Today, Sevco beat a Motherwell side so inept that it must have broken fan’s hearts to watch them play. They were awful; worse than that, they were utterly spineless in their approach to the game. Even with eleven men against ten they looked weak and indecisive, a team that looked, to me, as if they approached the game with no confidence that they could win.
There was a moment late in the match which summed up the dire level of Scottish football, and offered a possible alibi to teams like Motherwell, who struggle to match Sevco in these games. The Fir Park club made a substitution, bringing on a new player. They had signed him from Forest Green, a club in the English National Championship … the fifth tier of the English game. This makes Sevco’s own signings from the third and fourth tier look positively ambitious.
Are there no better players at a Scottish Premier League club than some journeyman from the lowest ranks in the English professional game? No kids in the youth academies who can match, or beat, that standard? If there aren’t, then I ask you; what the Hell is the point?
Why do these clubs even bother with youth development?
If a complete unknown from that kind of club can come in and get a game, the people running youth football at every one of those clubs should be fired, because they are just not up to the job.
It is symptomatic of a bigger problem, of course, and that is the utter lack of a coherent strategy and the vast majority of our clubs, and it’s not even best exemplified by Motherwell and their Forest Green player. It’s exemplified by Sevco, who in spite of a dozen signings in the close season put two loanees straight into their starting eleven today.
Warburton spoke, this week, with no contradiction, about “building for the future.” At the same time, his club was negotiating for a third loan signing and trying (and failing) to bring Port Vale’s second choice keeper to the club by paying for him in piddling instalments, the first of which is said to have been a meagre £60,000.
Everything at Ibrox is short-term in execution.
They have no strategy to speak of. They have no plan beyond simple hand-to-mouth survival.
Last year, I wrote – over on Fields – about a wonderful game I’d bought on the PC called The Long Dark. It’s a sandbox game, set in the Alaskan wilderness, where your plane has crashed. A mysterious geo-magnetic event has cut off electricity to the planet, and affected the wildlife in weird and not so wonderful ways. You are alone, forced to fend for yourself. There is no overall objective except you have to stay alive as long as you can.
It has a feature called perma-death, which is the inability to recover your saved game when you die … which everyone does, eventually. Some player’s boast of having gone hundreds of days, to the point where they have made their own weapons and clothes and have ample supplies of berries, plants and animal eat to eat … but it’s never enough. It might be hunger that gets you, or thirst. Perhaps it’s disease from eating food that’s gone bad or from an infection. It could be the cold; sudden weather changes are probably the most potent killer of early-game players. Maybe one of the wolves will get you … they get me a lot.
Eventually though, you will fall into the Long Dark. As one of the quotes at the start of the game says – it’s from Fight Club – “Eventually the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
The game reminds me a lot of what’s happening at Sevco; it, too, is about a hand-to-mouth existence, the necessity of small victories, of buying time in little snatches of white knuckle activity. Like the protagonist in the game, they are beset with problems, and death could come from many directions. A legal case that goes the wrong way. A sudden infrastructure fault. Some director saying “no this time, I won’t pay the bills.” It’s not that it could happen; it’s that it will happen. It is a mathematical certainty. It is just a question of when.
The media doesn’t want to write it. Their fans don’t want to admit it. The club itself will not acknowledge it, not if the roof had already blown off and the receivers were pounding on the door. King is safe over in South Africa, but his acolytes would rather join him there than be caught holding the bag like that.
Nothing terrifies them more.
But everyone involved knows it is coming, and wishing it away won’t keep it away. One thing might still guarantee that it is kept at bay at least until the end of the season; the sale of a key player, for a reasonable sum of money. It would be a short-term respite, nothing more, but everyone inside the ground would breathe a little easier, at least for a while, and it would get them through to the summer and the season ticket sales.
But that now looks like a forlorn hope, entirely without likelihood of success.
The hoped-for Barrie McKay transfer scramble has not been forthcoming. They’ve been unable to attract any clubs to guys like Waghorn and Tavernier. The effort to drum up interest in Josh Windass was so pitiful even Level5 realised it was a dead end, and it was swiftly abandoned.
Time is running out for them to pull this off. There are four days to go. The countdown clock has to be ticking loudly in the background at Ibrox. When it gets to zero they are in the hands of fate, no longer controlling their own destiny.
The Ibrox operation is a failing business, struggling month to month. They are, as Phil keeps pointing out, a loss making company without a credit line from a bank. Everyone knows now that King isn’t going to fund the glorious revival. No-one else at Ibrox is either. The search for external sources of funding has come to naught and a share prospectus looks as unlikely as it ever did, even if there were people out there interesting in buying them. The Ashley saga rolls on, and in the meantime Sevco fan sites tease their members with garbage, unfounded rumours of secret investors and Red Bull fantasies which betray the depths of desperation.
Raised on fantasy, on someone else picking up the tab, they aren’t ready for what reality looks like. This month should have made them painfully aware of their limitations, and how precarious their future now looks. They haven’t got the message yet.
If this month ends without a major sale, they will soon enough.