Paranoia Plus

JUST because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you - and they, whoever "they" are, certainly appear to be out to get Celtic this week. It hasn't been the best seven days for ra Sellick family, of London Road, Glasgow.

It began brightly enough with a fairly mundane win over Dundee United, since when it has all gone downhill faster than a bobsleigh crewed by Pavarotti, Cyril Smith MP, Vanessa Phelps and Fern Britton before she had her gastric band fitted.

There was that midweek Highland hiccup, then all these weeks of: "lets all laugh at Rangers" over the takeover ended; finally, Hearts "lay down" to Rangers (official Sellick View of this afternoon's events), to leave Poundstretcher FC (great line that from a Celtic fan on Scotsman.com) four points clear at the top of the table.

But, these series of events were surely not the low point of the week for the great-grandsons and daughters of Erin - that surely came on Friday morning, on BBC Scotland's Scottish Election Round-up programme - when Paul McBride QC outed himself as a true-blue, Maggie Thatcher-adoring, pro-Unionist CONSERVATIVE, just like his fellow member of the Faculty of Advocates, Donald Findlay QC.

SO SIR David Murray has taken himself off into the sunset: Ibrox no more and all that. Just how will history treat the man who was, for 36-years, Mr Rangers?

When it comes to SDM, ah kent his faither, who was a real gentleman, but, an inveterate gambler, whose downfall was brought about by his gambling addiction. David, thankfully for him, was less of a gambler than his father - but he still took some outrageous gambles in business and in his sporting life.

I hope history looks fondly upon him, for he certainly put a lot into Scottish sporting life over the past 30 years. I first met him when he was the man behind the Murray Internaitonal Metals basketball team.

With Murray's millions behind them MIM took Scottish basketball to a new level. He spent a lot of money chasing European glory, he brought some outrageously-talented American talent to Scotland, most-notably Alton Byrd: "the best basketball player in the world under six feet tall".

MIM were the top British side, then, after David Holmes took charge of Rangers and shipped Worthing Bears, lock, stock and barrel to Scotland, MIM were for a season, second-best, before Murray bought Rangers and with no mountains left to climb in basketball, got out to concentrate on football.

There, he spent millions trying to replicate his basketball success in football. But while the team, under Graeme Souness then Walter Smith, dominated Scotland, as with basketball, real, lasting European success was beyond him. So, as with basketball, so too with football - he stopped spending.

He tried to take on the Scottish media, starting his own Sunday paper, using the same formula as he had used in basketball and football - hire the top talent and let it run. Sadly for Murray, this didn't work and he cut his losses.

Now, after spreading his wings from his original core business of steel-stockholding into property, media, hotels, and other service industries, came the crunch, the Murray magic lost its lustre and he is now re-structuring his still-considerable business interests in very difficult times.

Perhaps the magic has lost its potency, perhaps the days of the business conglomerate such as Murray International Holdings are gone, only time will tell on this. But, what is certain, the days of David Murray in football are gone - unless he finally buys Ayr United as a retirement project.

He maybe wasn't so-much of a gambler as his late father, but he was a dreamer, who made dreams come true. In basketball, he promoted Scottish talent - signing every international class Scottish player and making MIM virtually a Scottish international squad masquerading as a club side, but he also hired top overseas talent and in the process brightened-up the domestic game.

Certainly he made mistakes at Ibrox. I don't think he realised just what a giant organisation he was taking-on and he never really was at-ease with the media demands of being Mr Rangers. He enjoyed the limelight, turning him from David Who? to a national personality, but I don't think he was ever happy with the demands of the football media.

Overall, he was good for Rangers and for Scottish sport - not just Scottish football. I wish him a happy future and I for one will miss him.

ENGLISH arrogance, don't you just love it? No, neither do I.

There has been a lovely example of EA this week, surrounding the big debate in the "Best league in the world", the Premiership down south. This debate is: who will succeed Edwin Van Der Saar in the Manchester United goal next season?

He may be heading for Bayern Munich, but the English media refuses to accept this, clinging to its near-unanimous belief that Shalke's Manuel Nueur will be unable to resist the chance to play at the Theatre of Dreams.

Whoever succeeds to United's number one shirt next season - I don't see it being Nueur and while I know SAF has an apparent blind spot when it comes to the merits of Scottish goalkeepers - come on Fergie, one mistake didn't make Jim Leighton a bad keeper - if I was him, I'd be going for Allan McGregor.

You can be technically the most-gifted player in your position in the world, but, if you are playing for a small-to-middling club, even in a huge league, it is no real preparation for life in the goldfish bowl with a really huge club.

McShagger has had his spells on the front page, but, by and large he has coped well with life as Rangers' goalkeeper. He has had a major role in keeping Rangers involved in the SPL title race this season - with vital saves at crucial times, not least that penalty save from Samaras. Publicity, good or bad, has seemingly no effect on him; he has proved himself internationally; he has Champions League experience and, perhaps most-significally - he will not cost the earth to prise away from Rangers. For me, he ticks all the boxes for Man U.

THIS WEEK I've been doing some historical work on an on-going book project and in the course of this I was looking at the way the much-criticised SFA selection committee worked in the post-war years.

From 1945 to 1955 there was a Scotland team and below that the Scottish League side. It was into the League XI that promising young players were fed, more often than not to find out if they could possibly take the step-up to international level.

After the embarrassment of Scotland's no-show in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, the SFA came up with the concept of a B team, placed somewhere between the League XI and the full team, then, after the horrendous thumping by Uruguay in the 1954 World Cup, in came the Under-23 team, which in the mid-seventies, became the Under-21 team.

This development system, perhaps by accident, worked. Today, there is no international development programme within Scottish football. Today's Under-21 squad members are, more often than not, barely-established in their club's first team, while the original Scotland Under-23 side: which gave us Alex Parker, Eric Caldow, Dave Mackay and Graham Leggat was an XI of young but established first team players.

In the fifties, the B team could contain uncapped and capped players - but these capped guys had to have less than four caps. The Scotland B team has largely been wiped from the memory banks, but of the first Scotland B team, which played France in Toulouse in November, 1952, all but goalkeeper Tommy Ledgerwood of Partick Thistle and outside right Joe Buchanan of Clyde went on to win full caps.

Tommy Docherty, Blackpool's Hugh Kelly and Bolton's Willie Moir had one cap each, Alex Parker, future World Cup captain Willie Cunningham, Thistle's Jimmy Davidson, East Fife's Ian Gardiner, St Mirren's Tommy Gemmell and Hibs' Willie Ormond, the future Scotland boss, all went on to be capped.

Ronnie Simpson, South African John Hewie, Portsmouth's Jackie Henderson, Leicester's Jock Anderson, Celtic's Mike Haughney, Willie Fernie and Neil Mochan, Burnley's Jock Aird, Hearts's John Cumming and West Ham's John Dick emerged from the 1954 B team - even if it took Simpson 13 years to make the jump to the big team, while Bill Brown's sterling Scotland career received a boost when he won his B cap in 1956.

A year later, B internationals went into abeyance until the late eighties. Since then, apart from the short-lived experiment under Berti Vogts, which saw the B team re-named the "Futures" squad, and a couple of half-hearted games since, the B team has been neglected.

Now, however, with our international ranking with FIFA determined by how we perform in every international, I feel the time is right to restore B internationals, that way Craig Levein could experiment with his formations, team units such as central defence, midfield and so on without jeopardising our international co-efficient by perhaps losing otherwise meaningless friendlies.