Earlier last week I said that Alan McRae is a guy most of us couldn’t pick out if he walked past us on the street.
Yesterday he changed all that when he expressed his hope that we “dont win another” treble, and pushed the Survival Lie and the “Scotland needs Rangers” guff to new heights.
The “head” of our governing body, the SFA, is a man few in Scotland know the first thing about but he has been President since the disgraced Campbell Ogilvie shuffled off with a pension pot he didn’t deserve, with the veils of scandal draped over his shoulders.
McRae is, hopefully, the last of the hand-picked leaders, elected under a backward system which rewards longevity rather than any skill-set. His election was the last gasp of that establishment, the ones that’s been running this game for decades. The next SFA President will not be elected based on how many years he’s served but on what’s been done with them. It will be done on merit. McRae is the final cough of the embarrassing old Blazer Squad.
The reason I haven’t written more about this guy, good or bad, is that he is utterly anonymous. He has assumed the position simply because it’s “his turn”; there was no hope of him bringing one progressive idea, or one original thought, to the table.
He is a joke.
His presidency is a joke, and one that sums up the association itself.
His election was legitimate only within the corrupt strictures of the current version of the rulebook; it was written so that influence could be handed down, to enclose the presidency in a bubble rather than open it up to accountability, and in service to an old order, a “two club” order some say, but in fact only one.
The election process was a handover of power the likes of which you only see these days in tin-pot dictatorships or in the Conservative Party. Wait a while and you’ll see what I mean. The guy has no mandate. He has no ideas. He simply exists, and has existed a while, and so he was the Chosen One. That’s how football “governance” works here now.
McRae follows a long line of people at the SFA with pro-Rangers/Sevco tendencies.
We’ve had to endure a parade of these people in recent years, in the President and Chief Executive offices both. One had to resign, in scandal, after disenfranchising our club. Another offered to suspend a cup final to help his favourite team, without bothering to consult their opponents. One was appointed after writing a chapter in a book where he said the association was historically biased against Ibrox. Another was about as corrupt and “conflicted” as it was possible to be, and hung on in there like the Downing Street Squatter when it was apparent to everyone else that the gig was up. He was protected by the guy who tried to shoe-horn a NewCo born of debt dumping into the SPL.
McRae took the mask off yesterday; that’s all he did.
And it was never a very convincing one.
At the top of the SFA there is a guy who doesn’t like us much. When has there ever not been? Not only did he say he hoped we wouldn’t win another treble – scandalous comments; if an SFA President had said such things when Rangers last won theirs he’d have been hounded out of his job the same day – but he announced that Rangers were “back”.
Back from the dead? That would be a neat trick.
He repeated the mantra about Celtic and Scottish football “needing them” which is so widely derided now even Gordon Waddell at The Sunday Mail felt the need to hammer him on it. This was a shocking interview, and his comments would be profoundly disturbing to fans who hadn’t expected them, who hadn’t know this all along.
The ugly face of the SFA has been revealed again, and it hates Celtic as much as it ever did.