V is for Victim Lie
Back in 2012, when the decision was taken that Sevco should start its pitiful footballing life in the bottom tier, there was very little argument about that outcome anywhere in the game. Even the Ibrox fan-base was reasonably sanguine about it.
The reason for this is that most people acknowledged the Death of Rangers and accepted that the NewCo would be a brand new club.
Even Sevco fans understood this simple truth.
Yet Charles Green had no sooner gotten his hands on the assets than he was pushing what we call the Survival Lie. Rangers had not died at all. He had saved them, using those big Yorkshire hands of his to heal the club and take them forward up through the ranks.
Green knew his audience well. On the club’s first game he stood on the touchline and said that Scottish football had stabbed them in the back.
He called the SFA and those who ran the clubs “sectarian.” His assertion was based on a simple truth, one of those Unspoken Facts which people in charge here don’t want to acknowledge; if Rangers and Sevco were the same club then what the SFA and the SPL did to them was illegal.
Think about that. Is there a more dangerous assertion in Scottish football than the idea that Rangers was destroyed by the rest of Scottish football? That a club that ran into financial trouble was thrown down through the leagues out of jealousy and spite?
Their fans have been fuming over this for six years now, and they aren’t ready to make nice.
Scottish football continues to push it every single day that it supports the Survival Lie.
Nobody wants to confront the myriad contradictions of that particular fiction, and that means all of us are living with the consequences of the other big lie that toxifies the sport. The Ibrox fans really do believe they are the only people who suffered here, that the suffering was forced on them, that it was a product of hatred.
We can’t move forward until that is spiked.
