Pundit Brazil to cut back radio show
BY GRAEME YOUNG FOOTBALL pundit Alan Brazil has said he is heading into “semi-retirement” and will only host his talkSPORT show two days a week.
The former Ipswich, Tottenham and Scotland striker has been a mainstay with the broadcaster since it launched in 2000.
Brazil is often joined by other pundits, with Rangers legend Ally McCoist a regular sparring partner on Thursdays and Fridays.
The 60-year-old said: “After 20 years of earlymorning starts, Monday to Friday, that’s me entering into semi-retirement with talkSPORT.
“From this week, I’ll only be assaulting the airwaves on Thursdays and Fridays. But I’ll still be hurting your eardrums in the build-up to the weekend football action – whenever it restarts.”
BY MARK McGIVERN
DESPERATE Scots are being forced to beg, busk and borrow to fund rehab after public funding was slashed.
Poor families have racked up bills of more than £10,000 as they pay for their loved ones to enter long-term rehab centres in last-ditch bids to save their lives.
The Record has spoken to people trying to break free from drugs and alcohol after raising cash themselves on the streets by begging and busking.
Other skint families are blowing inheritance cash on getting loved ones back on track or borrowing from credit unions.
Our findings make a mockery of claims by local authorities that there is short demand for abstinence-based residential recovery programmes, which have dramatically fallen out of favour despite drug deaths in Scotland rocketing to the world’s worst levels.
The lack of provision has remained despite a clamour for treatments that get people off drugs rather than seek to stabilise them on methadone, sometimes for decades, which often leads to fatal mixing with other drugs.
In centres such as Phoenix Futures in Glasgow and Abbeycare Scotland in Lanarkshire, beds remain unfilled while hundreds of drugs users complain that pathways into treatment are blocked, mainly by lack of public cash and then by red tape for the few places that are funded.
Stephen Kennedy, programme manager at Phoenix Futures in