There is something pitiful about watching football supporters suffer needlessly, a spectacle that is actually pretty common in the sport. It has happened to fans of many clubs across the world, fans with too high a degree of expectation.
The ultimate case in point is that of England supporters.
I often think the worst thing that ever happened to English football was their host nation victory in the World Cup finals of 1966. A year after it we won the European Cup but we used that as the foundation stone for a classic mythology; we never believed we were suddenly a European superpower. It was the story of a glorious triumph against the odds which is why it enhances our club whilst 1966 simply gave the English a sense of themselves wholly out of proportion to reality.
I sometimes wonder if Leicester City fans would be better off if their incredible, unexpected success of two years ago had never happened. What happens if they end up relegated, to tumble down the divisions as so many other clubs have? Blackburn is a case in point. Will they have loved that they ever scaled the mountain, or will they lament ever having seen the Promised Land at the top of it only to be denied entry and told to go back down?
I sometimes wonder had we won that second European Cup, in Milan, would we have an idea about our club that football long ago left behind? Would a second triumph have enhanced the first one or cast a dark shadow over it instead?
The idea might seem mad, but as someone smarter than me once said hope, not despair, is the real killer.
And that’s the problem right there, and we can trace it back to the exact moment when it started the long (and hilarious) process of slowly strangling Sevco fans.
It was 14 February 2012, the day Rangers was put in administration.
From that day on it was all crumbling. And yet the media and their supporter’s reps, indeed everyone who could get in front of a camera, were telling them, right from that moment, that everything would be alright. They lied repeatedly to these poor saps, including the famous “HMRC will not want to kill a football club and will be amendable to a deal …” nonsense which flew in the face of political reality, objective fact and the Revenue’s own policy.
The club of course died, but rather than let it go – perhaps even recognising that it was never real in the first place, merely an artificial construct of bank debts and tax evasion – the fans instead sought to keep it alive like Norman Bates’ mother … and that was the stupidest thing they could have done, because it would have been hard enough had there been no David Murray or Bank of Scotland or HMRC deprived millions … but trying to build a club from scratch whilst insisting it that it inhabit the spirit of the dead one in spending what it couldn’t afford and being ludicrously over-confident about its own capabilities … the stuff of madness.
So they sign players and assume that those players get better the minute they walk into Ibrox; think for a moment on the fantastic scene in Kingdom of Heaven when Orlando Bloom knights a bunch of farmhands and answers with a “Yes,” the snarked question of whether a man fights better because he’s been badged; they lose that battle, of course.
They believe every manager who walks through the door has to be good, because otherwise he wouldn’t be there. Think on the moment in Aliens where the soldiers first realise that maybe the top brass hasn’t got a clue how serious, nor not, the situation they are heading into might be; their LT offers a hint when they ask how many missions he’s been on. “Thirty eight … simulated …” And how many combat drops, Vasquez asks. “Two. Including this one.”
They believe that they should be challenging Celtic, when we are at our historic peak and they would have been lucky to hang onto our coat tails even at the height of Rangers’ historic earnings. This might be the maddest idea of them all.
Theirs is a club which doesn’t inspire ready sympathy, of course. Many of their supporters are angry bigots, people wallowing in hate, but they also cling obsessively to hope and it’s the hope that’s killing them. They lurch from one disappointment to the other because they simply refuse to accept the facts as we try to explain to them over and over again.
Their club died. The NewCo is five years old. If you ask me, they’ve done well for a club that young. They’re shooting for the moon just qualifying for Europe even if they weren’t fully entitled to take the license that put them there last year. And if there’s shame to going out of Europe to a team from Luxembourg it’s tempered by some of the other humiliations Scottish clubs have endured over the years. Living with these things involves facing facts.
That’s why they won’t.
And that’s why their suffering will go on and on and on.