Search: 'Jim McLean'

Gordon Strachan has always been popular with the English press but all is rather less cordial in Scotland, as Neil Forsyth reports

When Celtic’s talented midfielder Aiden McGeady turned on ­Gordon Strachan after a draw with Hearts in December, it is unlikely that his manager would have seen much immediate benefit in the one-man mutiny. McGeady reportedly reacted to Strachan’s criticism with a tirade that shocked the rest of the team, and shocked one enough for the story to be quickly leaked to the press. 

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Ian Campbell reviews the season in which Rangers broke Celtic hearts

The long-term significance
Rangers ended Celtic’s run of nine successive league titles, which had equalled a European record set a decade earlier by the Bulgarian army club CDNA (later CSKA) Sofia. Rangers went on to match this themselves between 1989 and 1997; Skonto Riga of Latvia are the current holders of the record, with 14 championships in a row up to 2005. This was the final season of an 18-team top level in Scotland. Concern about the gap in playing standards between the leading few clubs and the rest led to the creation of the Scottish Premier Division in 1975‑76, with ten teams playing each other four times a season. In 1998 this became the Scottish Premier League, whose current format involves 12 clubs playing a total of 38 matches.

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The title race was over by Christmas, but in the end it wasn't that bad a season in League Two, writes Ron Hamilton

Over recent seasons it has become an increasingly popular pastime for League Two aficionados to point and sneer at the lopsided and avaricious Premier League, scoffing at the hype and hoopla in comparison to the somewhat earthier charms of football’s basement division. Yet while much of this scorn is predicated on the assumption that the lower leagues represent the last vestiges of football’s soul, the 2007-08 season has seen the fourth division’s occupation of the moral high ground somewhat ­undermined.

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Tribute to a man who has given Dundee United his all, by Neil Forsyth

In a season that has already seen the hopeless tragedy of Motherwell captain Phil O’Donnell’s death, Scottish football has another event approaching that will be markedly tinged with sadness. When Dundee United face Rangers in the CIS League Cup final at Hampden on Sunday March 16, they will do so with a chairman in Eddie Thompson who is openly suffering from the latter stages of terminal cancer. Football looks desperately flimsy against such issues, yet it is in his dedication to United that Thompson has spoken of finding salvation in recent months.

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The Andy McLaren Story
by Andy McLaren with Mark Guidi
Mainstream, £9.99
Reviewed by Neil Forsyth
From WSC 252 February 2008 

Buy this book

A football autobiography that opens with the subject considering suicide then loops back to sexual abuse in childhood is going to be a more demanding read than the standard one you would expect from the genre. For Scottish player Andy McLaren, this book reflects an often calamitous past. As well as the tragic abuse, there is a staggering line of self-destructiveness through a career that should have produced more than a Scottish Cup winner’s medal.

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