When does the truth start to sink in for you, Steven Gerrard?
When does it dawn on you?
When will it start to hit home?
Today your club announced the designs of their three kits for the season; their run-of-the-mill blue jersey, their blue, white and red sash pattern and last but by no means least their orange strip, long rumoured and now arrived.
This is who you are now, Gerrard.
This is the club you call your own.
So when does it finally start to dawn on you what it means?
When you see the first footage of yobs in that ghastly sectarian third kid, lobbing petrol bombs at police over in the Six Counties during “the marching season”? Will it be during the pre-season annual bigot’s beano in Linfield where you have to stand there and applaud a marching band playing pure bile?
Will it come when you take your first shift on the touchline and hear that dirge about their fans being up to their knees in Irish and Catholic blood start up behind you?
Will it be when you walk up towards the black clad “singing section” and see all those “Red Hand Salutes”?
Will it dawn on you then?
Will it finally start to seem real?
And this is not confined to the stands or the dives and hovels of Belfast and Bridgton Cross.
The orange strip was worked on by the club’s marketing department and those at Hummel. This was sanctioned at the very top of the house, by people who know full well the connotations of it and wholeheartedly approve of the club’s association with them.
It doesn’t matter what you do from here on in, the stink of this is never going to wash off you. The first time you’re photographed beside some tattooed thug or terrorist at some fans shin-dig, or videoed bouncing around to some sectarian anthem, that’s your reputation trashed for all the rest of your life. Sponsors will run. Image consultants will bail out on you faster than a former Rangers player turning down a move to the NewCo.
This is inevitable because this is the club you are at, and when you see those pictures of those strip designs you cannot be in any doubt that it goes all the way to the top. This is a club mired in this stuff, in filth, in scandal, in sectarianism, in hate.
And with your profile, the goons will be lining up to have their pictures taken with you. They will be queuing up to get in close and make their introductions. And the first time you shake a hand that’s held a blade or a gun then you’re over.
Those strips are not an aberration. Wait until Poppy Day with all the shrieking nonsense that goes on then. Armed Forces Day and all that entails. A working class lad who played for a working class club, entwined now in militarism, empire and the stink of Ulster Loyalism, and whose team will advertise that fact every time they take the field in one of those hideous tops.
When does it start to hit you? Maybe it already has.
You wanna know the amazing thing? That it didn’t hit you before now. That you didn’t think of this before you signed on the dotted line. That you didn’t consider your family and what you’ll say when your daughter asks you, on her first visit to Ibrox, what all those ugly men are singing about. Will you have the guts, then, to tell her the truth?
“They’re singing about you, dear. They’re singing about you.”