BURNING AMBITION - Why this Rangers Board's policies just won't do.

I keep harking back to season 92/93 - Leeds and Marseille in the Champions League. Particularly Marseille. I watched the home game from the Club Deck - and for the first time I came face to face with the new face of football - that night swathes of the Club Deck were filled with people who looked as if they would have been more suited to Royal Ascot - it was an occasion and those middle-class Prods who normally spent their sporting days at the golf or at the rugby appeared to have rediscovered their footballing roots - the place was awash with them that night.

In other ways too it was a night to last long in the memory. We were up against not just a football team - but a superteam - that Marseille team was truly a team of all the talents, when it broke up the members of it would find more fame and fortune around the world for clubs and countries. Here's how they lined up: -

Marseille: Barthez, Angloma, Di Meco, Boli, Sauzee, Desailly, Casoni, Boksic

Voller, Abedi Pele, Deschamps

Those are truly names to conjure with. Their achievements have been overshadowed because of their club President's bribery scandals but with a team like that why would you need to bribe anyone to beat them?!

If you are any sort of fan that's the kind of team you would love to watch every week in your colours. We got out of jail at Ibrox after playing dreadfully until late in the match - but in Marseille the boys played a brilliant game and we felt we had arrived. We might not have had a team with the same glamour as our opponents but we had something to build on, we had competed and we were within touching distance of true greatness.

Instead, the team that Richard Gough once said drank together and won together started to get old together and lose together in Europe. That final push just wasn't in them and the additions to it didn't make them stronger where it mattered. Of course we had the comfort blanket of domestic success and the sacrifices and the heroics in doing Nine In A Row in an era where all the teams you played in the league were fully professional and you played the best teams four times instead of twice a season is a magnificent achievement.

I suppose it is a little bit hypocritical of me to complain too loudly now, like most punters I placed my trust in the team and the manager rather than calling too loudly for radical change. But I wasn't in full possession of the facts, I wasn't calling the shots at Ibrox, I wasn't the custodian. So when we threw away Ten In A Row by being too loyal to Walter - another one of the Chairman's 'I'll never sack him' friends - I wasn't best placed to say I told you so. But it still hurt - and that's why I couldn't accept or understand Murray's shrug of the shoulders attitude and comment that 'at least we've got that monkey off our backs' - so what is wrong with wanting to make history? Being the best is what Rangers is all about.

At the same time we looked for the bright side in Europe - losing goals in the last minute was poor but some of the results were nightmares. So when ENIC's £40million came along I did genuinely think it was the dawn of a new era where we would learn from our mistakes and make the leap as Murray promised us 'to a new level.' Little did we know how that golden opportunity would be frittered away just like Ten In A Row had been and just like Dave King's £20million would follow it down the plughole.

Now we're not being offered new levels or a place at the top table. The debt the incompetence has lumbered us with is dragging the club down and alongside it there is a campaign by the members of the Board to encourage the fans to lower their ambitions as if the financial catastrophe we are experiencing is something over which they have or had no control. They say the European dream is over, they say we have to scale back our ambitions - I say no.

The history of Rangers FC is one of struggle - it is also one of great men of vision - to even contemplate Rangers as a second-rate club is to betray all who have gone before us - whether they were the founders, the players, the directors or the fans. Bill Struth taught us well when he taught us that only the best is good enough for Rangers.

Ten years and more after Marseille we should be a club alongside Milan, Juve, Manchester United and Real Madrid. The fact that we aren't and now don't even seek to be is an embarrassment and a betrayal.

At present the Board claim to have a three-year plan. A plan to do what exactly? Win the Champions League? No, they want to break even. Is that really what it has come to? It's simply not acceptable.

What new story will they be spinning in three years time? Because I tell you we may be breaking even in three years time but there is no way we will have touched the mountain of £65million debt we have if we carry on the same path. If there is no change in three years time we will still be signing short-term contracts with players over 30 - Alex McLeish will not get the chance, with Rangers at any rate, under those circumstance to prove what sort of manager he really is. You can't build a team on policies like the ones Rangers are lumbered with. You have to tackle the debt.

The one-year contracts are simply the tip of the iceberg - the part that shows above the waterline - in this case the football park. Below us the good ship Rangers is holed the waterline and can't perform properly until the damage is repaired - in our case that means getting a share issue which will make a significant difference in the debt burden and allow the club to operate normally.

How much of your football supporting life are you going to fritter away waiting for things to change at a time which suits David Murray? Are you going to remain silent when a few paid employees are trying to wear down our expectations?

Murray was quick enough to jump into the hot seat to negotiate the Barry Ferguson contract, a club spokesperson last week said he, not John McClelland, had shaken hands with Alex McLeish on anew contract to which only the final details remained to be sorted. Murray is the big tiger - he is the only one at Ibrox who matters. All the other Board members now get their entire incomes from their employment at the club or with one of Murray's other companies - this crisis is Murray's crisis and it is up to him to sort it out.

We simply cannot build the sort of club we want on a succession of one-year contracts and so we are driven to the inevitable conclusion that we need a share issue.

It is at this point that what Rangers need and what David Murray wants depart. It's obvious that he does not, or cannot, put in the sort of cash that is needed - the revolving credit facility is merely a glorified method of robbing Peter to pay Paul and is no way to run any business in anything but the shortest of short terms.

The Board may claim that now is not the right time to go to the market. Well, we missed the right time to go to the market so we'll just have to go now and get the best deal we want because the club needs money now and we can't just wait until something turns up. If that means a massive cash injection from David Murray fine - if he can't come up with the money then he'll just have to accept that the club can't wait for him.

In any case, Murray's only real objection to a share issue is that it dilutes his shareholding and his control. The last time he was at a Rangers AGM he said he wasn't in it for the money so I don't see what his problem is unless he is putting his own interests in front of the best long-term interests of Rangers.

Rangers FC cannot afford to stagnate - we have to progress and the only way out is an immediate new share issue.

GRANDMASTER SUCK