Last night, as the chilling wind of reality was still blowing through a silent Ibrox from the weekend’s pasting at the hands of Celtic, a minor scandal broke when a Club 1872 director published a stunning resignation statement that alleged, amongst other things, that the club had been paying Chris Graham for work on behalf of their so-called “independent” organisation.
The fury was palpable on SevcoMedia, whose members have long believed that Club 1872 could not be trusted to properly represent supporter opinion. If you wonder how that club got itself into such a state as this, Club 1872 provides part of the answer. Sevco fans are not the sharpest tools in the box, and in the aftermath of the King takeover he made sure all his little acolytes got their rewards even if some of them don’t have the intellect of sea slugs.
A support still reeling from Sunday has fractured still further and the key supporters group has, once more, been revealed as heavily compromised. The timing could not be worse.
For days now, the club has been quieter than the graveyard where they buried Rangers.
There was a brief flurry of triumphalism as they won a Glasgow Cup last night in a match where the ref seemed determined to ensure that no further trauma was inflicted on them. But even their fans aren’t convinced by such posturing. They know this is a mess.
This morning, the whole think sunk to yet another level of farce as Graeme Murty left the club.
Was he fired? Did he resign?
The fact nobody knows for sure the answer to that question is proof of how big a mess all this is, and it’s into this swirl of crisis, which gives off all the appearance of a club in complete freefall, that Steven Gerrard holds further talks with them.
The utter absurdity of the Gerrard story and all surrounding it requires an article all of its own, and I’ll do one later today, but the continuous drum-beat of trouble out of Ibrox comes because that club is stuck in the mud. They are a laughing stock not because all of Scottish football hates them but because of how they conduct themselves.
It is unprofessional. It is anarchic.
Yesterday, Brendan accused them of throwing Murty “under a bus” and he was absolutely correct to have done so, but this is what that club does now. It stabs in front those who show loyalty but do not meet the ludicrous “standards”. Gerrard would be a pure fool to take this job on, especially as it’s been revealed that some in the boardroom don’t even want him.
Think on that for a moment. He’s not even started yet and already there are people inside Ibrox who do not think he’s up to the job. This is Pythonesque; you have a Sevco boardroom split into camps, King off doing his own thing, Mark Allen signing players with no boss in place and a power structure so convoluted and all over the place that if you drew it as a diagram MIT graduates would not be able to make head nor tail of it.
As the club slips deep into the darkness today the only unanswered questions are how far they go and how long they stay there. Nobody sane would willingly walk into this. I cannot believe that Gerrard has not already flatly told them “no.”
For Graeme Murty, at least, the pain is over.
Most of the reports today suggest that he’s walked and the only thing I can say to that is that if he had done it before this weekend he would have saved himself a lot of grief. The Gerrard story should have been the final straw. No manager can work whilst all that stuff is going on behind his back.
He took the job willingly, and stuck with it way longer than he ought, so any sympathy I have for him is limited, but it would take someone with a heart of stone not to see that the way they’ve treated him has been disgusting.
His win record of over 60% would have kept him in work at just about any other club.
Had he been at Hibs or Aberdeen he would have got the gig over the long haul and allowed to see what happened when he made some signings of his own, although no-one knows where the money for that was coming from.
But as usual at Ibrox the quest for instant results has hampered any hope of stability.
And that’s why this is going to go on and on and on.
Postscript: The club has just announced that Murty was sacked. But shockingly, they’ve told him he can return to his duties as a coach. So his choices are no job and a job nobody would want. What a disgusting organisation that is. What a shambles. Hell mend the person who next sits in that chair.
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