Gers

Rangers Football Club (or the Gers as some of their loyal fans call them) recently won the Scottish Premier League title. This is the third title in a row they have won.

unfortunately in the SPL it is almost always only a competition between two teams, Rangers and Celtic. This year followed that. Rangers finished the season with 93 points in front of Celtic who had 92. The third place team? They had 63 points.

No other team in Europe has won as many trophies as Rangers, yet on the international scene they don’t get much credit. among many other large numbers, Rangers have won 54 league titles. 54! People are raving about United’s accomplishment of 19 (including me) but 54…that is incredible.

Granted the SPL is nowhere near as difficult as the EPL but it is still amazing.

I love Rangers because of my Protestant Scottish heritage, I’m no bandwagoner. But for those people looking for a team outside of the EPL to support, look in to Rangers.

They play pretty football for a Scottish team partly because they have players from all over the world. They have fanatic fans that give the atmosphere a great feel (usually) and they are a succesful club. They really deserve more credit.

But who deserves credit most of all is Walter Smith. After the last game of the season, Smith retired as coach of Rangers. During his time the team won 21 major titles including 10 times league champions. He has been a wonderful representative of the Ranger organization and he will be honored and missed. I cannot stress enough what a great coach and a great asset he has been. There is a great article on his importance here.

So go Gers! And for any Hoop fan reading this, don’t count on us stopping at 3.

Non-English Football

Because Manchester United did not win today, I do not feel inclined to talk about the EPL. All I will mention is that Manchester City looked remarkably like Mark Hughes’ side of last year in their unimpressive draw to Birmingham.

But on to football in the rest of the world. I do not usually like to talk about the MLS because the football is sub-par to say the least. The team that I support is the LA Galaxy, being the team that I have seen play the most times, going to games at a very young age with my father. They beat the Seattle Sounders to make it all the way into the Western Conference Championship.

Los Angeles Galaxy

This is not a huge feat for the Galaxy; one would expect them to make it al least this far with players like David Beckham and Landon Donovan. But the Galaxy have a habit of not being able to score goals in big games. I am happy to see them make it this far and I hope that they win the league title after their extremely disappointing finish last season (they lost on penalties in the final).

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