It was Ella Fitzgerald who said that “into every life a little rain must fall.” Ask Ibrox fans how they’re getting on without their umbrellas. Since 2012, they’ve forgotten what “a little” rain feels like; their current club was born amidst scandal and disgrace and for every day since its inception a cold wind has been blowing and the water has been coming down.
What’s it like to live in the centre of a storm?
Do you get used to it?
I think after a while you must.
There’s a movie in the cinema right now called A Quiet Place; it’s a monster movie, of sorts, but with a difference. The monsters are blind, but they have highly sensitive ears. The survivors of whatever calamity has befallen the world have to live their lives in complete silence so as not to be found.
And in spite of the enormous hardships, they manage.
Because people do. We can get used to anything. We can handle anything. It’s why our species has done so well.
How do you get used to a situation that’s ever fluent though?
How do you adapt to a situation where the problem isn’t bleak despair that things will never get any better but the constant rise and fall of hope? It’s hope that really kills you; it’s hope that strangles you slowly. It teases you. It torments you. It ties you in knots.
There’s a moment in Band of Brothers when a hardened veteran tells a rookie solider who wants to simply live in his foxhole that the only hope he has is to realise that he has no hope at all. Resign himself to death, embrace the horror, and that will allow him to function as a solider, and ironically give him the best chance he has of surviving.
I think of that often when I think about Sevco.
It didn’t have to be this way for their tortured supporters. They could have accepted that as a new club it was going to be years and years and years before they were capable of challenging for a league title in the top flight. They could have been patient. They could have developed their club gradually, carefully, slowly … they could have lowered expectations across the board. But it would have meant dumping out the old supremacy.
Instead they clung to the idea that they were somehow superior to every other club. They clung to it so tightly they got stuck to it, without realising that it was a lead weight and would only pull them down. Next weekend, at Hampden, all the chickens come home to roost.
And for no people more so than those who cheered King into the club and who continue to believe, or at least to continue to try and convince other people, that he will deliver everything he promised, and that disaster won’t befall them because of the mere association with him.
They are fools to doubt that it will.
The one constant since King walked through the door has been turmoil. In fact, the turmoil at Ibrox preceded his being there but much of it was his fault nonetheless. He worked tirelessly to destabilise the old board. He called for boycotts. His drip-drip of information from his wee blackmail box put them under constant pressure.
The media loved it all. They supported his campaign – his campaign which violated takeover regulations and possibly even the law itself. They cheered a convicted tax cheat and serial criminal through the gates and then demanded that the SFA not even bother with fit and proper person status. All of it, because they believed he had wealth and intended to lavish it on the club. All of it because they believed that Dave King had a plan.
Look at the state of that club this weekend, where they were reduced to bringing in 38 year old Kenny Miller for a game against Dundee. Managed by a guy who’s contract lasts only until the end of the season. Uncertain swirling around them. Skint, facing probes into their finances by UEFA and who knows who else. King himself, on the edge of a contempt of court charge.
This is Sevco under the King board. A shambles. Their grand plan, whatever it was, is in ruins and that must now be readily apparent to every single one of their fans. There is no happy ending here, just a bitter drawn out and painful one where Sevco keeps on bleeding.
King has appointed four different managers since he became chairman, including Murty. Next Sunday he will have to face up to the hard fact that the youth coach doesn’t command the respect of the fans or the loyalty of the players. He will have to accept that the experiment is over. He will have to accept that his grand stratagem is in pieces and that another summer of uncertainty is what’s awaiting the club and the supporters.
He will have to accept failure, and his media toadies will have to accept failure. How many more times will these people write that “King has to get it right this time” before they realise that King either doesn’t know how to or doesn’t care? How much more evidence do they want that this guy hasn’t a clue to pull them out of this tailspin?
There never was a plan, only Dave King’s usual arrogant assumption that things would just fall into place, that two-bob bosses would still have enough about them to come in and whip Celtic. It is typical of this guy and those around him that he didn’t just believe this but that he got other people to believe in it as well. They believe because he fills their heads with utter nonsense about how the club is special, how they are special. They are the Peepul.
I say once more what I have on this site before now, and if Sevco simply understood this, if their fans did, if they accepted it, they would all be happier for it; that club and its supporters have two choices. They either accept what they are, where they are and where that leaves them in relation to us … or there will be a third club playing out of Ibrox before long, starting at the bottom again, clawing its way to credibility one year at a time.
Come this time next weekend, King will have to face sacking yet another manager. It’s always the guy in the dugout who pays the price for mistakes at Ibrox that have been made much, much higher up the food chain. King broke this. He owns it.
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