I have, for years now, harboured a sick kind of fantasy. It’s that of the Peepul running their football club. Tattooed, beer-gutted, shaved headed yahoos, manning the soft seats in the director’s box and surveying the majesty of Ibrox. Their Ibrox. Leaky roofs and all.
The thought tickles me and it always has. Imagine stripping that support of all its illusions about sugar-daddy owners and “big investors” and leaving them to their own devices. Imagine them sitting in those offices with no-one to fall back on and thereby nobody else to blame. Imagine them owning the supremacy and all the mistakes that go with it.
Who would they blame? Who would they turn on?
Each other, of course. Hence my amusement.
Waddell thinks its viable. He thinks the club should have dumped all that baggage years ago, all that “we are Rangers and we have to win” nonsense. I agree with him. They should have. But you know why they never did and never will? The fans he so lauds, and who he appears to believe exist as a wholly separate thing from the problems plaguing the club.
They are the problem. They are the club.
Charles Green came to Ibrox with no baggage whatsoever. He would have run it like just another club, but he realised almost the minute he had the assets, that the fans would respond better if he basked in the old supremacy and stoked the hate. So he stood on a pitch and made a speech where he blamed everyone else in Scottish football for what happened to the OldCo and in that moment created the Survival Lie’s evil twin The Victim Lie.
He blamed it on sectarianism. And the sectarians in their support ate it up like Sunday dinner. When you see the world through a prism of hate I guess every problem looks like your reflection. These fans revel in this stuff. Waddell knows this, so I don’t know what the Hell he is talking about when he promotes them as the answer to ridding the club of all this stuff.
You only have to see their reaction to last week to see how disengaged from reality they are. Today at home, the fascistic Union Bears had a silent protest; silent, that is, except for their banner against the board which proclaimed that “we deserve better” as if winning trophies was something football fans were entitled to and which clubs had no choice but to deliver.
If the club didn’t need to pander to such egomania, the directors might have the breathing space to actually get on with the job at hand. That club needs building from the bottom up, and all the self-entitlement will not help get that task underway.
None of it matters, not in the end, because there’s something else going on with this article and it’s patently obvious what it is, and it has exactly nothing to do with fan ownership; what Waddell has written today isn’t really about the fans, or not in terms of them owning the club which even he knows is a pipe dream.
In fact, it is an open entreaty for them to put their hands in their pockets and fund phony share issues that could have come right out of the Dave King Book of Wishes. Whether Waddell is taking his lead from the club PR or not, he’s spinning of behalf of the King agenda and Club 1872. He’s telling the fans to pony up … without any actual guarantee of control.
Which is a shame, because thinking of them all together, around the same table, the Sevco Media guys, the Ibrox Noise editorial team, the Follow Follower’s, the Vanguard Scum and the fascists of the Union Bears … it makes me positively giddy.
I would say it would be good to be a fly on the wall … but only if you were the sort of fly that could subsist on drinking blood. There’s be lots of it.
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