Scottish Football has been living, for the last three years, with a persistent and dangerous lie. No matter how many times you hammer on it, it has the ability to re-assert itself, often with greater vigour than it had before.
We called it the Survival Myth, before the UEFA letter to the Resolution 12 guys.
Now we call it the Survival Lie. Although fully exposed as the biggest bunch of bull to hit Glasgow since the rodeo was last at the SECC it continues to grow and fester.
When you look at the calibre of players they’ve brought to their club, young unknowns and has-beens, you can see how far away from the level of the DeadCo they actually are.
Say what you like about Rangers, the wealth and the power might have been an illusion but their playing squad was real and they could go out and sign top players even if they couldn’t really afford them. They were, in that way, somewhat formidable.
Sevco aren’t formidable.
What little money they do have appears to have been squandered on players no-one wants for one reason or another. They have a manager who’s been at the club one year and has never been put under sustained pressure. Even so, what little there is swirling around causes him to fragment on a semi-regular basis.
This guy moans about everything, and nothing. Our press loves it, and prints his every ridiculous utterance. This week there have been some beauties.
Mostly he’s seen two potential transfer swoops collapse; one for Adam Armstrong and the other for Frenchman Rod Fanni.
These set-backs have clearly had an effect on him; he’s spent the last few days rambling incoherently. First he’s bemoaned the lack of money in Scottish football, which he says has hampered his signing plans. This is a subject so exhausted only Kevin Bridges could find something fresh to say about it. (He, after all, is the guy who approached the Rangers liquidation from the best possible angle; the face painter and the director who jumped around the Ibrox boardroom made up like a tiger!) Yet Warburton’s comments are treated as if they were brought down from the mountaintop, chiselled into stone.
Of course, he has offered no solutions to this conundrum, just as he offered none to any of the other “problems” he identified last year; everything from plastic pitches to how useless the Development League is.
Then, his whining complete, he reversed himself by saying that the club could meet its ambitions without spending any money.
Today is my favourite; he’s predicted that the club will leave Scottish football behind (odd for a man who was talking, just before that, about how we needed to rebuild it) and not even for a European league which is, at least, semi-plausible if not a little clichéd and played out, but a World League … which he says his club would have to be in.
Is he for real?
The club that’s virtually unknown outside of Scotland and who’s predecessors death means their name hasn’t even been heard in Europe for four years, is going to get an invite to what would be the biggest football tournament of them all?
On what grounds?
These people are deluded fools.
The global 500 millions fans was a figment of Charles Green’s imagination; has no-one clued these people in yet? What was it a former director of the OldCo said about them?
“We are a provincial West of Scotland football team without significant support outside of that demographic …” So what chance does Sevco have of getting into a tournament like that, even if the idea itself were not a Jack in the Beanstalk style fantasy with no grounding whatsoever in the real world?
The Fanni deal might have been realistic; he’s 34 and was playing for Charlton last year.
The Armstrong deal was just ridiculous, typical of their ego and arrogance and the basic stupidity which is rampaging through their club right now.
Warburton has hinted that the deal collapsed because of money; really?
Know what else might have been a deciding factor? That Newcastle aren’t remotely interested in doing Sevco any favours, not when you consider the way King talks about their owner.
Going to them for a loan deal was desperation at best, and naivety at worst. How much would Armstrong cost anyway? He’s spent the last season on loan at Coventry.
Sevco blew a huge opportunity with Newcastle.
The club has just been relegated; three or four top players might have been available on season long loans, at very good rates, if Uncle Mike had been kept sweet. Forget any such arrangement now.
But there are other clubs who won’t send players to Sevco on loan; rumour has it that Spurs were so disgusted with the treatment of their young starlets last season that they’re not minded to send any more players to Ibrox.
Arsenal were equally unimpressed.
The same cannot be said for Celtic, because although Tyler Blackett was a notable failure when we’ve taken loan players from the EPL they’ve tended to be pretty talented, and played a big role in the team.
I don’t like loan deals, but all the top clubs up there would take our call.
The problems at Ibrox are all of their own making.
Rather than accept their current plight, as a club living a hand-to-mouth existence, and who should have moderated their behaviour, they’ve gone out and signed nine players already and want more. This is the definition of madness, and in spite of this merry-go-round of names and faces into the club they still get pissed off and angry whenever they fail to get the guys they want.
Today he says they don’t need big money to “compete with Celtic.”
Lucky for them, as they don’t have any.
In one sense though, they are very much like the club that came before; sore losers, with an overblown sense of their own importance.
It must be tough, living in our shadow, and they better get used to it.
In Brendan We Trust.
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