Humiliation can be good for you, if it focuses your thinking. Like a guy who thinks he’s hot shit and can take anyone on and who gets slapped about one night by somebody he thought he could bully, there is value in learning your limits.
You would think that suffering a major humiliation would force Sevco towards some kind of self-analysis. You would think that it would make them think. I cannot believe the attitudes of their fans and many of their media apologists tonight.
Sober reflection is not happening. Instead these people are retreating to their default view; the club needs “investment” if it’s to catch Celtic and this must happen. They must spend, because that’s the only way to “catch” us.
What planet are these people living on?
No club in world football, no support anywhere on the planet, needs a dose of hard reality like this lot do. It doesn’t matter how many skelpings we hand out; they are still not getting it. Sevco has hit the glass ceiling. They have come as far as they will. It is time to accept their place and position and start acting accordingly.
And what does that mean? It means facing a few home truths and the first of them is this; the club is already spending too much money. They are over-budget and they need to start making cuts. You will not convince people of that. Far from upping the ante, this is a club in dire need of some serious austerity. But even the idea brings people there out in a cold sweat.
This has to happen though. Their club is in freefall and they cannot spend their way out of it, even if there was money available, which there is not. The situation over there is truly dire; I have to say that it is much worse than many people appear to realise, and I include some of our fans in that. They do still worry that Sevco will somehow recover, that they will find money in the mattress, that they will eventually “get it right.”
But the problems over there run deeper than just their obsession with catching our club. Sevco has never really been competing against Celtic; Sevco has been competing against Rangers, trying to live up to that “standard”, trying to be as big a club.
The thing is, Rangers never was. They were an artificial construct. That club was built on sand. The cash that funded all those signings was funny money; the second the bank stopped indulging Murray’s business empire the party was over. Sevco will never manage to reach that level because those days are over. The big spending days at Ibrox are done, and they are not coming back because they were never “real” in the first place.
And that’s where Sevco struggles to adjust.
If they could see clearly what Rangers was they would never have embraced that name and the Survival Lie which underpins it all. They would have run a mile from it. The second they took it on they took on a level of expectation that was not only unrealistic but unrealisable.
To continue with this nonsense when even the most stupid of them can see that it is toxic is simply unbelievable. There is no shame to a team scrapping for third place being whipped by the best club in the country. But they feel shame, acutely, but only because they believe they are more than they are.
They are a six year old NewCo barely on its feet.
The sooner they realise that the better off and the happier they will be. But you can no longer be in the slightest doubt that the very act of confronting that would screw them up even more. They are not built to deal with reality any longer; this is a club that exists in a half-light of delusional, paranoia and hate.
They are collapsing in front of our eyes, but they hold the perverse view that there are still answers to be found in the past … and there are, but not ones they have any interest in embracing. The disease that killed Rangers is coursing through their bloodstream and it is going to kill them just as surely.
I don’t think anything can stop it now.
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