I don’t like Davie Provan and I don’t like his articles. The ex-Celt is a spiteful man who has no love whatsoever for our club and I say that with one of my earliest, and warmest, memories as a supporter being his Hampden free kick against Dundee Utd.
This weekend he wrote an article that has sparked gibbering fury on the Sevco forums. Our old friends at Ibrox Noise Up wrote a truly deranged piece on it because Provan had dared to call their UEFA Cup final team “bang average”. Anyone who saw them knows how accurate that description is, with that entire campaign a triumph for Smith’s anti-football brand.
But that wasn’t the real point of the piece, which was yet another canonisation piece about Sir Walter Of Ibrox, the patron saint of liquidation. The point was that Sevco board had wanted him to take the job again and he had turned them down.
Walter Smith would be the best Sevco manager we could ever hope for. No kidding. In our wildest dreams, he would be the number one choice. Forget knitting a team together; this guy would need tens of millions just to start that job and those days are gone. Whenever this guy had a restricted budget he could see the writing on the wall.
I’d love to see Brendan get his chance to put the all-conquering Walter to the sword.
Nothing would please me more. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. His ideas were outdated even when he was managing with them; in the modern game that guy would get found out with or without a big budget. The Real Rangers Men would finish the job of wrecking that club.
I found this weekend’s game at Ibrox highly amusing when you consider that what it boiled down to was a reunion of all the key faces who brought down the OldCo. I’m not sure if that’s why their fans stayed away from it or not, but those were there lapped it up like Pavlov’s slobbering dogs, and that never ceases to amaze me.
And what about that orange strip? Jesus, this lot just don’t get it, do they?
They have no idea how small-minded, bitter, narrowly sectarian, that stuff makes them look.
Rumour has it they are going to release an orange away strip next season, in an act of reckless pandering to the most regressive element of their support.
The Bigot Pound is vital to their survival. Without it they are dead.
It would be a fitting one for a team managed by Smith, though.
Walter Smith was the manager who blew it. He was Rangers boss at the moment the EBT tax bill came in, and he made no one single provision for a negative verdict in the appeal. In fact, he was running a ship so overburdened that it was bound to sink in the first heavy storm. Their club washed up on the rocks because of his own sterling mismanagement, his and that of the guy he made sure was appointed manager in his wake. What a mess they made of it.
Smith put his own popularity and his own legacy in front of doing right by the club; I can’t put it any more bluntly than that. That man gambled with the club’s future to maintain his own position as the darling of the fans. When it became clear that the gamble was going to fail sooner rather than later he got out. Even then he wasn’t done screwing them over; he sat on the Craig Whyte board. He gave that man the cover he needed whilst he finished the club off.
Sevco is going to run aground too.
Most of their fans had a clear understanding that that game was part charitable event and part fund raiser for the club. The paltry attendance is a sign of what happens when you ask the Peepul to put their hands in their pockets to finance running costs above and beyond the normal means. And yes, some Sevco fans will scream blue murder that it was a charity match, but we all know full well that much of the money from it will snake its way into the club coffers by various low-order means.
A lot of their stay-away fans realised this and they didn’t want to know, because they feel they’ve paid enough already.
And who can blame them for feeling that way?
The fans who turned up to cheer those two teams on all paid homage to the Great Walter and Super Ally, guys who might one day have Gallowgate pubs named after them.
They killed Rangers.
And their fans love them for it.
Pray that Smith completes the circle.
Pray he caves in to the flattery and the egotism and takes the Sevco job.
The laughter won’t stop for the whole time he’s in place.
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