How long did you think it would take us to fully recover from 2012?

crmpicco

Well-Known Member
I’m interested to know what the opinion of this board is on the timescales for recovery from 2012.

Back in 2012 it was clear to me things were bad and we were going to have a rough road ahead and I recall thinking that the three year European ban would be effectively a write-off in terms of any success (excluding lower leagues). I expected us to be back in the SPL for the 15/16 season and slowly challenging for the title over the next 2-3 seasons. Obviously I hoped for better, but was prepared for a scenario like this.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit I would never have thought we’d be staring at a full decade without a trophy if we do actually win something next season. In my opinion our recovery is slower than it should’ve been and we are still a few years away from taking our rightful place at the top of the game - and we should be there by now, IMO.

What were the expectations amongst the support?
 
I’m interested to know what the opinion of this board is on the timescales for recovery from 2012.

Back in 2012 it was clear to me things were bad and we were going to have a rough road ahead and I recall thinking that the three year European ban would be effectively a write-off in terms of any success (excluding lower leagues). I expected us to be back in the SPL for the 15/16 season and slowly challenging for the title over the next 2-3 seasons. Obviously I hoped for better, but was prepared for a scenario like this.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit I would never have thought we’d be staring at a full decade without a trophy if we do actually win something next season. In my opinion our recovery is slower than it should’ve been and we are still a few years away from taking our rightful place at the top of the game - and we should be there by now, IMO.

What were the expectations amongst the support?
My expectations pretty much reflect your own. I think we’re at least one year behind where we should be at the moment. I do feel that we’ve not got much further to go. On the park we seem to be a better match for them on match days. You can see they fear us again compared to a few years ago. Unfortunately we shout ourselves in the foot and Lieswell has been in the background building his monopoly over Scottish football. I do hope that we bring more of a spine into our team. In my opinion we have too many young players without a winning mentality. I’m not convinced bench warmers from England are better than tried and tested in this league. We need to win every game, that doesn’t need to be pretty...just win. I’d bring in select players from our own league and surround this with quality. We will get there but unfortunately we now find ourself in a vital must win season.
 
My expectations pretty much reflect your own. I think we’re at least one year behind where we should be at the moment. I do feel that we’ve not got much further to go. On the park we seem to be a better match for them on match days. You can see they fear us again compared to a few years ago. Unfortunately we shout ourselves in the foot and Lieswell has been in the background building his monopoly over Scottish football. I do hope that we bring more of a spine into our team. In my opinion we have too many young players without a winning mentality. I’m not convinced bench warmers from England are better than tried and tested in this league. We need to win every game, that doesn’t need to be pretty...just win. I’d bring in select players from our own league and surround this with quality. We will get there but unfortunately we now find ourself in a vital must win season.
Warburton and Pedro are big reasons why we are behind by at least 2 years, for me. If Warburton handed the reins to someone else after the SCF defeat then we’d have been in better shape. Pedro set us back massively.

there’s no way I would’ve said we couldn’t lifted a trophy within 10 years.
 
I’m interested to know what the opinion of this board is on the timescales for recovery from 2012.

Back in 2012 it was clear to me things were bad and we were going to have a rough road ahead and I recall thinking that the three year European ban would be effectively a write-off in terms of any success (excluding lower leagues). I expected us to be back in the SPL for the 15/16 season and slowly challenging for the title over the next 2-3 seasons. Obviously I hoped for better, but was prepared for a scenario like this.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit I would never have thought we’d be staring at a full decade without a trophy if we do actually win something next season. In my opinion our recovery is slower than it should’ve been and we are still a few years away from taking our rightful place at the top of the game - and we should be there by now, IMO.

What were the expectations amongst the support?

Five years.

But that was based on a functioning club, and not having 3 years of open theft, and a further five years untangling the turd from the cloth.

Warburton should have been moved on after promotion, barring two cup games in the second half of his first season, we'd gone stale and easy to play against. An experienced manager should have been brought in, whilst long term planning could begin.
 
We could have won the league this year but for poor form after New year where in hindsight a couple of new faces could have pushed the team on , a raft of “ honest mistakes “from our officials and outright cheating from Clancy across the city who must be in line for a medal given the amount of times he refereed the club like no other , an injury to Defoe was a sore one also

I don’t buy the we are years behind myth as we’ve played them off the park on numerous occasions now , it’s the other games we let ourselves down in , the Manager has to look at certain away games and realise that 4-3-3 isn’t going to work when 5 in the middle against you are kicking anything that moves

We need to be really on the front foot with the corrupt / poor officials as dignified silence doesn’t work no matter if we win lose or draw call them out and highlight it in our press conferences, building bridges wins you nothing , we are treated like shite regardless

Sadly I don’t think we are getting inside a football stadium until a vaccine is found so who knows how this will pan out

But I will add that Rangers were fined £100k and had an 18 month transfer ban for going into administration, the mentally challengeds have a number of pending court cases over them facilitating a child sex ring , if found guilty that’s a far far more serious offence than running up debts , I’m not confident the current regime can be trusted to deal with it in a professional manner In fact there’s No chance of it being dealt with but we should as a club and support be at the forefront to ensure Moral Integrity deals with them
 
Always thought we would bounce back quickly however there was serious damage done to the club that we did not really understand - When Dave King took control (and thank God he did) we then started to realise where we stood. We will be at the top again and 55 will be a fantastic day.
 
Five years.

But that was based on a functioning club, and not having 3 years of open theft, and a further five years untangling the turd from the cloth.

Warburton should have been moved on after promotion, barring two cup games in the second half of his first season, we'd gone stale and easy to play against. An experienced manager should have been brought in, whilst long term planning could begin.
Mostly this for me.

At the time, I thought we’d be back in the top league in consecutive seasons, maybe a Scottish Cup along the way. I knew it would take us 2-3 years to be competitive at the top with them, but probably had hopes that we’d blood some exceptional young players throughout the journey and so maybe shortcut that.

But getting out of the hands of one crook and dropped into the hands of a gang more set us back at least 5 years. I don’t think Warburton set us back particularly, maybe losing a year. And we lost the whole year of the Pedro experiment, but our biggest loss - by far - was off the field.
 
5 years to begin. Then it unfolded with the Spivs and my worry then was we’d never get back. That set us back years too. If I’ve one criticism of the current board it’s Pedro, too left field for our situation and it’s cost us about 2 years also. Without the Spivs and errors I’d thought 5 years.
 
I expected us to be back in the top tier after 3 years, cash rich and debt free after a fresh share issue, with a young hungry squad.

I expected us to be contending for the league after 5 years.

I never envisaged failing to get promoted from the 2nd division, the ridiculous wages paid to dross in the lower leagues and the circus with the spivs.

After the drubbing received under Pedro I wondered if we'd ever get back.

I still think it's a disgrace that we haven't won a proper trophy in nearly a decade while in the same time frame Ross County, Kilmarnock, Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, ICT and St Johnstone have.
 
Said this in another thread the other day. Warburton screwing up the SCF in 2015 has allowed the fact that we haven't won anything since 2011 to become a thing. Collum has been key for the filth winning that last 2 cups with his decisions in the finals of both competitions against Hearts & Us.

The longer we go without winning something, the worse things will get and we are pretty much at the point where if a manager doesn't win something then we need to hit the reset button that summer. We can't keep doing that.

We know the current state of Scottish Football, how its run and until we can get rid of some of the people at the top of the game, given what's gone on in the last 2 months then we will continue to struggle IMO
 
I expected us to be back in the top tier after 3 years, cash rich and debt free after a fresh share issue, with a young hungry squad.

I expected us to be contending for the league after 5 years.

I never envisaged failing to get promoted from the 2nd division, the ridiculous wages paid to dross in the lower leagues and the circus with the spivs.

After the drubbing received under Pedro I wondered if we'd ever get back.
You didn’t really understand the seriousness of our situation did you?
 
I always thought thank F its Scotland it won't be too long,but I did not factor in that no one likes us and we as a support can be a wee bit daft.
 
We should have beaten a terrible Hibs side in the SCF. I'm actually still embarrassed at that shambolic end to the Final.
In truth we were absolutely dreadful that day but after going ahead we should've had enough to see the game out.
I was absolutely gutted at the end and said to my mate that it was probably our worst ever defeat....maybe an over reaction at the time but to lose to a team hadn't won the cup in almost 100 years was soul destroying.
After the semi final win against Celtic,we hardly kicked a ball in my opinion.
 
In hindsight I’d agree. Warburton and Pedro are not better managers than Stuart McCall
Warburton is a superior manager to McCall. Warburton got a Brentford side is on a tiny budget and one of the favourites to go down into the Playoffs. McCall has been sacked by two League One sides in two of his recent jobs
 
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Had the spivs not drained us for a few years then I think we could have won more by now but I suppose 10 years was my thinking
 
When it all happened, I naively thought 5 years. When, early into Green's reign it became apparent that the Spivs were crooks, I genuinely had fears we would never be a competitive club again. I felt last season was the season we would win something and we should have at least won that League Cup final.
 
Am still raging at the appointment of pedro that set us back massively imo reckon we would have won a title if we didnt appoint him
 
In truth we were absolutely dreadful that day but after going ahead we should've had enough to see the game out.
I was absolutely gutted at the end and said to my mate that it was probably our worst ever defeat....maybe an over reaction at the time but to lose to a team hadn't won the cup in almost 100 years was soul destroying.
After the semi final win against Celtic,we hardly kicked a ball in my opinion.

Like almost everyone else, I presumed the game was done and dusted. That Hibs side were absolute dogshit and to lose a trophy in that manner was humiliating.
 
You should look back and see the amount of young players that we tried to play through the lower divisions - very few were good enough.

Maybe it's a repressed memory but all I remember is a 42 year old John Daly being flogged to death so Ally could go unbeaten in the third tier.
 
Like almost everyone else, I presumed the game was done and dusted. That Hibs side were absolute dogshit and to lose a trophy in that manner was humiliating.
Winning that Scottish Cup Final would have been great but it would have meant Warburton was seen as a good manager - he didn’t have the mental fortitude to take us forward.
 
To be honest, I expected us to come back challenging quicker than we have achieved, but I wasn't aware back in 2012 the depth of corruption we would be exposed to. Ashley, Whyte, Green the Greenock Krays etc, etc.

I also underestimated the sheer hatred and levels of outright cheating/obstructive practices we would have imposed upon our recovery. Sporting Integrity? It's clearer to me now more than ever, that we aren't dealing with people with any modicum of 'sporting integrity'.

This whole episode has stank to the high heavens and has nothing to do with sport at all. It has everything to do with hate, politics and religious bigotry, the veneer of 'sport' is merely that, a veneer.

Any love I had for Scottish football is gone, burned away by the experiences of recent years. It's barely alive in my eyes now. If it dies completely, it dies. Maybe we can shift to another, less corrupt league, who knows.

Yes, I'm renewing my ST, but my self imposed domestic away ban remains. Hopefully we win the league next year and I'll celebrate, but we will still be here, so and I'll continue to support Rangers and enjoy the company of my fellow bears in spite of 'them'.
 
For me the issue isn’t about recovering on the pitch now. We’ve almost done that.

The lasting damage of our collapse in 2012 that is now our biggest obstacle is the stranglehold the mentally challengeds have on the game off the field.

They control the SPFL and SFA at boardroom level. They control the sporting media and have them push every agenda. They control match officials through fear and intimidation.

In the last 12 years the filth have made Scottish football more about winning off the pitch than on the pitch.

Refereeing strikes, voting your main rivals out the league, campaigns to strip titles, media agendas to ruin our players, using peoples deaths to gain a sporting advantage and being handed trophies by rigged votes.

I really don’t know how we go about toppling the regime.
 
Maybe it's a repressed memory but all I remember is a 42 year old John Daly being flogged to death so Ally could go unbeaten in the third tier.
Correct m8 - but we were chasing an unbeaten season and Ally knew our options were limited.
 
The only fear I felt was that we would lose a generation of ‘young bears’ coming through the ranks. During the spiv years with the boycotts I’d stand by the rails opposite the Main stand on match day and have a coffee just to watch the ‘old&bold’ walk by, not many youngsters. SG has lifted quite literally the entire club by the scruff of the neck from mediocrity and back to the what we are accustomed to. We still aren’t there but by Christ I think the current setup throughout the entire club is potentially better than anything over the past 20years. We keep going and we will get there. I feel the current COVID situation is another opportunity to bring the youth players through, we missed the opportunity in Div-3. Never forget what we have been through, it has made us stronger-we were a baw hair away from total wipeout in 2012 so in answer to the question I felt it would take a generation to recover but now I’m extremely optimistic and the old vintage engine is kicking back into gear :)
 
With the right people in place and unlimited funding, one season. However difficult to know the first for sure, and difficult to obtain the second. As it is, even now we are still financially handicapped.
 
If charles green, ashley and the rest of the spivs ctually tried to run a successful football club it would have been much sooner. Unfortunately instead of trying to build from a clean slate we have had to take years trying to sort out that mess and stop ourselves getting robbed.
 
I thought we’d be back in the top flight in 2015/16 and spend the season finding our feet. The following season we’d be challenging near the top before winning the title in 2017/18.

I had my doubts along the way and obviously the above was pushed back a year when we lost the play off final.

Beating Celtic in the Scottish Cup Semi in 2016 made me think we would win a trophy the following season and even challenge Celtic as the gap wasn’t that much.

The Scottish cup semi final win was the worst thing that could’ve happened to us. Celtic appointed Rodgers, splashed the cash, whilst we got overconfident and kept several players who were not good enough to that level (Kiernan, Waghorn, Holt etc).
 
Tbh we where up against a lot, but other than what everyone else has mentioned I think us humiliating them in the scsf really worked against us. They went out and got a very good manager that instilled a strong ruthless winning mentality when they were slogging it with a shite Aberdeen team. We stuck with with Warburton who was just beginning to befound out as very one dimensional and had lost his spark of the start of the season.

Then our appointment of Pedro to take on Brenda was was just an out and out disaster heads should have rolled for that.
 
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