Ally McCoist today veered into new territory when he faced up to some hard facts and told the literal truth about where Celtic stand in relation to Sevco. He admitted that we’re “years” in front of them, perhaps enough years to successfully reach ten in a row. He joins a number of other ex Rangers luminaries warning that the NewCo is nowhere near our level.
You have to love McCoist.
Once a darling of the Rangers supporters, he’s got a good claim to being one of the people who helped wreck that club. His utter ineptness in the dugout not only crashed their finances when he was knocked out of Europe twice in a month, but he blew a solid league lead on top of that to send us to the first of our titles.
It was quite something to see the utter implosion of his team that season. Little did we know, but the best was still to come as he took on the role at Sevco, knowing there were no other clubs interested in his managerial services. There he gave us a hilarious blend of incompetence and sneering fury, sometimes in the same moment. His demand to know the identities of an SFA commission when his club already had that information showed the dark depths of his personality and ruined the cheeky chappy image he’d spent years cultivating as surely as his uselessness in the dugout did the same to his reputation as a manager.
When Sevco started out, they had a plan; to build a young, fast team that could learn on the job and rise through the ranks as a settled unit. He wrecked that idea in the first season, with ridiculous signings such as Fran Sandaza and the laughably bad Kevin Kyle. Ian Black was his Joey Barton, and it ended the way the modern experiment will, with the player becoming as much a hate figure amongst the Ibrox fans as the rest of Scottish football.
He expanded the wage bill enormously over the next couple of years, bringing to the club as much dross as it has ever signed. He was actually given money to do this, the kind Warburton might never get, and although he won two lower league titles in a row he didn’t deliver a single domestic trophy, not even the Petrofac Cup.
Whatever plan there was, he ruined it.
This isn’t to say that the idea of rearing a young side would have paid off, not with him in charge, but it would have put them in a better financial position than they are in now. It would have given them stability instead of having to endure upheaval and transition every single year.
What makes it amazing is that the lessons of this haven’t been learned yet; Warburton, who talked last season about wanting a settled team, has added eleven players to his squad … a monumentally stupid decision, especially when you consider who some of them are. Theirs is a club in a state of constant flux.
You only have to look at Brendan and how he’s handled things at Celtic to see the alternative way of doing things; he’s added five players, but the massive clear out hasn’t happened because he knows the value of doing this sort of thing by stages. You get the sense of something being built there, whereas at Ibrox the overwhelming impression is of a club making it up as they go along.
That sense of drift came from McCoist and his time in charge there.
Celtic is heading for six titles in a row.
If Sevco really are “two or three years” behind Celtic then the best they can hope for is that they recover in time to stop us right on the verge of making it ten. But the issues that surround that club are such that they look as if they are headed for the same fate as Rangers.
It’s hard to ever see them catching us.
McCoist is right, of course, about the club being miles behind. He’s wrong to put a term of years on it. Trying to do so is like saying Partick Thistle are 30 years behind. It’s a meaningless concept.
The simple fact is that with our financial advantage and them having literally no way to close it that we ought to be out of sight for a generation or more.
Ally McCoist knows as well as anyone that the task facing their club might well be impossible. Amongst the many people we have to thank for that gap is McCoist himself.
He is one of the architects of their present disaster.