In your briefing today:

📣 Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is to stand down to become a junior minister in Andy Burnham’s government. He’s expected to be announced as a business minister later today, and will also take a seat in the House of Lords.

Holyrood’s ban on “dual mandates” means he cannot be an MSP and a peer at the same time, so he will resign from the Scottish Parliament to take up the new role. He will also resign as Scottish Labour leader, forcing a leadership contest. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 A damning review into disorder at an Old Firm game in March is calling for tough action against Rangers and Celtic, saying the day came close to ending in tragedy after a series of failures.

The review, commissioned by the Scottish FA and written by sports event expert Mark Blackbourne, also criticises Scottish football’s governing body, and says police are “petrified” of policing another match at Ibrox.

It says ultras fan groups of both clubs are set up like “organised crime groups”. (Daily Record)

📣 Volodymyr Zelenskyy has bowed to public pressure and sacked Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, giving a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week, sparking nationwide protests. A “popular and innovative” general, Mykhailo Drapatyi, will take over as Ukraine’s new head of armed forces. (Guardian)

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📣 The killers of Kayden Moy, the 16-year-old boy who died during a confrontation on a beach in Ayrshire last year, have been jailed for a minimum of 16 years each. (BBC)

📣 Andy Burnham has been pressed to approve new North Sea oil and gas drilling amid alarm about his choice for Energy Secretary. Miatta Fahnbulleh has previously advocated hitting net-zero targets within “10-15 years”. (Scotsman)

📣 A transport Quango is warning Scotland has no plan to protect Highlands and Islands air services amid concern about the reliability of ferry links, and timetable changes by Loganair. (Herald has the exclusive)

📣 A woman who died after being found injured at her home in the west of Edinburgh has been named as Vikki Soloman, the owner of a local aesthetics business. Her MSP, Alex Cole-Hamilton, paid tribute to her “effervescent charm”. (Edinburgh Live)

📣 A Scottish architect has launched a campaign for a full rebuild of the Glasgow School of Art, calling it “Scotland’s Notre Dame”. (Scotsman)

📣 Ed Miliband’s appointment as Foreign Secretary is going down “like a lead balloon” in the White House. His previous comments about Donald Trump - “a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper” - have not been forgotten. (Independent)

📣 US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the US war with Iran has cost $37.5 billion, as Republicans prepare a $95 billion package to fund the military. (AP)

📣 The wreckage of a Pan Am plane that crashed in 1952, killing 52, has finally been found 2,000 feet under the Atlantic. (Mail)

📣 Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves headed straight to the pub just hours after they left Downing Street. (Mirror)

⚽️ Hearts were dismantled 4-0 by Sturm Graz in the first leg of their Champions League qualifier.

Manager Wouter Vrancken said the huge defeat off the Austrian side, in his first competitive result, didn’t mean the tie was over, and he saw his side create a number of brilliant chances only to squander the opportunities. “At this level, you have to score the goals, you have to finish the chances also,” he said. (Daily Record) (Highlights)

⚽️ Daizen Maeda has agreed a deal that’ll see him leave Celtic for Ipswich for £10 million. (Sun)

🗣️ It was a near miss “of the most serious kind”. The violence which marred the Rangers v Celtic Scottish Cup game in March of this year saw fans invade the pitch, some masked, wearing reinforced gloves and carrying poles.

The scenes at Ibrox took Scotland to the brink of another football tragedy: four minutes and 28 seconds of anarchy in which lives were put at risk by a minority of rioting fans, and another incident outside the ground which could have had serious consequences.

Those are the core findings of a damning review by an independent expert, Mark Blackbourne, commissioned by the Scottish FA to look into the events in Govan that day, which was published yesterday.

(Read the full report - PDF)

Even if you’re not that concerned about football, Blackbourne’s review is worth your time because of its shocking findings about fan behaviour, what it reveals about the competence of large Scottish institutions - the football clubs, Police Scotland, the Scottish FA - to cope with events of national significance, and the potential for worse to come if action isn’t taken.

It highlights two “near misses” - the pitch confrontation we saw on TV, and a crush behind the Broomloan Road stand, allocated to Celtic fans, where members of the club’s Green Brigade “ultras” group overwhelmed stewards and charged in.

The report links both incidents to a string of institutional failings. Among other problems, it finds:

Perhaps most disturbingly, “for Glasgow, for Scottish football, and for the standing of the game,” notes Richardson, time-served Police Scotland officers described themselves as “petrified” of working another Old Firm fixture at Ibrox.

The two clubs have responded. Rangers, in a lengthy statement, accepted responsibility “for the areas within the club's control” while pushing back on the review's assessment of the ticket-allocation dispute that consumed half the planning window. The club said the Scottish FA's own conduct deserved the same scrutiny.

Celtic's interim chairman Brian Wilson welcomed the report's emphasis on safety but maintained the pitch invasion by its own fans was “not, in itself, a major or threatening incident”. He did not reference fans charging the gates of the stadium - the other major incident that day.

Both clubs now face SFA misconduct hearings on 13 August.

What should concern Scotland's civic leadership most are the patterns of behaviour behind the scenes, because without radical change it’s clear all this will happen again.

Scottish football has, for instance, two club-run governing bodies whose disciplinary sanctions have, by their own admission, never moved beyond slaps on the wrist.

There is a safety-oversight structure in which, as Blackbourne puts it, those delivering the plans are also the only ones assessing them afterwards.

And, as their statements show, the two clubs involved are still pointing fingers in public five months on, even while claiming lessons will be learned.

Scottish FA chief executive Ian Maxwell says only that the recommendations will be “considered in full,” - note, not “enacted in full”. The report's own sad tally of prior reviews - Bowen in 2016, Roberts in 2019 - is a reminder that Scottish football has been here before.

This latest review is rigorous, unsparing of every party, including the Scottish FA that commissioned it, but still finds space to praise the stewards and officers who, injured and outnumbered, held the line that day. Whether that rigour now translates into the “immediate, not suspended” sanctions Blackbourne recommends is Scottish football’s next big test.

Keith Jackson, writing in the Daily Record (£), captures the urgency this morning: “Act now and act robustly before you have blood on your hands”, he writes. We’ll see.

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