as it may often look to enjoy a certain detachment from the destructive frenzy of modern living, Ireland, it seems, is feeling the social pinch in those very areas that grace so many tourist brochures.

‘Gardaí have noticed in the past few years that the age profiles of those committing suicide in some rural areas has increased…

…Mr Dennehy said that normal places of interaction for people, especially those living on their own, were disappearing rapidly in rural Ireland.

“It’s not just pubs which are closing, but post offices, creameries, garda stations etc. Even the postman is not now calling to some houses in rural areas and is instead putting letters in boxes down lanes,” [he ] said.

However neat it may look on the spreadsheets of those who decide such things, this is the flipside of the streamline and centralisation fetish that has long dominated the management of public and private sector concerns alike, certainly on my side of the Irish Sea. It sucks life out of areas that ultimately cannot live on nice views and birdsong alone. More and more, it also begs the question – if centralisation is so right, so imperative, how come we managed without it for so long?

Our ancestors weren’t all commercial dunderheads, I’m sure. How come there was a time when villages had their post offices and hospitals and small towns their railway stations and the British Isles not only survived on such arrangements but thrived on them?

Getting to the heart of it, is centralisation something commerce does to survive, or merely something it does to make big profits bigger?

I’m neither an historian nor an economist, so I would genuinely like to know. As might those among Ireland’s elderly for whom a place to die for seems in danger of becoming precisely that.

The scariest words a drinker will hear – “Brewed in the UK”

The essence of Luton

Welcome to Brahma; latest in a long line of serial offenders brought to you by the big-league brewing industry.

It is, the bottle informs me, Brazilian Beer since 1888 and brewed “to the authentic Brazilian recipe”.

Exotic as it sounds, it is also cursed by the most damning phrase any drinker will ever hear – “Brewed in the UK”. I knew its father, you know: “Brewed under licence”.

We’ve been here for 30 years now and as one who has tasted the real thing where the likes of Castlemaine, Molson and Budweiser are concerned and knows only too well how “Brewed in the UK” usually translates as “nothing like the original”, I call hogwash on that “authentic Brazilian recipe” claim.

From the very first sip, I detect no hint of Copacabana or samba. I detect what I always do in a bottle bearing the “Brewed in the UK” curse: bland, unremarkable beer that tastes just like all the other beers that result whenever big brewers decide that they can find the taste of Brazil, America or Canada by going no further than Burton on Trent or Luton.

Whatever the difference may be between this ludicrous fiction and those far eastern hawkers who flog fake Rolex, I’m struggling to spot it.

…………………………………………………..

Brazil’s Brahma beer goes global - in the company’s defence, it does at least come right out with it in this masterpiece of corporate-speak. I considered satirising the quotes from Devin Kelly, Inbev’s vice-president for global brands, but realised I couldn’t possibly improve on the original.

[Pic courtesy of timkas23]

Office politics a mere trifle alongside office anarchy

Memo from on high in the workplace this afternoon:

“I have just witnessed the most appalling sight in the disabled toilets, so much so, that this will now be locked and only used by disabled staff.  This is the second time poor ***** has had to clean this up and it’s simply not fair to her to have to do this!  The toilet is now out of order, due to the flush handle having been broken as well.“

Not for the first time, I gaze around our open-plan office and inwardly shudder at what dark forces froth away beneath the flimsy veneer of civilisation.

No guns or gore, yet Inside Job one of the all-time great horror movies

Image via Wikipedia

In a way, I’m delighted that Inside Job is now available free of charge, for all to see.

And in another way, I’m not.

Because I defy even the most benign among you to reach the end of this documentary feature film analysis of the crash of 2008 without wishing you had a gun.

On the face of it, 108 minutes of talking heads shouldn’t make for an Oscar winner. The drama, however, emanates not from the characters but from their damning words, as the causes and causers of Wall Street’s latest meltdown are nailed emphatically to the wall, in an expose of greed and hubris that will take you beyond anger.

That not one executive nor company  has yet been brought to justice for their part in this fiasco raises serious questions about just how much daylight exists between law enforcement and Government in America and leaves we plebs having to savour the film’s minor triumphs of retribution:

1. Mouse-like Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard’s  laughable attempt to go all John Wayne on the interviewer (“Give it your best shot!!!” – at 1:31:55) as he begins to perceive the corner into which he’s being painted. Some men can carry off the all-guns-blazing approach: this isn’t one of them.

2. John Campbell, Chairman of Harvard’s Economics Dept (1:30:05 and 1:32:30) doing the best hapless Brit routine since Bertie Wooster. If I thought this was the sum total of my 15 minutes of fame, I might never leave the house again.

And at the end of what I thought might be a film that merely confirmed what we already suspected, there is a certain sting-in-the-tail. If America’s business and economics academics are as hand-in-hand with these Wall Street geniuses as Inside Job suggests, what’s to say we won’t be back here again in 10 years’ time, when the next batch of college graduates hit the Street?

It’s a sign of just how relentlessly infuriating this film is that its only note of optimism comes if you’re a woman of a certain age, as French finance minister Christine Lagarde ably demonstrates that grey hair need be no bar whatsoever to arousing a certain je ne sais quoi in the opposite sex. If Combe Inc is the next American corporate casualty, it may be the first in a while for which bankers can’t be held responsible.

Jensen Button will be telling us he likes Pot Noodle next

You’re a Formula One World Champion. Arguably the most handsome member of that select group that these islands have ever produced.

You’re articulate, charming, intelligent and loaded.

You could be spotted in any of the world’s most glamorous fleshpots, extolling the aesthetic joys of Dior, Chanel, Boss or Lauren and we would lap up every word.

So just one question, then.

What the hell, Jensen Button, is with the Head & Shoulders gig?

To put this in perspective, even I have used Head & Shoulders. It’s that common-as-muck. Where’s the magic, the glamour, or indeed, a decent agent when you need one?

I’m reminded of the statistical principle of ‘reverting to the mean’, whereby something that swings outside expected boundaries usually settles back at the mean over time.

With the British, it seems, no matter what chance we give ourselves to be something better, we somehow keep coming back to being just that little bit naff.

World Cup – trickledown economics message isn’t trickling down…

You may remember the trickledown theory beloved of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher.

Just let the rich get richer, they assured us, and the affluence will trickle down to everyone on their payroll.

On which basis, you’d suppose stewards at one of South Africa’s World Cup venues would be in seventh heaven right now, given the untold millions FIFA is likely to garner in profits from the latest quadrennial milking of its principal cash cow.

Not so, it would appear.

I don’t know about you but I’m absolutely stunned.