The Imagination of Sevconians
Today’s been an amusing day to be a Scottish football observer.
On the one hand, we have the prospect of Hibs or Falkirk perhaps having to choose between winning the Scottish Cup or going up to the Premiership, due to a calamitous SPFL scheduling decision, clearly designed to give Sevco a chance to make the headlines on the last day of the 2014-15 season.
On the other, we have the usual imaginative suggestions for how to save Sevco Rangers from its self-inflicted wounds and assure that it doesn’t yet swirl down the same toilet tubes as the club that came before it at Ibrox.
Oddly enough, none of those solutions are about looking to the future.
They’re all about reaching back into the past.
One of those suggestions is that Ally might be recalled from gardening leave!
The notion is certainly amusing, but it also makes an odd kind of sense.
For those in the Sevco support who seriously thought putting McCoist on gardening leave meant things would get better, the form under Kenny McDowell must have come as a cold-water shock. Three wins in nine games has them three points behind Hibs for second spot and so far behind Hearts they are no more now than a speck on the rear view mirror, quickly wiped away.
So today’s news that McDowell would welcome it – gelling with things I’ve been hearing off the radar which suggest that King and others aren’t entirely happy with a guy sucking nearly a cool million off the payroll over the next year whilst doing nothing – sounds an awful lot like the ground being paved for a return to the dugout for Ally before the season ends.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, some of the more cerebrally challenged amongst the hacks are actually touting the return of Walter, albeit admitting that it’s “unlikely.”
You better believe it’s unlikely.
Smith is a guy with an almost uncanny ability for avoiding trouble. He was always given a free ride by a press that loved him. He jumped out of Ibrox the first time with Celtic on the cusp of winning the league and then oversaw a Scottish Cup defeat before going. He came back for what was supposed to be an interim period but stayed when it became clear there would be money to spend and then he bailed again with the taps empty and financial calamity looming large.
Smith then got onto the Rangers board as chairman, after a shriekingly slavish media campaign, where he helped sell Charles Green’s share issue.
He was there during a time when money flowed out of the club like flood waters. He scampered when the tide started to turn against the board he was brought in to oversee, and then claimed that the power of the chairman is grossly over-stated.
(I wonder why no-one remembers that now? Answers on a postcard, eah?)
Let me be blunt; nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to see old Wattie taking his place in the managers seat at Ibrox at a time when they are encumbered and stumbling in the dark. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to see his oft-feted record end in the ignominy and shame of failure, despite a spending ratio advantage that he would have been goggle-eyed over ten years ago.
What these fanciful notions offer a hint of is just how little imagination there is amongst the people who were banging the Dave King drum.
The names they’re touting for manager – Stuart McCall, Terry Butcher, Derek McInnes (as if he would touch it with a 20 foot pole), Billy Davies – are all cut from the same old cloth; “the Real Rangers men”.
The problem, of course, with being stuck in the past is that you find yourself repeating all the old mistakes, and that mentality is clearly alive and well at a club which is already talking in the same arrogant language as the deadco, about dominating Scottish football by spending vast sums of money … having learned no lessons at all.
We even have Dave King and his cohorts telling the media that we, Celtic fans, need their club to provide “competition”, perhaps not noticing how tight the SPL is right now or that Dundee Utd are doing their level best to prevent our march to the cup double.
It’s also amusing to be told we should welcome the competition of a team third in the second tier at the moment and who failed to score a goal at the weekend against a side that lost a whopping ten in their previous outing.
Yes, they certainly lack imagination … but they retain a wicked sense of humour.