You have to hand it to the Peepul at Sevco’s PR department.
They really do go all-out at times. Having spent the entirety of the week thus far suggesting that Irish businessmen are trying to take over Scottish football, and that people with links to Celtic can’t be trusted to act objectively, there’s growing excitement amongst their fans today about the likely design of their new strips.
And this makes me laugh, because, to be frank, it’s bonkers.
Apparently one of their away tops will be orange, satisfying a demand from a certain section of their fan-base which goes back a long, long way. Needless to say, the Neanderthals amongst their support are positively over-the-moon. Many intend to buy it merely as a “provocation” to the rest of the populace. “It drives them nuts,” one gleefully said.
“No, it makes you look nuts,” would be my reply to that. And that’s if I was being generous. If I was being completely honest I’d say “It makes you look like a bigoted yahoo.” Which is exactly what it will do, and not just to the individual fans wearing it.
They got away with this once before, of course, when they brought out an orange shirt in the Advocaat era.
Their fans loved that, but hid behind the excuse that it was in honour of their Dutch manager and the Dutch contingent he had brought with him. What excuse will they offer this time? It’s in honour of Gerrard’s favourite favour of Club biscuit?
Sevco is getting ready to proudly wear its sectarianism on its back. It’s a celebration of “PUL culture” and there’s no other way to interpret it. Many of their supporters are quite open about that, and the club will pander to it shamelessly.
Hey, if Gerrard had the slightest doubts about what he’s walking into, this should be the first step towards turning his head on straight. The guy who named his daughter Lourdes is about to take over at a club which is nakedly dancing toe-to-toe with the gutter rats of Loyalism. And this is equally clear from the Union Jack design shirt which their fans are chuffed with. At a time when their supporters are telling the world that Gerrard expands their horizons the club’s own shirt manufacturer is getting ready to show how limited those horizons are.
To be associated with that club means being tainted by this mind-set. This pro-Union, imperialist, militarist, Loyalist ideology. There’s no escaping from it, and it has a way of seeping in even to the most moderate people at the club. Pedro Caixinha’s final major acts at the club were to have a supremacist slogan emblazoned on the dressing room walls and to ban green boots.
And he was a Portuguese Catholic.
There is no greater evidence that there’s a sickness in Ibrox and its catching.
Before too long, Gerrard and his squad, emblazoned in either of those grotesque shirts, will be parading on the pitch at Linfield and the chorus about being up to their knees in Irish and Catholic blood will be ringing in his ears.
I wonder how proud he will feel on that day? I wonder what his image consultants will think? I wonder what harm it will do to “the Gerrard brand”? It’s far too late for him to give consideration to those matters. This is his first day at work, and it seems fitting that the media and the Sevco sites are focussed on whether or not they’ll wear orange next season.
That club has no wish to grow and be more than it is. Its adherents are content to swim in the scum swamp that Rangers once drowned in, and the media which has spent the week pushing a conspiracy theory will not, at any point, ask Gerrard if he feels the club should be quite so nakedly embracing 17th century ideals.
But just because he’s not going to be asked the question it doesn’t mean he’ll be free of the taint of it. It will follow him for the rest of his career.
And the club itself will never move on, it will never get bigger, it will never be more than it is. Whilst Celtic openly advertises itself as “a club open to all” Sevco is about to demonstrate, again, that it’s entire ethos is tailored for, and to, one specific, and shrinking, section of our society, and one that the rest of us would like to see washed away.
So much for expanding their “global footprint.”
They’ve once again shrunk back to the fringes, towards the dregs, confirming again that those running things over there are entirely without a clue. Every positive they might have gotten from the Gerrard appointment will be erased at a stroke the second their players walk out onto the pitch dressed like they’ve just stumbled home drunk from an Orange walk.
But that is who they are.
That’s never going to change now.