Search: ' St Johnstone'

The decline of Scotland and Austria was encapsulated by a Champions League game in 2000 featuring hardly any Scots or Austrians, as Cris Freddi recalls

This being the Champions League, Rangers weren’t expected to stay around for long. It’s been the story of their lives for the last decade or so. This time at least they’d given themselves a real chance of reaching the second round, winning their first two group matches 5-0 against today’s opponents and 1-0 in Monaco. But this was a right rollercoaster of a group, and by the time they arrived in Graz they’d taken only one point from two matches with Galatasaray, while Sturm had won 2-0 at home to Monaco, who then thumped the Istanbul side.

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From the Stade Louis II to Alloa and Queen of the South in three years, St Johnstone fan Gary Panton charts his club's sharp demise

Why did the team collapse so emphatically last season?
Sandy Clark’s inability to find suitable replacements for the players that achieved third place in the SPL, a League Cup final and a UEFA Cup run earn­ed him the sack back in October. His replacement Billy Stark – whose perennially folded arms and monotone drawl must make him one of the least animated managers in Scottish football hist­ory – struggled to prove he could do much better.

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Falkirk appear to hae been saved from relegation by Airdrie's demise. But James Teideman is still bitter about the fate of clubs excluded from the SPL

It is the night that Bayer Leverkusen host Manchester United in the second leg of their semi-final. The Cham­p­ions League music that welcomes the teams on to the pitch at Brockville Park floats with comic irony over the terraces – as if it isn’t surreal enough that Ev­erton are playing here tonight for the honour of lifting the Alex Scott memorial trophy, highlight of Falkirk’s 125th anniversary celebrations. The travelling fans must have had a laugh as they surveyed the crumbling “stadium” that sums up the melancholy malaise of small Scottish clubs.

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Ken Gall gives a resounding cheer for the exasperated Scottish Premier League chairmen who finally stuck two fingers up at Rangers and Celtic

To anyone who says that there are no surprises left in Scottish football, the events of April 16 will have been the cause of some bemusement. In what might seem at first glance to be the equivalent of the Christians expelling Jesus from Christianity, all the Scottish Premier League clubs, with the exception of Celtic and Rangers, gave notice of their intention to resign en masse from the league in two seasons’ time, leaving Glas­­gow’s much-loved double act, not for the first time, in a world of their own.

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Partick Thistle fan Chris Fyfe sets out his side's promotion plan to the Premier League, rivalry with Airdrie and the club's 'tablecloth' kit

Have Thistle’s derby rivals changed over the years?
Our main rivals tend to fluctuate between Airdrie, Clydebank, Clyde and Killie depending on our res­pective fortunes. At the moment Killie’s prolonged SPL run takes them out of sight. The rivalry with the other Glasgow club, Clyde, came to a head when they lodged at Firhill for five years, due to their locals preferring to watch dog racing.

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