A serious question here; is everyone at Ibrox insane?
From the boardroom to the boot room the entire club is wracked by paranoia and spite, directed everywhere, at everyone. This is not a siege mentality. That can be healthy for a club, can bond people, create togetherness, and is usually a temporary measure to get through a crisis. This is different. This is ingrained, like a sickness, and it looks to a lot of us as if it’s going to become a permanent feature over there.
Ever heard of TMHA?
To give it the full title, trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid? It’s an odour, a strong sweaty smell, sometimes associated with schizophrenia. Because of that, its unscientific name is “the smell of madness.”
I imagine you can probably smell that all around Ibrox right now, wafting out of every room.
Lee Wallace is the latest to embrace the lunacy, doing his bit for community relations yesterday by saying that “The guys who are new to the club realise that wherever you go there is probably going to be a fierce hatred towards (us) …” He went on to say that “I think Scottish football knows that.”
Scottish football knows nothing of the sort.
This is getting ridiculous now. Do these people have no concept of social responsibility at all? Where was the “fierce hatred” last week, for example? Or in midweek? Or most weeks? A lot of clubs can’t stand the wailing, self-serving urine that comes pouring out of the club these days, but that’s not the same thing as hatred. It’s the kind of irritation you feel towards the guy in the pub who never stops moaning, who never quits with the self-pity.
What happened to Rangers wasn’t the fault of Scottish football; it was the fault of people inside the club, and to a lesser extent its own fans.
What happened to Sevco, in being made to start at the bottom, was a perfectly valid, reasonable approach when one considers we were dealing with a brand new club and one born in the ashes of scandal.
But it was four bloody years ago now, and they are still moaning about it, and everything else besides. Every club hates them? No, every club is just fed up listening to their crap. Every set of supporters has had up to their necks with the arrogance and irresponsibility of the procession of halfwits, desperados and con men who’ve trooped through its halls, all the while stoking the paranoid fantasises of the support … all the better to get their money.
You know, I don’t deny that a strong element of dislike exists towards them. But that’s been manufactured over the last few years by the offensive rhetoric out of the club itself, to which Wallace has now added another great dollop.
The irresponsibility of doing so before an Aberdeen match … a game which, when Rangers played them, was often a tinderbox affair, well that takes some beating. He would have had time to think through what he was going to say. He could have moderated the tone. He chose not to. He chose to pander to the idiot element of the support and in doing so slandered the Scottish game with this enhancement of an already appalling lie.
I’ve spoken before on here about whether or not Mark Warburton feels some unease when he has to go to places like Linfield, when he hears his directors defending rioters and sectarian singing. These are matters of policy which have nothing to do with his role as manager, although if he fancied himself as a leader of the club I am certain he could do something about them. But no-one can be in the slightest doubt that he subscribes, fully, utterly, to this rancid conspiracy theory when he allows his captain to use that kind of language at a press conference.
It is unbecoming of a man who takes himself seriously as a role model.
Warburton has no moral right any longer to consider himself one.
Nice guy? I would dispute that now.
He, too, has shown signs in recent months of being sucked into the swamp in which this club too often happily gambols about. He is becoming infused with this nonsense and it deserves to haunt him for the rest of his career.
Tomorrow I expect that to be a fiery encounter.
Lee Wallace and others at Ibrox will bear some of the responsibility if there are real life fireworks to go with that.
Not that they’ll admit to any.
Instead the club will issue some inflammatory statement, they’ll sling more mud and on it will go.
Because we’ve seen it before.
And before.
And before.
And before.
And before …