Down the rabbit hole a little deeper then …
The Ibrox Five have been named by the club in a press release this morning. I guess that “internal investigation” has wrapped up pretty neatly then right?
Do you remember how this summer went?
When internal investigations were being scorned by everyone over there as inadequate and even corrupt? It’s not the first time Ibrox has been allowed to investigate itself; I am betting that it won’t be the last time either.
The names are pretty underwhelming; the two players already named, their South African midfielder Zuniga, who has hardly set the heather on fire and won’t be subject of many bouscodebets.co.uk bets, one reserve player nobody outside Ibrox has ever heard of and a reserve keeper on loan at another club.
No James Tavernier. And amazingly, Gerrard has branded the whole story about his “injury” fake news.
Good news from the test and trace teams, then, eah?
Then why do we suspect that there’s more here?
Why are we suspicious that their “internal investigation” has offered up such puny blood sacrifices?
Let’s start with this; when Edmundson and Jones were caught doing similar; their club slammed them both hard and made it clear that their careers there were pretty much over.
Bassey and Zuniga are new signings; are the club going to cut them loose?
Possibly, and especially in the case of the South African who has hardly been impressive.
Patterson’s positions is well covered for; they signed Simpson from Bournemouth in the window on a pre-contract and that means Patterson is third in the pecking order at right back.
They can afford to tear his new deal up and fire him for cause if they so decide.
If these had been first team regulars – like the captain, maybe – that decision would have been much harder to make.
But here’s the real issue; doesn’t this reveal a staggering lack of internal discipline at Ibrox at the very least?
I mean, let’s take a look at this for a minute and analyse it the way the media would analyse a similar situation at Celtic Park.
Imagine for a second that you accept those five names.
Imagine that you accept that those are the only five.
Imagine you accept that the first incident involved only those two players and wasn’t a wider breach involving half the first team squad.
Now, Gerrard says they cracked down heavy on the players involved in the first case.
They made it clear to the players what was and what wasn’t permissible.
Even if you accept that this was only the second time Ibrox players have done this kind of thing – instead of being only the second time they were caught – what does it say about the respect players there have for the rules and for the manager that so many of them violating this coda on this occasion and doubtless on other occasions as well?
Discipline is a flexible concept at Ibrox, and we’ve already seen that this season in the soft-soap treatment they’ve handed their players, and especially with the criticism free bubble they’ve put around Alfredo Morelos, although he’s been cited and banned twice for the same offence. There appears to be a very lax attitude towards following the rules.
And that comes from the top of the house.
This is the club that, at the start of this crisis, demanded that games be played in front of full stadiums before they considered any title race legitimate.
Then they broke with the rules in a truly diabolical way when they allowed a reserve team game to go ahead when they knew they didn’t have up to date test results.
That’s a club that doesn’t take this issue seriously and sees it, first, as an opportunity and secondly as an inconvenience to be gotten around whenever they are able to.
What do we know from history?
We know, first, that the mentality over there is to win at all costs.
We know that Ibrox clubs have historically considered rules and regulations as applying only where they want them to.
Rangers initiated the EBT scheme to let them sign more expensive players. They hid contracts from the SFA. They lied when investigators asked them about those contracts, confident that they would never be uncovered.
This Ibrox club is built on lies and misinformation.
The Survival and Victim Lies are the foundation stones of the institution that inhabits that stadium.
We know their current directors have lied to their commercial business partners, leading to court cases.
We know they lied to the City of London takeover panel.
We know that they have frequently, and unashamedly, lied to the media and even to their own fans.
They lie about things both great and small.
They lie even when those lies are dangerous; look at the incident involving the guy caught fiddling with Morelos’ car.
We know it was the Ibrox media operation which encouraged speculation about car-bombs and hate campaigns.
We know too that they are adept at getting the media to swallow anything and at getting them to stop digging on their say-so.
There was a momentous story to be uncovered there; I know because I have the whole thing, tucked away in a folder somewhere.
But it’s not a football story, so I’ll never write it.
So yes, a lot of suspicion remains, because we have a hopeless, spineless local media here and governing bodies which aren’t worth a damn.
If you believe some of the stuff on social media we also have a Scottish Government which hates our club and treats us differently from them; this isn’t something I subscribe to, but worryingly there are people at Celtic, presumably with more information than I have, who do believe this and it concerns them.
So yes, it’s very hard to let go of the suspicion that there is more here than is in the public domain.
It’s taken Ibrox three days to release this stuff.
A long time to get your ducks in a row if all your doing is establishing facts about a house party.
Over on CQN, Paul Brennan hinted yesterday – in a piece called Conspiracies Are Difficult To Maintain – that there’s a lot we don’t know about what’s been going on at Ibrox during the lockdown period … and that it will all come out in due course.
If he’s right – and remember, this guy gets frequent nods and winks from inside our club – it’ll happen after this title race has already been put to bed.
If, at some point, investigations need to be opened into it all, I think we’ll find that they’ll widen to include what happened this weekend past.
With all this smoke, I strongly suspect there is fire.
In my experience, when you’re talking about stuff over at Ibrox there usually is.