League Cup and Thursday Mashup

By: Ian Rose | August 7th, 2008

I find myself apologizing as often as anything else on these blogs lately, mostly for the fact that I’m so rarely here. Unfortunately, moving to a new city and starting a new job has taken its toll on my blogging schedule, but I’m setting a new rule for myself of at least one post a week, on Thursdays, to cover the biggest news in Scottish football each week. We’ll see if that rule lasts more than one week running.

Shame
I wrote on the main Offside page last season about the perplexing amount of Rangers games that Mike McCurry is still allowed to officiate. I have a lot of sympathy for Scottish refs, who don’t get paid a fraction of the amount they do down in England, but are of course held just as liable for mistakes. But when a ref is consistently wrong in favor of a certain team, even if that ref is still allowed to officiate, he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to run that team’s matches. Rangers start the season this weekend against Falkirk, and who’s in the center circle but Mike McCurry … for good and ill, very little ever changes in Scotland. At least they’ll see a friendly face after dropping out of Europe early, because that must have hurt, especially to Hearts junior.

The League Cup
It will still be some time before Rangers have to step in to defend their CIS Cup, but the lower leagues are already fighting it out for the chance to grab it. There were 14 matches in the first round of the cup on Tuesday, with some great ones mixed in. First, and I’m forced by virtue of being a Caley Thistle fan to mention this, Ross County was tossed out at home by Airdrie, by way of Paul di Giacomo’s 112th-minute winner. This was the only match with two First Division sides meeting up, and County is the only First Division side headed home early. For the most part, the matches went as expected, though the lucky 317 fans on hand to see Stranraer 3-6 Greenock Morton might disagree. The second round is played on August 26, with the field, now 28 strong, boiling down to the last 16.

Refs get their deal
With the start of the season only two days off, we at least know that we’ll have an opening day. For a while there, a looming referee strike put that very much in question. Like I said above, these guys aren’t paid nearly enough for a thankless job. The guys that oversee them, in my humble opinion, are overpaid if they make a single pound, because the regulation of refs has been a joke in Scotland as elsewhere in recent years. Still, I’m glad to see the officials making something closer to a decent sum for their job, and even more glad that the season kickoff won’t suffer for it. After all, it is Scotland, and we all know how fixtures tend to get behind in the winter.

Here’s to a great start to the SPL season, and, of course, MON THE CALEY.