Hard as it is to believe, Scottish football will get past the point where it appears obsessed with the behaviour of one idiotic footballer with a big mouth. Incredible as this will sound, it will get past the point where it appears fixated on a phony rivalry manufactured by the media and which bears no relationship at all to the one they continuously try to compare it with. It might even get past stories out of Ibrox that would be termed “unbelievable” if they appeared in a work of fiction.
Scottish football will get past all of it, and become about the contest between 12 top flight clubs and the battles going on below them in the other divisions. It will. I honestly believe that. But it will take something major, something monumental, for this to occur.
And I think that can start with the League Cup draw.
I don’t think I’m alone in wanting Sevco. It’s the draw I would have wanted to avoid in the Scottish Cup last year because you just never knew what Celtic team would show up. This season has started well, but as I said in my piece earlier today we seem to be suffering a little Barcelona hangover; nevertheless, I feel wholly confident that a Sevco semi-final would end in a one sided slaughter like that which happened at Celtic Park just a fortnight ago.
And I want that outcome, for a number of reasons, most notable of which is that I truly desire to see this team stuffed as often as we can manage it, because they are pretentious and arrogant and their board is vile and reckless.
But underneath all that is the realisation that they are also weak, and that Warburton, in particular, is weak. One hard push and the whole lot could come down. I’m not saying that it will, but if their manager falls they’re facing an almost insurmountable problem of replacing him and then having to replace the bulk of his team, which no new manager would want in its present form. Too many players over there are simply not up to the job.
I believe that he’ll be gone by mid-January, but us winning the semi would accelerate the process and make November a perilous month which he may not survive. If they go managerless into the January window then anything could happen, but I’d expect player sales rather than signings. The cash to support this operation just isn’t there.
There are rumours – and they might be just that, but Johnjames, who’s written some of them, has good sources – that some of the board wants out. £400,000 in shares was traded just this week. Is this the start of a scramble for the lifeboats? Perhaps it is.
I’ve said already that I believe they’ll run out of money sooner rather than later; administration is virtually certain at this point, followed by a period of austerity like they’ve never seen. The run for safer shores is an individual one; the club will be left to crash against the rocks. The prospect of that is heightened by this news, not lessened.
There’s also the small matter of the roofs, another subject JJ seems acutely well informed about and which must be causing the Ibrox leaders to pull their hair out. That’s a developing story, and I’m looking into a few things there as are others. But the long and short of it is that they’re facing a problem so large that it endangers their very future.
I’ll explore that on Fields over the weekend.
Sooner or later, that club is going to have to run on a sustainable basis, with the expectations seriously tempered and the cold light of reality shining through the windows. That will not happen whilst King and others are at the helm, but the first signs are there that the boardroom is beginning to fracture as the full weight of what’s coming starts to sink in.
I do not believe King will want to be standing on the bridge when the crash against the rocks comes any more than David Murray was willing to be. If people on his board want out – and remember, it’s their soft loans keeping the lights on there at the moment – it’s a matter of time before he decides to bail out rather than get caught with his hand on the switch.
When he’s gone, and when what’s left of their club is being run in the proper fashion then the circus is over. The rivalry will be exposed as one based on nothing but hype; it will no longer exist as something functional. The so-called “global exposure” of the games themselves will be reduced as a consequence of their one-sided nature.
Eventually, even our media has to get tired of hyping them. There will be other stories, other issues to cover, and the significance of the goings-on at Ibrox will recede as their profile shrinks to an appropriate level. I do believe this.
And it could start tonight, with the League Cup Final draw.
So when that game is finished tonight and those four balls are in their bowl, think hard on the possibilities and say a wee prayer for the right draw. We won’t crash the club in one game of football, but we can give one of its support beams a right good kick and send that to the floor, unbalancing the rest and hurrying this towards what’s inevitable.
I’m not saying I’ve not enjoyed the last few months – or that I won’t enjoy the next few as the King era at Ibrox starts to crumble – but like many I’d rather be focussed on my own club and enjoying football in Scotland again, instead of the side show.