Scottish Premiership - All you need to know this weekend
Game of weekend - Aberdeen v Celtic (Sun, 12:30 BST)
Celtic started their title defence last week against St Mirren - the team who held them to a draw in the final game of the last Premiership campaign.Having this time overcome the stubborn Buddies thanks to a late goal, Brendan Rodgers' side will next hope to also gain some kind of revenge over the team who denied them a domestic treble in the season's finale at Hampden.Like Celtic, the Scottish Cup winners are playing only their second match of the season. The first ended in a 2-0 defeat by Heart of Midlothian.Aberdeen had headed to Edinburgh with their fans believing they had strengthened thanks to Jimmy Thelin's summer rebuild. Celtic, on the other hand, arrive at Pittodrie with some among their support suggesting their squad is, if anything, weaker than the one which lost in that Scottish Cup final.However, the Hampden penalty shoot-out win apart, Aberdeen's record against Celtic is fairly horrendous and they had not beaten the Glasgow side in their 30 previous meetings.Rodgers' team were ruthless at Pittodrie on their last visit in May - their second 5-1 scoreline against the Dons in a row and their second win there in succession.Indeed, Celtic have not lost in 17 visits to Aberdeen since a 2-1 defeat in February 2016 and, despite the cup final setback and questions about summer recruitment, will be favourites to win their opening away league game for a fourth successive season.
Player to watch - Kieron Bowie (Hibernian)
Martin Boyle grabbed most of the headlines, the Australia forward bagging both goals in Hibernian's excellent 2-0 win away to Partizan Belgrade in Thursday's Conference League qualifier.But, while the Aberdeen-born 32-year-old was the star man as he notched goals 100 and 101 for the Leith outfit, team-mate Kieron Bowie was enhancing his growing reputation further in a team full of heroes.The 22-year-old's physicality troubled the Czech side's defence throughout and it was fouls on the striker that led to Vukasin Durdevic's 34th-minute sending off and the 70th-minute spot-kick that puts Hibs in pole position to reach the play-off round.That came on the back of Bowie scoring both goals in Saturday's 2-1 win away to Dundee in their Premiership opener, with Kilmarnock, who have lost in their latest five visits to Easter Road, next in his sights on Sunday. He has come a long way in a short time since his three years with Fulham came to an end last summer after a loan spell in League One with Northampton Town and having had to wait until February to make his first Premiership start.Six goals in 23 games for Hibs last season may not seem like a prolific total for a striker, but since that first start, he has the best minutes per goal rate of any player to score more than twice in the Scottish top-flight.His seven goals at an average of one every 83 minutes helped earn him a first Scotland cap in June's 4-0 friendly victory over Liechtenstein and Bowie's swift rise to fame will have the former Raith Rovers trainees' family dancing in the streets of hometown Kirkcaldy.
Manager in spotlight - Russell Martin (Rangers)
On the face of it, albeit on the evidence of only four unbeaten games, little has changed at Ibrox since Barry Ferguson was replaced with Russell Martin as head coach this summer.Despite summer comings and goings, Rangers remain stubborn and clinical in European competition, while less than convincing domestically.Having been fortunate to even escape Fir Park with a 1-1 draw in their Premiership opener against Motherwell, Martin's side already trail reigning champions Celtic by two points in what he has stated is his priority competition this season.They can little afford to drop any more, even at this early stage, but return to domestic action on a high after establishing what looks like a winning 3-0 lead over Viktoria Plzen in the first leg of their Champions League qualifier on Tuesday.
Strong words about egos, followed by the dropping of four players, including captain James Tavernier and the much-lauded Nicolas Raskin, seemed to do the trick, but it is in the Premiership where Rangers' mentality has been most under scrutiny and where Martin must earn his managerial spurs.Dundee would appear to be ideal opposition for their home league opener given Steven Pressley's own troubles in his first months as their head coach.On top of their failure to qualify from their League Cup group and some fan disappointment at his appointment, the former Rangers centre-half's side lost their opening-weekend game 2-1 to Hibernian.Dundee managed just two attempts on goal - their fewest in a Premiership home game since October 2018 against Celtic - and that came amid Pressley's admission that summer recruitment has proved equally troublesome. History does not provide much promise for the visitors either given Rangers are unbeaten in their last 17 meetings with Dundee, winning 14 of them, since a 2-1 defeat at Dens Park in November 2017.The Dark Blues have not beaten the Light Blues in 19 visits to Ibrox since 2001, and a failure to win either of their two opening games for the first time since 1989-90 under Graeme Souness would again dampen enthusiasm early in Martin's tenure despite that European resilience.
Pick of the stats
All three league matches between Dundee United and Hearts last season finished as 1-0 wins to the away side, with the Tangerines winning two of those and the Jam Tarts the other.Will Hearts make it six straight wins to start the season under new head coach Derek McInnes on Sunday?
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Daily Record
43 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Russell Martin fails to silence Rangers boo boys as Gassama penalty splits Monday Jury
It was a big weekend in the Scottish Premiership with the Ibrox side already playing catch up after another slip up Kieran Dowell was booed as he went on for Rangers. Does the Ibrox faithful need to show patience to Russell Martin and his team? KEITH JACKSON: Martin absolutely needs their patience but if the manager continues to make decisions which appear to the fans not to make any sense he'll test their tolerance to its limits. Persisting with Max Aarons at right back while leaving Nico Raskin on the bench isn't helping matters. MICHAEL GANNON: They are going to have to chill out a tad, accept it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while and hope Martin gets it right eventually. It's still early days and this desperation for it all to click immediately could be counter-productive. SCOTT BURNS: Russell Martin and his new team need time but that is the one thing you don't get in Glasgow. Regardless of it being a rebuild, you need to win games and they are not doing that in the Premiership. It needs to be addressed and quickly. Rangers got a point against Dundee thanks to a late penalty. For you, was it a spot kick and a foul on Djeidi Gassama? KEITH: It was clever from Gassama who got his body across Drey Wright and caused a tangle of legs. There was enough contact to justify the award even if Wright did very little wrong. MICHAEL: Drey Wright got on the wrong side and tried a sneaky tug to pull Gassama back. The winger's theatrics didn't look great but by the letter of the law it was a penalty. SCOTT: I do think it was extremely soft. I thought Gassama went down looking for it. I can see why Dundee felt aggrieved. Is the clock ticking on Arne Engels' time at Celtic? The record signing has been on the bench for the first two games KEITH: No. On the contrary, the young Belgian has bags of time on his side. The question is, can he make the most of it when the chance comes along? There is certainly plenty of room for improvement. MICHAEL: It's certainly interesting with the record signing benched for the opening two games of the season. There were signs of a real player in Engels last term but he needs to step up this term and nail his place in the side. SCOTT: I do think he will be at the fore for the big games. I am sure he will have a big part to play over the course of the season. He is a player Brendan Rodgers' rates highly. Livingston have come up and made a storming start. They were amongst the favourites for the drop but who do you think will finish bottom of the Premiership? KEITH: This could be a tricky first campaign in the job for Stewart Kettlewell at Kilmarnock. Derek McInnes was always going to be a hard act to follow and Kettlewell will have his work cut out just keeping the club's top flight status intact. MICHAEL: It already looks a long haul for Falkirk unless they really tighten up at the back. The bottom six sides are fairly evenly matched though so no one will get cut off and it will turn into a proper dog fight. SCOTT: I do think Falkirk could really struggle. John McGlynn might need to break up his back-to-back promotion winners to make an impact in the Premiership. I thought they might come up with a real bounce but the defeat to Livingston will have been a sore one.
Daily Record
43 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Russell Martin may be delusional and Rangers will do well to fixate on a whole new rival
Even those of us who predicted a bumpy ride ahead for the new boss have been left almost open-mouthed by just how difficult Martin is making the job of fixing his football team appear to be Things are likely to get worse before they start to get any better. The warning has been issued to Rangers supporters so many times on these pages since the appointment of Russell Martin that it's in serious danger of becoming boring and losing impact. And yet, even those of us who predicted a bumpy ride ahead for the new boss have been left almost open-mouthed by just how difficult Martin is making the job of fixing his football team appear to be. Two games into the new campaign and he's already stranded four points off the pacesetters at the top of the table. In fact, on Saturday evening Martin became the first Rangers boss in 36 years to fail to chalk up a top flight win in his first two attempts when Steven Pressley and Dundee were robbed of recording a first victory at Ibrox since the turn of the century. And even though Martin was always likely to have his work cut out in rebuilding an entire squad while simultaneously attempting to reinvent the wheel with his own ideology on how the game ought to be played, it's hard to imagine how his introduction could have landed any less impressively. The very people who have been asked to offer the new man some much-needed patience and time are already nearing their wits end. These emotionally exhausted fans simply will not tolerate watching the surrender of another league title. But soon they may have even more to fret over than just the continuation of decades of Celtic's domestic superiority. Because when Hearts left Tannadice on Sunday evening having banked six points from six, a more humiliating reality might have been beginning to dawn on them. Even just the idea of McInnes emerging as the man most likely to throw down any kind of credible challenge to the champions would represent a step too far for a Rangers support that regularly prickles and rails against at the suggestion their own club should have hired the same man years ago. The consensus seems to be that McInnes is just too damn obvious. Or perhaps his style of management is too mundane. And now here they are, attempting to cling to the notion that Martin's more modern, blue-sky approach to winning games of football might yet offer them some kind of theological fulfillment. There's a great deal going on here and much of it can be unpacked and filed under wishful thinking. More worrying still, it may have been based on something of a myth. The widely held assumption was that Martin would transform his side's style of play in much the same way as Ange Postecoglou did for Celtic, when he hit the SPFL like a big Aussie juggernaut a few summers ago. But the early indications suggest this isn't remotely close to Angeball. It feels a lot more like Yawnball. At times, over his first five games in charge, it has looked almost as if Rangers are trying to bore the opposition into submission. And if that really is the way the manager wants his team to function then his post-match prediction – when he stressed the coming campaign will be a long one – is likely to come to fruition. And not necessarily the way he might imagine. Martin's whole philosophy is built around possession-based football. And that's fine. But when it's executed at such a pedestrian, plodding pace it becomes painfully predictable and easy to contain. On the contrary, Postecoglou's vision for Celtic was very much wham-bam, front-footed and, at times, insanely aggressive. Based purely on the early evidence, Martin's is a much more measured and lethargic version. His players seem to have been instructed to take four or five passes when one will do. As a result, it's taking them an eternity to work the ball out to the areas of the pitch where they might actually be able to do some damage. And over and over on Saturday, this allowed Dundee's defence all the time it needed to shuffle back into position and make sure there was no room for Djeidi Gassama or Oliver Antman to go about their work. This surely can't be what Martin wants from his team. All possession with hardly any purpose? All style but no substance? It all feels almost borderline pretentious and that's unlikely to cut through with a core support which has been anchored in pragmatism since the days when Walter Smith was delivering them with one title after the next. And to compound matters, Martin's better judgement seems oddly flawed. For example, if he truly believes Max Aarons to be an upgrade on skipper James Tavernier then he's in danger of self-delusion. Aarons has started all five of the manager's first games in charge and has impressed in none of them. By instinctively passing the ball back the way, Aarons might tick a box in Martin's possession stats. But this approach does very little in terms of progressing his team- mates into the areas where they really need to be. If Martin persists with the Bournemouth loanee as his first choice right-back, he's also at risk of appearing bloody-minded and stubborn. Then there's the developing issue around Nico Raskin who was left on the bench once again on Saturday watching Martin's midfield malfunction without him. The vast majority of Rangers supporters will be struggling to understand the logic behind dropping their most influential operator, while watching others fail to command the middle of the pitch. It makes very little sense from the outside looking in and those cloudy, confusing optics are likely to count against Martin when it comes to his requirement for patience and a bit of breathing space while his vision for Rangers is given the time it needs to bed in. On top of all of that, there's also the decision to postpone a trip to Paisley to face St Mirren later this month, in the event that Martin and his men finish off the job they started against Viktoria Plzen to secure a place in the Champions League play-offs. That might seem like a piece of smart thinking. But how will it be looked upon if Celtic use this hand presented opportunity to open up a seven- point gap at the top of the table? And where exactly would it leave Martin if the champions then register a victory at Ibrox in the first derby of the season to go 10 clear before the end of August? Assuming McInnes and Hearts are also continuing to motor at the top end of the table then things really will have got a great deal worse than even Martin himself might have anticipated in his own mind's eye. And, at that point, there would be no guarantee of better times still to come.
Daily Record
2 hours ago
- Daily Record
Gangster Ross McGill's life on the run from - from promising athlete to Mr Big
The Daily Record tells how Ross McGill went from a promising teenage athlete to international crime boss in the space of a few years It was an obscure race meeting in front of only a few spectators in the tiny town of Alva near Stirling in July 2009 when 15 year old runner Ross McGill first came to public attention. As a promising sprinter with the Renfrewshire athletics club Kilbarchan Harriers the youngster from East Kilbride in Lanarkshire came third in a 70 metre race. Six months later in early January 2010 he claimed another bronze in an under 17's 60 metres with a time of 7.4 seconds at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. McGill's big breakthrough came in 2011 when he came first in the New Years Day meeting in Musselburgh when he won the 60m handicap race and finished second in the 90m. The following month in the under 20s men's event he smashed the club's 60 metre record beating the best in Scotland in the process. By this time he had been called into a training group for the Scottish Athletics team coached by Olympian Brian Whittle, now Tory MSP . He was picked to represent his country in the Celtic games in Antrim in Northern Ireland in August 2011 and came second in the 100 metres. McGill also set a highly impressive personal best time of just over 11 seconds. But it was his one and only appearance. Despite the prospect of a promising and lucrative athletics career he seemed to disappear off the radar. But McGill was embarking on another race - to the top of the criminal ladder. While he enjoyed some success as a runner he obviously believed that greater success, power and riches were to be found elsewhere. At the age of 14 in 2008 the keen Rangers fan had joined the Union Bears. an emerging Rangers fans ultra group. By 2021 he was its leader or Capo with access all areas at Ibrox and had been photographed with Rangers captain James Tavernier and then manager Steven Gerard. Nobody at Ibrox suspected there was anything wrong with this outwardly pleasant and articulate individual. In September that year he unexpectedly resigned his position as leader and appeared to have disappeared off the radar for a second time. However he was about to go down a third route that would bring him even great notoriety. In early March this year a series of attacks on members and associates of the Daniel crime family both in Edinburgh and Glasgow began, which to this day has resulted in more than 50 police arrests. The attacks would continue into June and involved daytime assaults with machetes and firebombings of people's homes and commercial property. At that time the Daniel's had been in a long running feud with another Glasgow crime family the Lyons. It appeared that associates of Edinburgh cocaine baron Mark Richardson - a Daniel ally - had in turn duped a Lyons associate by paying for a £500,000 drugs deal with fake notes. It had echoes of a previous incident almost 25 years ago. In this instance the Lyons were alleged to have stolen £20,000 worth of coke from a Daniel safe house in Milton, Glasgow. The man said to be orchestrating the violence was none other than Ross McGill, now holed up in Dubai and the alleged victim of the fake cash scam. A group of highly motivated young men going under the name Tamo Junto were carrying out the attacks in Scotland, allegedly under under McGill's orders, posting videos of the violence including burning properties. The footage also carried warnings of further attacks against the Daniel's and their associates. The Richardson crew had made the mistake of thinking he was a nobody and easy prey - but nothing could have been further from the truth. In reality the 31 year old he had been on a police watch list for several years over claims he was involved in drug dealing and serious and organised crime. As a result he he fled the UK fearing he would be arrested after French cops cracked an encrypted criminals phone network EncroChat. That had been the means by which gangs across the world could previously contact each other, do business, and leave messages without being caught. Now Police Scotland had a haul of incriminating information that was already bringing down a large number of organised crime groups. McGill, who was known by the nickname Miami, had initially fled to Malaga in Spain before moving to Dubai where he resurfaced as an aspiring crimelord. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. To this day it is not clear how McGill made the transformation from promising athlete, to fans leader to international crime figure. It was however clear he had made contacts with some of Scotland's most powerful underworld figures but how? One suggestion is that he developed links with key figures following Rangers - both at home and abroad - providing an excellent cover for any clandestine meetings. It's also been claimed McGill was introduced to the highest levels of criminal networks by by another Glasgow organised crime figure 47 year old James White - known as the Don. He had previously been the right hand man of two drug dealing brothers James and Barry Gillespie from Rutherglen near Glasgow. The Gillespie's had been exposed for the first time in 2019 by our sister paper the Sunday Mail as Scotland's two most powerful crime figures. By then they had relocated to the town of Fortaleza in Brazil with White but went missing around 2019 and are now thought to have been murdered. White was extradited back to Scotland in 2022 from Brazil to stand trial at the High Court in Glasgow where he was sentenced in 2023 to nine years and ten months for his involvement in serious and organised crime. McGill is also a close pal of ex-Union Bears Lloyd Cross, 33, now serving a six year prison stretch for his role in a £100million racket smuggling cocaine in banana boxes. The man said to have masterminded that particular operation was gangland Mr Big Jamie "Iceman" Stevenson who is serving a sentence of 16 years and three months for his role. It's also been claimed that McGill's rise rapid rise has been boosted by support from gang chiefs Steven Lyons, 44, and the late Ross Monaghan, 43, who was shot dead at his bar in Fuengirola in Spain alongwith close friend and associate Eddie Lyons jnr in May. With White and others in prison and the Gillespies missing presumed dead, it's been claimed that Ross McGill now oversees drug routes from South America previously established by others. In turn fast-tracking his rise to the top of the criminal tree. However people we have spoken to suggest that McGill like other criminals before him is merely filling the vacuum that normally opens when major crime figures are behind bars. In a recent interview for Criminal Record Graeme Pearson, former Director General of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement said:"You have the new first division coming through who are saying these old guys are in the jail, we don't need to bother with them, we'll do our own thing and that creates the violence we now witness." One source said: "People think he must be backed by someone bigger, but McGill is very much his own man and used to running his own organisation. "The Union Bears is a good example of that." As things stand at present McGill appears to be stuck in Dubai as he faces arrest if he returns to the UK. At present there is no extradition treaty between the UK and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) but that could change in the future. There have been suggestions that McGill - and other Scottish underworld figures based there - could try to get UAE citizenship to avoid being sent back to Britain. One police source told the Daily Record:"At the end of the day McGill can run but he can't hide. "But you have to remember that McGill used to be good at running."
