First Things First, Sevco Doesn’t See Past This Ten In A Row Thing.
Fergus McCann came to Celtic Park with a five-year plan. He did not come to Celtic Park with a three year plan, and that’s how close Rangers were to the dreaded number. You cannot understand Fergus without understanding that above and beyond everything else. Fergus knew that it was important to win a league, but it wasn’t the be all and end all.
For Sevco, stopping ten in a row has become the all-encompassing fixation. It influences everything, from signing policy to managerial selection. When we secure title eight the frustration level will go sky high. Win nine and there will be a bloodbath over there.
Fergus hired Tommy Burns because he believed Burns would work tirelessly in pursuit of the goal. But Tommy’s goal was stopping the nine. He gave everything to it, and that’s what Fergus came to realise. Tommy was too emotionally invested. Fergus knew that if it was going to happen he needed someone who could maintain some distance, and approach it in a detached way. Hence bringing in a guy like Wim Jansen, with no connection to our club and who could disengage from all the hype and just focus on doing the job.
In the boardroom, Fergus had a different job. He was rebuilding the whole club. He realised it might not yield a league flag before being completed. He didn’t let that influence him.
A lesser man, one who cared about that stuff, would have changed the plan to accommodate unfortunate circumstances; at Ibrox Van Hooijdonk, Cadete, Di Canio and others might have got hefty wage rises just for threatening to go when their opponents were on the brink of making history, but Fergus stuck to his guns because he realised that sticking to the strategy was where the long-term benefits would be.
We didn’t always like it. Fergus got booed unfurling his league flag; it was a shameful moment, but I can see it now through the prism of the times. There was no online community to counter the appalling media inspired perception of the man. People believed what they read, and they read that this was a guy who actually lacked vision and clarity … utter nonsense, as time and circumstances have borne out in spades. We didn’t always get what he was trying to do. It’s only now that we see it for what it was. It grounded us. It prepared us for a reality that much of football still refuses to embrace. It was visionary. It was a kind of genius.
And it took amazing courage, and self-belief. Can you imagine being the man, flying in the face of media negativity, hostility wafting out of Ibrox, the sneering of Murray … and then being booed by your own fans? To keep on going through it, to never alter the plan, to move forward regardless … I never cease to be amazed when I look back on it.
At Ibrox, everyone blows in the prevailing wind. The slightest pressure can knock them off course. Fergus himself might have folded the hand faced with the ridiculous over-reaction and grotesque over-expectation amongst that support. The plan (if you can call it that) changes every five minutes and never seems to get better.
The focus on stopping ten in a row is pure blindness, and it’s way past the point where they can tell the fans that such things don’t matter in the long run. Even Fergus would never have told the fans that it wasn’t a big deal … but as amazing as this will sound, he’d have been right if he had. Because we had survived a near death experience and had a whole club to build and an overwhelming focus on that would have set that job back years.
Sevco crawled out of Rangers’ grave. The whole structure at Ibrox was levelled. They started in the bottom tier. The task of putting that together would have taken a decade even without all the false turns and bad choices. What they needed more than money and ego was a sense of realism about that in the boardroom … and through all the turmoil and the turnover and the coups and the bloodshed, they haven’t got it yet.
How clear was Fergus’ vision?
Well, his revolution paid off in just three years and he did it without indulging the whims of various parties or pandering to either the supporters or greedy players and agents. King and his board has already had three years, and they’ve wasted so much money already that the debts are piling up around them and there’s no end to the chaos in sight.