Today the delightful news that 37 year old Kenny Miller is to be handed a new Ibrox contract. Any questions their fans would have had about the size of the transfer budget for the summer have just been answered, definitively.
They want to keep a striker hanging off the fag-end of his career, who has scored 12 goals in 42 games. Amazing.
If you were checking out the various sites yesterday, you’ll probably have seen a report on the contracts that the club foolishly handed out to the assorted dross they’ve spent the last two years signing, guys like Waghorn, Dodoo and Garner .
These guys are all on long-term deals; they are going nowhere unless the club can find buyers.
But you can’t just cancel contracts.
And really, who would want these guys?
Not one of them would fetch a seven figure sum; they would be lucky to break even on any of them. What makes that deadly for them is that they can’t just keep adding to the squad they have; Caixinha will know he has to cut, and so there will already be pressure from the boardroom to start that process.
Of course, they will not be short of players offering their services.
One has already today; Kyle Lafferty, whose exploits in a Rangers shirt were not exceptional if you’re discounting the number of thuggish assaults he launched on fellow pros, and a propensity for diving. His scoring ratio of one in every three games actually looks pretty decent, but he’s never been particularly prolific and the fact he’s been at five clubs in five years since leaving Ibrox – two of them on loan – should tell you how well he’s done in the interim.
He sniffs one last payday there before his career winds down, but he’s misjudged the financial state of the club because there isn’t one of those to be had.
And even if there were … how could the fans accept it?
Lafferty left Ibrox under freedom of contract when the club was liquidated in 2012.
He was one of the guys who refused to sign a deal with Charles Green’s NewCo and left for free.
He signed for Sion shortly afterwards. I was looking over that today and got a laugh out of a BBC report on the matter which said this;
“BBC Scotland understands the Scottish Football Association could reject an application for international clearance from their English and Swiss counterparts on behalf of he and Whittaker’s new clubs. Scotland’s national body claims it would require both the “old” Rangers, which will soon be put into liquidation, and the newco Rangers to give their permission for such clearance to be given.”
Both Rangers’. Uhuh.
So much for this “same club” cobblers. There was a time when everyone accepted that Rangers had died and that a NewCo had been born.
Kyle Lafferty was one of them.
They say football fans have short memories … surely even the Ibrox fans haven’t forgotten this guy and Davis and others heading for the exits as fast as they could?
Maybe they’d be in a forgiving mood, as desperate as they are. But if Lafferty ever again pulls on a blue jersey at Ibrox he will ,to the rest of us, be a symbol of the liquidation and death of their club, actual standing proof that the line was broken forever.
Go on, Pedro. You know you want to.
The idea makes me smile. If this is what they’ve got to be excited about there’s not much excitement to be had.
How are they going to market season tickets on the back of giving a 37 year old a new deal? I would love it if they decided to sweeten the deal by offering to partner him up with a guy who left the fans, his fellow players and his manager high and dry. Who wouldn’t even swap over from club to club long enough to get them a transfer fee.
This is what “building for the future” looks like at Ibrox now.
Living in the past.
And not even their own past.