Yesterday I did a piece on the ten decisions made inside Celtic Park which led us to nine in a row.
It can be read by clicking on this link.
Today I want to look at ten decisions, hilarious decisions, bad decisions, awful decisions, which happened elsewhere and which helped us along the way.
They include three disastrous managerial appointments, one boardroom coup, a needless war with a sports franchiser and a couple of other pieces of bizarre Ibrox behaviour.
No other football club in the world makes mammoth errors in judgement quite so consistently or over such a long period of time.
This is why we still call these “the banter years”; there is no end in sight to the Ibrox operations’ capacity for self-harm.
Even in the present time, when clubs are scrambling to make cuts, they continue to leak transfer stories to the press in the hope of convincing their own fans that they are making giant strides. They continue to hang on to delusions of grandeur.
Until they radically break from these patterns of behaviour they are never going to be able to touch us.
Indeed, mistakes made already make stopping ten impossible and have eroded their chances of preventing us from reaching 55 almost completely.
From Rangers to Sevco, the line of disasters is just about unbroken.
And to start with, let’s go all the way back to when there was still a club called Rangers playing at Ibrox … let’s go back to what might have been the worst bad decision of them all except for EBT’s …
David Murray Sells Rangers To A Chancer For A Quid
I have tried, many times, to think of any scenario where the spending of a quid guaranteed the kind of fun and games we’ve been treated to down through The Banter Years and I just can’t do it.
The £1 which Craig Whyte used to buy Rangers from David Murray still represents the pinnacle of cheap enjoyment.
I still remember where I was when I heard about it.
This was supposed to be the “biggest institution in Scotland after the church”; those were Murray’s own words.
And the thing was flogged like a cheap piece of tat, or one of those banks where the purchase conditions mean taking on toxic debt.
And look who bought the thing; I never ceased to be amazed at the lack of due diligence done when Whyte breezed into town.
The press release describing him as a billionaire was hilariously easy to knock down; I managed it in a less than an hour just by going through the Sunday Times Rich List.
No media outlet bothered to do anything like it.
But if Whyte was not everything the Ibrox fans hoped for, he more than delivered for us.
He wasn’t in the door a calendar year before the club was in administration.
The revelations tumbled out over the course of his time there, until every moment was joyous and the Rangers operation was falling apart at the seams.
He was at the helm when we won our first title.
Rangers was soon gone, but Whyte’s legend remains.
Indicted for a bunch of his alleged “crimes” he was cleared on the lot of them.
You have to love the guy.
Appointing Ally McCoist As Rangers Manager
Earlier on, I published a post about Ally McCoist and how Neil Lennon won that particular war.
But let’s be honest, there was not much doubt as to who was going to win it.
Lennon is a vastly better manager than McCoist is or was or will ever be.
The decision to appoint McCoist as Ibrox boss was utter lunacy.
Not only were his tactics a throwback to the 80’s, but once Sevco was born he insisted that it should behave exactly as Rangers had done even though behaving that way is what killed Rangers.
The 5 star hotels, the SPL players to beat bottom division teams, the snarking in the media, all of it conspired to destroy not only his reputation but the two sides he was entrusted with. He couldn’t even win the lower-league trophy, the Challenge Cup.
The results in those competitions were absolutely embarrassing for them and hilarious for the rest of us.
They wasted years on this guy.
He wasted millions on dreck.
Their side could have been built by youth players and they could have been slinging the cash they saved in the back.
If they had done that, Sevco might have been in a position to challenge us at some point.
But those wasted years and millions can never be gotten back.
The consequences of appointing McCoist at Rangers and then at Sevco are disastrous for the Ibrox club.
We have been able to build a decisive, and unassailable, lead in part because those in charge over there wanted to cater to this guys giant ego.
What an error it was.
Sevco Directors Needling Dermot Desmond At Hampden
Hubris invites Nemesis.
This was the formula that the Ancient Greeks spotted, and which leads people and institutions down the road to disaster.
Hubris exploded at Hampden when Sevco knocked us out of the Scottish Cup on penalties.
That day, in the executive lounge, their directors got so carried away that they violated all established protocols of even common decency. and taunted our board.
Unfortunately for this tiny band of pygmies, they had forgotten they were posturing in front of a man of genuine means and world class business acumen, a man who does not take kindly to being made to feel like a fool, in any way shape or form.
Desmond bristled at their insults.
He told Lawwell that Ronny would go at the end of the season and that the club would stop at nothing to bring the best possible person to Celtic Park as his replacement. Rodgers was the name he must have had on his mind the whole time, and the pursuit of him was soon in high gear.
The rest is history.
Of all the errors Sevco’s board made along the way, this is the worst.
The trophies which have followed are the legacy of their ghastly error in judgement … they didn’t even close the deal to win the Scottish Cup.
Rodgers’ appointment was timed to perfection, being announced on the day before the game, which Hibs duly won.
They were the last team outside Celtic Park to win a major honour.
That was eleven trophies ago.
Joey Barton And The Other Assorted Duds Of 2016
The events of the summer of 2016 will go down in the history books as some of the most hilarious of The Banter Years.
Remember the hype that surrounded that Sevco team, the one which was headlined by Joey Barton and Niko Kranjcar?
The Internet Bampots were brilliant at doing their research, and they were scathing about the signings of most of these guys.
I was always amused to see a guy called Crooks playing at Ibrox and took pleasure in seeing that name on the back of the shirt, but he was actually one of the lesser disasters of that time.
Garner, Senderos, Jordan Rossiter and others were costlier in the long terms, and of course Kranjcar and Barton brought no end of laughs.
Remember the media coverage on Barton in particular?
How can you have forgotten it?
The player was the most hyped signing in the recent history of the game, and what a colossal failure he turned out to be.
That picture of him looking at his feet as Brown glared at him is the stuff of legend.
He did not turn in a single major display, and was soon sent packing after a dressing room bust-up with the manager.
If possible, Kranjcar did even less.
Before the season was over, Warburton had been “resigned.”
And just when you thought that things couldn’t get crazier, or more hilarious, over there … well, they did.
The Appointment Of Pedro Caixinha
Pedro Caixinha was the best thing to happen to jelly and ice cream sales since Craig Whyte bought the first Ibrox club for £1.
This appointment was a disaster on every level, from seeing him address fans from inside the bushes when a Luxembourgian team knocked them out of Europe to the bizarre press conferences which people will be talking about for years.
The best of it is, this guy was hired without any due diligence being done.
The man was hired via Skype.
He didn’t even have a face-to-face interview with the Ibrox club until he’d already agreed to take the job.
Dave King says he didn’t personally meet him until the Portuguese turned up at the ground to start work.
You have to remember, too, that the media overhyped this guy to a fare-thee-well; The Daily Record in particular wrote some cringe inducing stuff about him before he was in the post.
The article which compared him to James Bond because he was a fitness fanatic who had once ridden a jet-ski was so bad that all involved should have been fired.
Again, this was a guy the media did no due diligence on at all.
His signings were a mixed bag, most of them useless.
I said at the time that if St Johnstone had signed these guys they’d have been tipped as a mid-table team at best.
Not even the European humiliation stopped the press from hoping for a miracle; it was never going to come.
The Portuguese Bond squandered more millions the club didn’t have.
They actually went backwards under him, which few of us even thought was possible.
The Off License Putsch Which Put Elevated King To The Top Table
Dave King is the last kind of person who should ever have been allowed to take the top post at Ibrox; it was a disaster on every level for a Scottish club which was already reeling from scandal to let a convicted tax fraudster and notorious liar take over there.
King’s first act was to remove them from the City of London exchanges.
They lost their Nominated Advisor.
Any chance they had of raising external cash went by the boards, and it is a position that haunts them even today.
The takeover itself was later investigated by the City of London Panel and they concluded that King had violated the law.
He was later given the notorious “cold shoulder.”
It was the kiss of death for his “chairmanship”, which up until the day he left the SFA regarded as “fit and proper.”
Under King’s leadership they sacked McCoist, hired Stuart McCall briefly, sacked him, hired Mark Warburton, sacked him, replaced him with Graeme Murty temporarily, demoted him to appoint Caixinha, sacked him, replaced him again with Murty and hired Steven Gerrard who had never been in charge of a professional side for a single game.
They also got involved in a ream of litigation, some of which I’ll discuss later.
His board launched a media strategy that has been devastating … to their own reputation.
King fled like a thief in the night just before coronavirus hit.
In his time at the club he went through managers like most of us go through toilet paper, and did not deliver a single major honour. Indeed, his arrival at the top of the Marble Staircase ushered in the greatest period of football dominance in the history of the Scottish game.
At Celtic Park.
The World’s Worst Media And Marketing Strategy
King has presided over a disastrous attempt to “market” the club.
Their retreat towards the fringes of Loyalism and Unionism had hit high gear under this guy with Britishness Days and Armed Forces Day and the embrace of the Poppy and the continued Bigots Beano in Linfield all continuing and actually being turbo-charged under his watch.
The media office in particular has been a highlight for all of us; is there a more deranged football club anywhere in Europe?
The paranoia, the lunacy, that drips off every one of those statements would have embarrassed any other boardroom in football.
The one at Ibrox was still producing them last week, even after King had left the building.
Their decision to appoint a former DUP councillor and member of the Orange Lodge as their new head of press is disgraceful, as are their talks with their new kit manufacturer to propose an orange kit for the coming season, if they can find anyone willing to make them.
It is easy to overlook the enormous damage this does to them.
Oh it might appeal to the “followers” here in Scotland and in Ulster, but it severely limits their club as a saleable asset.
It shrinks their potential fan-base.
It makes them a pariah south of the border; even the appointment of one of English football’s favourite sons will not wipe the stains off their reputation and make their more attractive to neutrals.
Celtic is a “club open to all”.
Sevco is what Rangers was; a club open to a select few, a club that rides the vapours of sectarianism and bigotry … to their own detriment.
The War With Mike Ashley
Having picked a fight with one billionaire, to their severe detriment, Sevco went all-in against another when King authorised the war with Mike Ashley.
It has cost them time, money and inflicted enormous reputational damage on them.
They could have closed the merchandising gap, but their insistence on fighting a full frontal war with the Sports Direct magnate has eradicated any chance of that for the foreseeable future.
Ashley had a stonewall contract. Sevco broke it. He threatened to sue.
King paid him a seven figure sum under the table, and granted him a brand new, and even greater, deal.
The media was spun a series of barefaced lies.
The club then changed its mind and tried to slither out of the agreement, after having lied to Puma about the status of it.
When the Puma deal collapsed they went with Hummel, who they also lied to.
They terminated that deal a year early and will almost certainly pay a high price for it.
They claim that they’ve cut Ashley out of the new deal, with a “premium” sportswear brand few of us have ever heard of, and who might not be able to fulfil their own part of the deal.
We still don’t know if Ashley is really gone … but his last legal victory remains and it’s going to be expensive.
Who knows when this chaos will end?
But it has done serious damage to the development of their commercial department, and made it harder to catch us.
None of this would have happened had they not gone full tonto against Sports Direct.
The Appointment Of Steven Gerrard
On a surface level, anyway, the appointment of Gerrard makes sense if what you are trying to do is grow the club’s profile and deflect from the absence of a plan.
It is probably the best PR move they could have made.
Even so, it is another calamitous decision.
Gerrard has been dreadful. He has improved performances against us, but the gap at the top remains vast.
He has not won more than five games in a row in the league as Sevco boss.
When it matters neither he nor his side has the bottle for the big push.
He also has an amazing habit of throwing his own players under the bus.
Before the global health emergency stopped the campaign the internet buzzed with rumours that he has totally lost the dressing room. There is little doubt that some of the senior players at Ibrox are furious about his conduct and resentful of his constant questioning their character.
Gerrard, remember, for all his talents, never won a league title as a player.
For him to question others on their bottle and drive is ridiculous when you consider that.
His decision making is baffling at times.
His “eye for a player” is dreadful; it’s no coincidence that two of the most successful players at the club were guys he didn’t sign.
And he, like others before him, has been allowed to spend huge sums of money that the club does not have.
Even with European income, they are running at a loss.
That he has been given a third season is unbelievable.
Lennon is right; if he had Gerrard’s record he’d already be gone.
The Continued Underestimation Of Other Clubs
Sevco’s biggest problem of late has been ego and arrogance and that, as much as anything, has led them to make grotesque miscalculations. The most obvious of them is in the way they constantly under-rate other clubs within the game.
How many times have you heard someone at Sevco do this? How many times have you heard Gerrard do it in recent months?
“With all due respect,” he said after Hamilton had beaten them at Ibrox. “We shouldn’t be losing at home to teams like this.”
And that’s their problem right there, in a nutshell.
Because other than Celtic – who they obsess over catching – they view every other club in this country with contempt.
I like that they do that.
The longer they do it the more they will disregard opponents of every shade and stripe, and they will continue to lose to them.
This belief that the other clubs are beneath them also feeds into Gerrard’s egomania.
This is why he chips away at the confidence of his own players.
This is why he was on the brink of losing the whole of the dressing room before the curtain fell on the campaign.
Sevco will undoubtedly continue to take this attitude into next season.
Our team never does this; Lennon was guilty of it in his first spell at the club, but he has learned huge lessons from that.
He takes every game, and every opponent, seriously … and that’s why we win.
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