McCoist’s Whinging About 2008 Is So Brazenly Dishonest It Needs Putting Straight.

As I wrote this morning, the foot stamping to give Ibrox some special help for their Champions League qualifier is well underway with their useful idiot McCoist in particularly rabid form squealing like a pig about the injustice of it all.

Once again, he harkens back to 2008. We never hear the end of it, do we? Just as we never hear about how no support was offered to us when we reached the final a few years before. All the anger over the help they didn’t get it in 2008 is absolute guff; they got help in 2008, which is why the season finished on a Thursday night.

It’s not the only reason for the “five games in eleven days” which he says shifted that title race. For one thing, the final wasn’t the only game that year they got a postponement for, and they were warned when they cancelled the game before the Lyon fixture that it might come back to haunt them somewhere along the line.

They didn’t care, not then, not at that time. But later, yeah they cared later.

They were also hopelessly inadequate in the cup competitions that year, forcing several games to replays which they had to be fitting around the domestic schedule. It was upended for them time and time again that season, in ways that are mind-blowing.

Nobody in the media ever bothers to mention that when we got to the final there were no five games in eleven days, nor did they face that scenario this time around. Why not? Because they had so many cancellations and postponements that year that the governing bodies had absolutely no choice but to do it the way they eventually did.

McCoist also invokes the red herring of George Peat and his notorious comment that when the Ibrox club reached the final that a “prominent chairman” phoned him and said “Don’t help Rangers.” What are we to make of that, except he never bothered to elaborate and he never bothered to explain how the SFA could have done it in the first place?

See this is part of what makes McCoist such an idiot. Even if there was a party at fault – and there wasn’t, and there isn’t here – he’s pointing his finger at the wrong people, and appears not even to realise that, although The Record has struggled manfully to place his comments in the right context, knowing as they do that he was dead wrong.

Because it was the SPL who set the league schedule, as the SPFL does now, and not the SFA and thus it was their job – and it’s still their job – to make that decision. And at that time, the organisation which is now the SPFL tired.

How can we tell, even at a first glance, that they tried? It’s why the five games weren’t played over a week instead of eleven days … they were granted a four day extension which was at the very limits of what the league was able to do.

And as for George Peat, a blatant pro-Ibrox puppet with David Murray’s hand up his arse … well, he did try to help them anyway, shamelessly offering to postpone the Scottish Cup Final on their behalf … but without asking their opponents, a scandalous act which should have seen him censured by his own board at the very least.

He never did name and shame the club responsible, because had he invented a club on the spot – as he’d almost certainly have needed to do – he’d have been sued into oblivion. Am I calling George Peat a liar? Then and now, I most certainly am.

It shows the weaknesses of the whole argument that McCoist can’t even get the name of the regulatory body he’s shooting at right, but it’s worse when you dragoon an eejit like this into the debate. Because Peat was a discredited joke in office.

His climb through the SFA hierarchy was via Airdrie, who he left in ruins and liquidation. Somehow he was allowed to trade his blazer there for one at Stenhousemuir, so that he could keep climbing the greasy pole. He went on to hire Gordon Smith as CEO, when Smith did not tick a single one of the boxes on the SFA’s own checklist for the post.

He did everything he could to assure the power of Ibrox. He jumped in 2011, just in time to avoid any “involvement” in the events of that year … and passed on his seat to the “conflicted” Campbell Ogilvie, one of the direst events in the history of our game.

All this 2008 stuff really needs to be blown, because it was nonsense then and it is even more nonsensical now. That some in the media – Gavin Berry at The Record – are arguing McCoist’s case on that basis is pathetic … he doesn’t have a case and all this is just embarrassing for those involved. Sutton was right to call them out on it.