I have heard so many stories about Kenny Miller in the past few years, about how he’s mistreated this person and that person inside Ibrox, about how the last three managers have been undermined and talked about, I’ve heard how he’s been a disruptive influence in the dressing room. I have never heard such stories about Lee Wallace.
There were four moments during the Sevco game at the weekend which should seriously trouble people at the club. Three of them happened out on the pitch or at its side, and one happened in the tunnel. The first was the Andy Halliday incident as he was going off. The second was Candelas as he marched up the tunnel. The third was the on-pitch incident involving Docherty and Morelos and the fourth was the moment in the tunnel between the two men.
They were public displays of egregious indiscipline. They were signs of a complete breakdown in respect between people at the club. There was an ugly mood in the Sevco team, and it erupted in various stages, all day long.
Don’t let anybody tell you either that this is why they lost the game. They lost the game because we turned up for business and got on with it. We were magnificent and we owned them from the minute the first ball was kicked.
The fury that erupted afterwards has been bubbling up for weeks, in the fear and loathing that has gripped Ibrox since we went there and won. They believed they would beat us that day and emerge as serious challengers for our title; the club is still shell-shocked by what actually took place. When we emerged from there with the three points in spite of being behind twice and playing much of the second half with ten men it showed them how far ahead we were.
The cup semi-final simply affirmed what many of them already knew.
Their anger has exploded. It is directed everywhere, and nowhere. Those running the club might be rank amateurs but they are not stupid men. They know that anger goes somewhere else or it comes to them. They have the deflector shields up, and whatever happened in that dressing room, Miller and Lee Wallace are the lightning rods.
I understand the Miller issue. He should have been run out of Ibrox last year, when he labelled the manager a “fraud” and was allowed to get away with it. But Lee Wallace is a Sevco folk hero, and not for nothing. He was one of the few players who took his Rangers contract over to Charles Green’s NewCo. He stayed loyal to the idea of the Survival Lie.
But loyalty means nothing at Ibrox, and he’s not the first person to find that out. Under this board, in particular, it has a short half-life. King’s board seems to get a kick out of turning on its own. Look at what happened to Bates last week, and it goes deeper. Remember that Joey Barton had his medical records leaked to the press; that club respects nothing.
Yesterday I highlighted a story about how two Sevco fan sites had fallen out over a story about Wallace having been passed fit for the game at the weekend, only to pull out of the squad. The person punting that story was Mark Dingwall of Follow Follow; it was quickly refuted by friends of the player. The SevcoMedia site knew who it believed and although I have no information one way or the other to refute either claim, I know which is more likely.
Today The Daily Record is carrying a nearly identical story to the one Follow Follow was pushing. It stinks of an Ibrox PR operation designed to cast the two players in the worst possible light. We know the Ibrox PR people do this. They did it with Bates. They did it with Warburton. They did it with Caixinha. They did it with Barton. They did it with McInnes.
And now they are brutalising Miller and Wallace. Whatever happened in that dressing room could have stayed there. If the players overstepped the mark the matter could have been dealt with quietly, internally, and the message would have been just as clear. But Sevco needed someone to blame for the weekend’s humiliation, and that’s the role these two have been assigned; scapegoats. Because if the defeat was their fault then it couldn’t be anyone else’s.
What a disgrace that club is.
It has no morals whatsoever. Service to it means nothing. Loyalty does not matter. They will sacrifice anyone, reputation and all. They will drive a tank over their own captain’s legacy, to keep the pressure off the men at the top.
I have no doubt that something transpired in the dressing room that went beyond criticism; I know for a fact it did. But it is not the first dressing room in which something like that has taken place. Murty is not the first manager to get criticised to his face. The message out of Ibrox right now that they “will not tolerate dissent” is fascistic in tone, but it’s nothing compared to the venom that pours out of the club whenever they want to play the deflection game.
Wallace and Miller are the latest in a long line of people with deep roots at the club who’ve been turned into hate figures by those inside the walls.
Anyone who considers going there to work should take note; this is how they treat even those who’ve given the full measure of devotion to the cause. Imagine what they will do to somebody who simply goes there to do a job … and one they’ve made impossible into the bargain?
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