Yesterday, Steven Gerrard signed an open letter to the Sevco fans which contained an assertion so hilarious that it was begging to be mocked, and it has been. Chris Sutton was the lead-off hitter and his particular brand of sarcasm was beautifully apt.
“Rangers make Glasgow,” was the banal and facile claim made by Gerrard.
It is worthy of more than just a laugh.
Even if you accept that the organisation called Rangers still exists – and one of the most disreputable things about Sevco is that ridiculous lie – it is incredibly arrogant and egotistical when one considers the dire stew of scandal and sectarianism in which everything at Ibrox has been brewed over the course of our lives.
Sutton posed the question: Rangers make Glasgow … what?
“Fill in the missing word” is how he put it, and it sparked a lot of hilarious responses.
What’s more, you have to wonder if Gerrard even came up with it himself.
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To me it reeks of some marketing guru’s bright idea, shoved into Gerrard’s stupid mouth; you really have to live here to get how ridiculous a one it actually is.
Because it’s a little like Espanyol claiming that they make Barcelona.
Sevco is this city’s lesser known football club and institution, and then only because Thistle refuse to pitch themselves to the lowest common denominator. The Loyalist card has always had a certain cachet; the Ibrox clubs have never been shy about going low in order to stay relatively big.
We are Glasgow’s Barcelona and everyone knows this.
Gerrard’s comments only highlight how small Sevco is, how it doesn’t even shrivel in our shadow but in the one of the club it pretends to be.
Sevco is eight years old. It has never won a major honour. Celtic has won the last ten on the bounce. When we are confirmed champions it’ll be eleven. The Scottish Cup may yet be delivered for the Quadruple Treble. And here their manager is, boasting on their failure.
Scott Brown jumped into the debate tonight, with a scathing put-down to Ibrox which was the equal of Sutton’s snipe earlier in the day.
As Gerrard was the focus of the Sevco campaign to sell season tickets, Brown knew that his own words were fair game.
“I think their manager and everyone understood that they were never going to catch us,” Brown said. “If you look on form, we were going to go on and increase that gap … (Sevco) said it in the press themselves – the only chance they had to win was the Scottish Cup so they pretty much admitted defeat already.”
And we all know what happened in the Scottish Cup of course; Sevco’s managerial genius, for all his prideful boasting, somehow managed to lose to the side rock bottom of the SPL and heading for relegation.
You could not mark his neck with a blowtorch.
All this stuff serves to do is make Gerrard look like a man completely out of touch with reality, operating at a club which has forgotten what that even looks like.
Sutton called them out on it, and Brown pointed out some ugly truths … but nobody at Ibrox is even listening anymore.
They are content to live in their bubble.
But it will not protect them from hard truths for much longer.
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