Should Celtic triumph on Sunday as we all expect, Sevco fans need not look far for succour. They can, if they are minded, do what they so often do and dwell on the past and on the glories of yesteryear. They can even indulge in a little fantasy.
Nothing would be new in that scenario, would it?
One of Warren Zevon’s finest songs is a tremendous tune called The Indifference Of Heaven; the narrator could have been writing for Ibrox Noise when he said “The past is realer than the present to me now, I have memories to last me.” It is even truer in the next lines when he says, “When the sky is grey, the way it is today, I remember the times when I was happy.”
And this is a familiar refrain from them … it is one of the reasons they can’t move on.
The trouble is, they are trapped in the past and they do not accept that time has marched on and left them behind.
They have never bothered to separate the reality of the bank financed glories of the Rangers era from the realities of the board financed strategies of this one, with the brutal difference being that this board could not spend the kind of money that the banks allowed Rangers to, and even if they could Celtic is far stronger.
The Ibrox club’s share one commonality; the illusion of strength, supported by Other People’s Money, except now that’s no longer enough.
This is why I cannot believe that McCoist picked this weekend, of all available ones, to feed the beast more scraps from the fantasy dinner table when he chucked the “I remember when we almost signed Luka Modric” story at them today.
No club’s supporters are less in need of reading supremacist guff like this than theirs are.
I laughed reading that, because even if it were something other than an absolute piece of Jack in the Beanstalk fiction, it simple serves to contrast the “grand old days of yore” with the poverty at Ibrox right now, where they have to pretend a £50,000 grand signing from Dundee can anchor a midfield well enough to merit interest from Juventus.
These people live in a fairytale, and there has never been a more dangerous time for them to do so. As I once wrote of that mind-set, if you’re going to live in a fantasy world you should always be afraid of dragons; a big green one is eyeing them right now like a morning snack.
Even if those days at Ibrox had been real – when Ronaldo was being touted with a move, when McLeish was trying to sign Messi, when McCoist had a shot at getting Luka Modric; none of this was remotely likely of course – those days are over. They are over forever. This is not a temporary hiatus, with normal service soon to be resumed. It’s done.
A lot of people – and I include a lot of Celtic fans in this too, by the way – still refuse to see the reality of what happened at Ibrox following 14 February 2012.
Rangers was destroyed, as if a nuclear bomb hit it. It was razed to the ground. We’re almost eight years into the existence of Sevco and they are still not grasping what it means to have been assembled from the bits of the club which was there before, a club which was obliterated.
The club at Ibrox right now might, in time, win trophies … it may even properly challenge for a title, but this will last only as long as it takes to give Celtic a shake back into life, because that’s what it’s ultimately going to take for us to be caught on the long timeline.
A generation of dominance does not necessarily meant that our club will win everything all the time; we are, in fact, living in an exceptional period where our club is doing things no other has done in the history of the game here.
A generation of dominance is one where our winning things is so routine that success for other teams becomes the aberration … and that is all any fleeting Ibrox victory will be from now on.
Luka Modric? Good God. This is like a retreat from a hard reality into the comforts of insanity. Who but Peepul already insane would believe that a good thing?
What these stupid stories are designed to do is to focus the minds of the Peepul backwards because, in point of fact, they really don’t have that much to look forward to.
Nothing except what Warren Zevon, in another song, called “trouble waiting to happen.”
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