How do I know that 2018 is going to be even more fun than 2017 was? By the way it starts. With Ibrox Noise banging the drum for ridiculous transfer fees for dreck. With Graeme Murty anointed the Second Coming for a draw at Celtic Park. For his appointing Jimmy Nicholl as assistant manager. For Keith Jackson back writing nonsense. For Neil Cameron attacking the bloggers. We’re starting a new calendar, but the same old nonsense persists.
And nowhere is the shape of the year more clearly outlined than with Alex McLeish, who in the space of 24 hours has managed to suggest that Ajer will never be a top defender – after watching him once, in a guy he excelled in – and now has offered his solution to all the problems at Ibrox; make three times more money than they currently do.
Isn’t that brilliant? Isn’t that level of insight astonishing? This is just the kind of thinking that they should have at NASA, in that department that deals with near earth objects. He’s the guy you want on hand if a meteorite or comet is going to smash into the planet, killing all of us in a millisecond.
“Right Alex, what can we do?”
“Well the way I see it, we need to somehow find a way to deflect or destroy the object, and that way it won’t hit the Earth and wipe us all out.”
“Okay … and what do you have in mind?”
“Well I just told you that. We need to come up with something that will work.”
“But you’ve no specific ideas of your own?”
“I just gave them to you.”
Who rates our chances of survival?
If you think that was a surreal type conversation, you want to see how the real one panned out; it went exactly like this.
“You need to be spending the types of money Celtic are spending. The type of money, the wages, I don’t know what the ratio is … Celtic may be 3/1? Spending three times more than (Sevco.) If (Sevco) can get three times the money they may be on a level footing with Celtic, certainly financially. But then the next key factor is recruitment.”
Wow. Aren’t you glad you’ve lived long enough to be the recipient of such wisdom?
Recruitment is key, but it’s a factor only after you somehow turn a club that can’t make a profit into a financial colossus, tripling turnover in what I can only presume is a short timeframe; we’re only four years from being on the brink of ten in a row, of course.
Does he know where this money is coming from? Of course not. It’s not even clear that he’s talking about income rising to Celtic’s level; he’s talking about money in the mattress it seems to me, or perhaps planting a forest of magic money trees.
These Peepul really do believe it just falls from the sky, don’t they?
The idea of building something has no appeal to them whatsoever. They want to buy it. And especially if someone else is picking up the cheque. Anyone who contemplated an “investment” in that club would be off their nut. It is too filled with guys like McLeish.
This is 2018. But some people still think they’re in the Murray years.
As long as they do, the pain is never going to end.
