biggertam
Winning means Everything
Stringer Bell said:Can Hearts win the league
possible...... but unlikely i still see it being celtic or rangers. but being neutral for a sec then it would be nice to see them win it just for a change.
possible...... but unlikely i still see it being celtic or rangers. but being neutral for a sec then it would be nice to see them win it just for a change.
Mack
Champions League
Should Lennon's ban be longer considering that Bowman guy got 17 game ban for a similar incedent in 2001?
Or should it be shorter considering it was far less worse than the Lithuanian Hearts player's actions last season and he got the same punishment? Or should Dougal (the ref) explain to everyone why he refused to attend the hearing without his lawyer, remembering that this is the referee who was found guilty of a verbal misconduct charge for swearing at Christian Nerlinger as he sent him off a few years ago?
There's more to this than meets the eye.
That said, the way the press up here have been, and are still, going on about it, you'd think Neil Lennon drank blood and ate babies. 'Agenda' isn't the word! :roll:
There's more to this than meets the eye.
That said, the way the press up here have been, and are still, going on about it, you'd think Neil Lennon drank blood and ate babies. 'Agenda' isn't the word! :roll:
Who's the Bowman guy? :-k
CD - Mikowhatever, got banned for 5 games, not 3 and it was originally 8 games until an appeal shortened it. Anyway as you said his was far worse, he ran and barged straight into the linesman, Lennon never actually got near the ref, he went over to him and the linesman got in between and ushered him away and Lennon obviously came into contact with the linesman but that's because he came between him and the ref.
FD
CD - Mikowhatever, got banned for 5 games, not 3 and it was originally 8 games until an appeal shortened it. Anyway as you said his was far worse, he ran and barged straight into the linesman, Lennon never actually got near the ref, he went over to him and the linesman got in between and ushered him away and Lennon obviously came into contact with the linesman but that's because he came between him and the ref.
FD
The ban was 8 games because he'd been sent off (twice I think), the red cards are a totally seperate issue to the actual misconduct which happened afterwards. I know he got 5 then got it reduced to 3, but they didn't need to reduce it to 3 they could have easily have said "naw, it's 5 ya fucken ride", so they made that choice no one else. Lennon just got the same ban. If they'd given him 5 Celtic would have appealed on the grounds Mikoshuggie got his reduced, probably thought what's the point. Also, I heard Celtic knew beforehand that he'd get a 3-game ban, dunno how, but there is definitely something strange about this whole scenario. There are rumours Dougal said something to Lennon before showing the card, which is why he went totally apeshit. Look at the smirk on Dougal's face too.
For the record, I have seen referees 'push' players with more force than Lennon did that day. :roll:
It's an absolute disgrace the way the media up here are behaving, it's done and dusted and they continue to keep on at it. Not surprising considering Lenny successfully sued certain papers over the 'Thugs And Thieves' article a year or two back, but still disgraceful.
For the record, I have seen referees 'push' players with more force than Lennon did that day. :roll:
It's an absolute disgrace the way the media up here are behaving, it's done and dusted and they continue to keep on at it. Not surprising considering Lenny successfully sued certain papers over the 'Thugs And Thieves' article a year or two back, but still disgraceful.
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Good article on the situation:
Scotland
September 22, 2005
Imagine there's no fairness: for Neil Lennon, it's easy if you try
By Phil Gordon
CONTEMPT: the feeling that a person, or thing, is worthless or beneath consideration
(Oxford English Dictionary)
LOOK UP next year’s edition and you may well see a mugshot of Neil Lennon next to “Contempt”. Or perhaps Lennon will simply be underneath “Kangaroo court”. That is what the Celtic captain has been exposed to over the past few weeks, following his controversial confrontation with Stuart Dougal, the referee, after the the Old Firm match at Ibrox on August 20.
On Tuesday, both men had their day in court — or Scottish football’s version of it. The SFA disciplinary committee at Hampden Park reviewed the incident in which Lennon was shown a straight red card as he left the pitch after the 3-1 defeat by Rangers. It handed out a three-match suspension. That has not been enough for a media lynch mob that had been talking, wildly, in terms of an 11-game ban, or perhaps a cell on Devil’s Island next to Dustin Hoffman.
For anyone who studies these things, it fitted perfectly. It was a punishment to fit the crime. “Misconduct of a significantly serious nature” was the SFA’s verdict. That is swearing at the referee, to you and me. The only problem has been that many newspapers have either never looked again at the incident on television, or simply chosen to ignore the nagging feeling that it was not as bad as it had been hyped up to be, because it got in the way of a good — or in this case, bad — story and steamy headlines.
The most alarming thing to emerge from the Lennon- Dougal affair was the nature of the coverage. If this had been in any other area of the newspapers, other than the sports pages, a lot of it would have been thrown out by the lawyers in case it got the paper into deep trouble.
Perhaps I am just being old-fashioned, or it is the product of too many days spent watching real-life court cases, but the one thing drummed into me by the law professor on the journalism course at City University was beware of contempt of court. In news, business and especially court reporting, you have to get the facts 100 per cent accurate — 98 per cent is not good enough — or else you and your newspaper could find yourself in front of a judge.
Football reporting? Oh, just use your artistic licence. The most commonly used descriptive mistake about Lennon’s confrontation was that he “manhandled” the referee and linesman. Now, according to the Oxford dictionary, “manhandle” is to “move a (heavy) object with great effort or to handle roughly by dragging or pushing”. Anyone who looked at the incident again could see that such a description did not fit what happened at Ibrox. Lennon, in football parlance, may have “lost the plot” but in strict legal terms he and Dougal came shoulder-to-shoulder and there is slight contact with the linesman, James Bee.
The offence was entirely verbal. Dougal’s match report confirms this. The red card was issued because the Celtic captain called him “a f****** disgrace” and “a f****** joke”.
It is misconduct, pure and simple. It was not as serious as the barging of linesman, Andy Davis, last season by Saulius Mikoliunas at Tynecastle. The Heart of Midlothian player did not, as has been commonly reported since Lennon’s incident, suffer an eight-game ban: he received three matches as an instant punishment for his two red cards and his five-match penalty for misconduct was brought down to three on appeal. Not by “the SFA cowards”, as some newspapers have branded the Lennon jury, but by Lord MacLean, an esteemed Law Lord.
Lennon’s three match suspension is a reflection of his disciplinary record since coming to the Premierleague five years ago. Have a guess how many red cards this menace to society has to his name? One. That’s right, his Ibrox crime was his first. Set against men in his line of work, ball-winning midfield players, Lennon would not even get first use of the soap in Alcatraz: Patrick Vieira registered eight at Arsenal, Roy Keane seven at Manchester United.
Anyway, that’s the facts out of the way. Enough of that boring stuff. How come the lynch mob managed to screw it up and watch Lennon get off almost Scot-free? Beats me. They certainly tried hard enough.
In the intervening time since Lennon lost his temper that day at Ibrox and Tuesday’s hearing, this was a man who, if he read the papers — which he does not — would have noted a string of articles that bordered on the litigious. A “backstreet thug” was one gem. It moved out of the realms of reporting and comment on a match, and its aftermath, into open warfare on one man.
Neil Lennon has been demonised by the press. They don’t like him. That is fair enough if it is an individual point of view, but when it is carried into print simply to pursue a campaign, it has unedifying overtones. This opinion, by the way, will be in a minority of one, or almost.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask the former Rangers player who defended Lennon on Tuesday at the SFA. Fraser Wishart, the secretary of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Union, was not pleading for Lennon because it is his job, he did so because he believes it is right.
Now Wishart finds himself being portrayed in the media as some sort of Uncle Tom or, worse, a Lennon-lover. Not even OJ Simpson’s lawyer had the sort of questionmarks placed against his name that Wishart has.
“One of the things we argued was that you had to take Neil Lennon out of the equation because he is some kind of demonised figure,” Wishart told reporters outside Hampden as he explained his defence strategy. “They (the SFA) also had to forget it was a Rangers-Celtic game and look upon it as an isolated incident.
“One of the interesting facts is that Neil Lennon has never been sent off in the Premierleague and never been suspended. He has never been over the points threshold and that is a remarkable fact for someone who plays his position and the number of games he has played for Celtic. I think that record was taken into consideration and I think three games (ban) is reasonable.”
Hold on, there. We can’t have reasonable creeping into this, can we? Wishart underlined the whole unseemly thirst for blood when he added the name of Ian Wright, who was was banned for two games for pushing Willie Young, the referee, at Kilmarnock. “There have been similar cases over the last five years,” Wishart said, “but the players were not punished to the level that there seemed to be such a clamour for in the case of Neil Lennon.”
Bizarrely, Stuart Dougal turned up at Hampden Park with his own lawyer, for what was an in-house SFA disciplinary meeting. The irony of Dougal and Wishart being on opposite sides is that the players’ union man actually jumped to the defence of the referee in 2004, when the SFA fined Dougal £200 for using the same industrial language as Lennon — television viewers reported the referee for telling Christian Nerlinger of Rangers to “f*** off”. You would have thought this might be one man who would have cut Lennon some slack on a day in which his team had been well and truly beaten by Rangers.
Still, Dougal applied the letter of the law and Lennon was correctly punished for it. The newspapers that have ganged together to pursue Lennon could not claim to be following the letter of the law. They have treated Lennon with contempt in its most literal and legal sense. There is an agenda at work. Selling more newspapers might be one justification, but there appears to be darker motivation.
Newspapers may say that they merely reflect public opinion, but they also try to manipulate it. Unlike someone who has had a bad game, the newspapers’ mistakes are not usually as visibly and publicly denounced, though one former editor now has reason to rue his choice of headline, “Thugs and Thieves”, after unsubstantiated reports about a Celtic team night out in Newcastle turned out be nothing more than allegations.
Dougal and his referee colleagues were yesterday called the most vilified characters in Scottish football, but the truth, however unpalatable, is that that status is reserved for Lennon. There were no banners at Ibrox that day proclaiming Dougal to be a bigot; there was for Lennon. The referee has not been attacked in the street, or in his car; Lennon has. Death threats scrawled on the pavement outside the house? That will be Lennon again.
Helping to create such a public enemy No 1 is irresponsible when merely kept to the confines of a football ground, but when being demonised changes the way you walk down the street, it is time to think again.
Scotland
September 22, 2005
Imagine there's no fairness: for Neil Lennon, it's easy if you try
By Phil Gordon
CONTEMPT: the feeling that a person, or thing, is worthless or beneath consideration
(Oxford English Dictionary)
LOOK UP next year’s edition and you may well see a mugshot of Neil Lennon next to “Contempt”. Or perhaps Lennon will simply be underneath “Kangaroo court”. That is what the Celtic captain has been exposed to over the past few weeks, following his controversial confrontation with Stuart Dougal, the referee, after the the Old Firm match at Ibrox on August 20.
On Tuesday, both men had their day in court — or Scottish football’s version of it. The SFA disciplinary committee at Hampden Park reviewed the incident in which Lennon was shown a straight red card as he left the pitch after the 3-1 defeat by Rangers. It handed out a three-match suspension. That has not been enough for a media lynch mob that had been talking, wildly, in terms of an 11-game ban, or perhaps a cell on Devil’s Island next to Dustin Hoffman.
For anyone who studies these things, it fitted perfectly. It was a punishment to fit the crime. “Misconduct of a significantly serious nature” was the SFA’s verdict. That is swearing at the referee, to you and me. The only problem has been that many newspapers have either never looked again at the incident on television, or simply chosen to ignore the nagging feeling that it was not as bad as it had been hyped up to be, because it got in the way of a good — or in this case, bad — story and steamy headlines.
The most alarming thing to emerge from the Lennon- Dougal affair was the nature of the coverage. If this had been in any other area of the newspapers, other than the sports pages, a lot of it would have been thrown out by the lawyers in case it got the paper into deep trouble.
Perhaps I am just being old-fashioned, or it is the product of too many days spent watching real-life court cases, but the one thing drummed into me by the law professor on the journalism course at City University was beware of contempt of court. In news, business and especially court reporting, you have to get the facts 100 per cent accurate — 98 per cent is not good enough — or else you and your newspaper could find yourself in front of a judge.
Football reporting? Oh, just use your artistic licence. The most commonly used descriptive mistake about Lennon’s confrontation was that he “manhandled” the referee and linesman. Now, according to the Oxford dictionary, “manhandle” is to “move a (heavy) object with great effort or to handle roughly by dragging or pushing”. Anyone who looked at the incident again could see that such a description did not fit what happened at Ibrox. Lennon, in football parlance, may have “lost the plot” but in strict legal terms he and Dougal came shoulder-to-shoulder and there is slight contact with the linesman, James Bee.
The offence was entirely verbal. Dougal’s match report confirms this. The red card was issued because the Celtic captain called him “a f****** disgrace” and “a f****** joke”.
It is misconduct, pure and simple. It was not as serious as the barging of linesman, Andy Davis, last season by Saulius Mikoliunas at Tynecastle. The Heart of Midlothian player did not, as has been commonly reported since Lennon’s incident, suffer an eight-game ban: he received three matches as an instant punishment for his two red cards and his five-match penalty for misconduct was brought down to three on appeal. Not by “the SFA cowards”, as some newspapers have branded the Lennon jury, but by Lord MacLean, an esteemed Law Lord.
Lennon’s three match suspension is a reflection of his disciplinary record since coming to the Premierleague five years ago. Have a guess how many red cards this menace to society has to his name? One. That’s right, his Ibrox crime was his first. Set against men in his line of work, ball-winning midfield players, Lennon would not even get first use of the soap in Alcatraz: Patrick Vieira registered eight at Arsenal, Roy Keane seven at Manchester United.
Anyway, that’s the facts out of the way. Enough of that boring stuff. How come the lynch mob managed to screw it up and watch Lennon get off almost Scot-free? Beats me. They certainly tried hard enough.
In the intervening time since Lennon lost his temper that day at Ibrox and Tuesday’s hearing, this was a man who, if he read the papers — which he does not — would have noted a string of articles that bordered on the litigious. A “backstreet thug” was one gem. It moved out of the realms of reporting and comment on a match, and its aftermath, into open warfare on one man.
Neil Lennon has been demonised by the press. They don’t like him. That is fair enough if it is an individual point of view, but when it is carried into print simply to pursue a campaign, it has unedifying overtones. This opinion, by the way, will be in a minority of one, or almost.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask the former Rangers player who defended Lennon on Tuesday at the SFA. Fraser Wishart, the secretary of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Union, was not pleading for Lennon because it is his job, he did so because he believes it is right.
Now Wishart finds himself being portrayed in the media as some sort of Uncle Tom or, worse, a Lennon-lover. Not even OJ Simpson’s lawyer had the sort of questionmarks placed against his name that Wishart has.
“One of the things we argued was that you had to take Neil Lennon out of the equation because he is some kind of demonised figure,” Wishart told reporters outside Hampden as he explained his defence strategy. “They (the SFA) also had to forget it was a Rangers-Celtic game and look upon it as an isolated incident.
“One of the interesting facts is that Neil Lennon has never been sent off in the Premierleague and never been suspended. He has never been over the points threshold and that is a remarkable fact for someone who plays his position and the number of games he has played for Celtic. I think that record was taken into consideration and I think three games (ban) is reasonable.”
Hold on, there. We can’t have reasonable creeping into this, can we? Wishart underlined the whole unseemly thirst for blood when he added the name of Ian Wright, who was was banned for two games for pushing Willie Young, the referee, at Kilmarnock. “There have been similar cases over the last five years,” Wishart said, “but the players were not punished to the level that there seemed to be such a clamour for in the case of Neil Lennon.”
Bizarrely, Stuart Dougal turned up at Hampden Park with his own lawyer, for what was an in-house SFA disciplinary meeting. The irony of Dougal and Wishart being on opposite sides is that the players’ union man actually jumped to the defence of the referee in 2004, when the SFA fined Dougal £200 for using the same industrial language as Lennon — television viewers reported the referee for telling Christian Nerlinger of Rangers to “f*** off”. You would have thought this might be one man who would have cut Lennon some slack on a day in which his team had been well and truly beaten by Rangers.
Still, Dougal applied the letter of the law and Lennon was correctly punished for it. The newspapers that have ganged together to pursue Lennon could not claim to be following the letter of the law. They have treated Lennon with contempt in its most literal and legal sense. There is an agenda at work. Selling more newspapers might be one justification, but there appears to be darker motivation.
Newspapers may say that they merely reflect public opinion, but they also try to manipulate it. Unlike someone who has had a bad game, the newspapers’ mistakes are not usually as visibly and publicly denounced, though one former editor now has reason to rue his choice of headline, “Thugs and Thieves”, after unsubstantiated reports about a Celtic team night out in Newcastle turned out be nothing more than allegations.
Dougal and his referee colleagues were yesterday called the most vilified characters in Scottish football, but the truth, however unpalatable, is that that status is reserved for Lennon. There were no banners at Ibrox that day proclaiming Dougal to be a bigot; there was for Lennon. The referee has not been attacked in the street, or in his car; Lennon has. Death threats scrawled on the pavement outside the house? That will be Lennon again.
Helping to create such a public enemy No 1 is irresponsible when merely kept to the confines of a football ground, but when being demonised changes the way you walk down the street, it is time to think again.
Stan
Allez les Lionceaux !!!
- 12 September 2002
This article sums up very nicely what i think of the press nowadays...
I think it makes a reference to an incident (Newcastle and "Thugs and Thieves") where Joos Valgaeren amongst other Celtic players was in trouble (arrested???).
It made big headlines here in Belgium but afterwards nothing was ever mentioned about it...i presume Joos was innocent (what happened exactly)...
What i mean is: the papers never acknowledges their mistakes...
If i were Lennon i would sue them...
I think it makes a reference to an incident (Newcastle and "Thugs and Thieves") where Joos Valgaeren amongst other Celtic players was in trouble (arrested???).
It made big headlines here in Belgium but afterwards nothing was ever mentioned about it...i presume Joos was innocent (what happened exactly)...
What i mean is: the papers never acknowledges their mistakes...
If i were Lennon i would sue them...
Aah, the British press. Such a bastion of truth and virtue.......can't stand reading the things myself. If anything, I pick up the local rag and rely on the online versions, much more factual.
Feel sorry for Lennon - I presume it's because he is captain of Celtic and must be hung out to dry. Kind of sad they are trying to demonise him though.
Feel sorry for Lennon - I presume it's because he is captain of Celtic and must be hung out to dry. Kind of sad they are trying to demonise him though.
JayM
International
Go on Hearts. 
biggertam
Winning means Everything
yip well done to hearts they are proving the doubters wrong saying that thier title challange would fall apart when meeting the old firm.....just hope they keep it up.
CELTIC (beattie 57,67) 2 - 1 ICT (wyness 51)
CELTIC (beattie 57,67) 2 - 1 ICT (wyness 51)
biggertam
Winning means Everything
CIS (qf) DRAW
Celtic v Rangers :roll: (had to be)
Dumfermline v Hibernian
Livingstone v ICT
Motherwell v Aberdeen
Celtic v Rangers :roll: (had to be)
Dumfermline v Hibernian
Livingstone v ICT
Motherwell v Aberdeen
http://media.putfile.com/Skacel_rips_the_piss_out_of_ned_boy
I didn't think the Skacel bit was all that great, in fact Ferguson does well to shepherd him out to the corner. The quality bit is just when Skacel looks covered, Fernando comes steamin' in and gives away the foul. Look at Ferguson's reaction, he turns round to the bench (or a team-mate) and gestures as if to say "He's feckin mental".
I didn't think the Skacel bit was all that great, in fact Ferguson does well to shepherd him out to the corner. The quality bit is just when Skacel looks covered, Fernando comes steamin' in and gives away the foul. Look at Ferguson's reaction, he turns round to the bench (or a team-mate) and gestures as if to say "He's feckin mental".
biggertam
Winning means Everything
LOL...poor wee fernando... freguson had him as well.
The Black Sheep
League 2
- 3 September 2005
Good to see lennon served his swearing ban* and we're back to full strength this weekend. So Bhoys after the little slip up at the start of the season and the side starting to settle, reckon Hearts will have it as easy as they did against Rangers?
* if Rooney had the same rules applied to him, he'd be off every game.
* if Rooney had the same rules applied to him, he'd be off every game.
JayM
International
Ho, ho, ho
It's magic, you know
Never believe it's not so
It's magic, you know
Never believe, it's not so
And Sutton, Maloney and that other guy. :p
It's magic, you know
Never believe it's not so
It's magic, you know
Never believe, it's not so
And Sutton, Maloney and that other guy. :p
biggertam
Winning means Everything
Livingstone 0-5 Celtic (McManus 36, Maloney 45, Zurawski 51, Sutton 62, Beattie 72.)
nice to see magic on the scoresheet again.8)
nice to see magic on the scoresheet again.8)
The Black Sheep
League 2
- 3 September 2005
Dunno where to put this request, but here goes...
Has anyone created the lisbon lions team in pro evo (or CM)? stats? I felt like recreating an old game...
Has anyone created the lisbon lions team in pro evo (or CM)? stats? I felt like recreating an old game...
Stan
Allez les Lionceaux !!!
- 12 September 2002
The Lisbon Lions...the most successfull British team ever...great team...
JayM
International
You could get 2 or more good players who's wages would only equal half of Keane's put together.
If he takes a big pay cut and gets payed the same as most other midfeilders on the team I wouldn't complain though.
If he takes a big pay cut and gets payed the same as most other midfeilders on the team I wouldn't complain though.
Too injury-prone, and looking for a supposed easy last few years to his career. If he was such a big Celtic fan he should have came when he was still a top class player, not now. We already have Lennon who I think has stayed one season too long, we don't need another ageing midfielder who's coming to the end of his career.
biggertam
Winning means Everything
would not have minded having kean at celtic a couple of years ago but not now the money we would have to pay him could be better spent.
i seen a few days ago arsenal are interested in Boruc just hope we are able to keep him.
i seen a few days ago arsenal are interested in Boruc just hope we are able to keep him.
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The Black Sheep
League 2
- 3 September 2005
biggash said:
I heard he'll be signing a three year deal.
Watch out, Fulham are interested... :lmao: :lmao:
If the talk of him moving on is anything other than his agent trying to bump his wages up to 20k before he signs on I doubt WGS will let him do anything other than sit next to Virgo till the summer.
BTW: Without meaning to put the cat amoung the pidgeons just before the race, Anyone else here have an inclination to support celtic players on international duty, regardless of nationality? :shock:
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