The latest statement out of Ibrox tonight absolutely takes your breath away in its crassness, arrogance, dishonesty and anti-social sentiment. Just reading it reminds me that yes, we do actually share living space with these Peepul and at times it is awful.
Their “open letter” to the First Minister reeks. It reeks of egotism. It reeks of untruth. It reeks of Whataboutery.
It has the pungent odour of the conspiracy theory.
Whilst we’re on the subject, it talks up the weekend as an “historic achievement” as if winning a league title was a generational thing that no other club had ever done.
I know they think they are the dog’s balls right now, but we’ve just completed a quadruple treble, so their banging that drum over and over again makes me think of the overweight winner of a pie eating contest bragging about his victory.
“Enjoy your moment. It won’t help you get women, pal.”
That’s the only worthy response to a unhinged rant like the one they just released.
Imagine taking such a self-reverential tone as they do here, when talking about the “level of leadership and professionalism which would be benefitting of this 150-year-old institution.”
First, there’s the Trumpian lie of continuity again, which they bring up so often it’s clear that even as they tell it to the world they’ll never really convince themselves.
Why bang on about it so much? The papers accept the lie. The SFA endorses it. You’d think it was being challenged daily, and it isn’t except amongst other Scottish football fans.
But it’s harder to tell yourself the same lie over and over again. I think sometimes of the Survival Lie as one of those truths that the liar himself can’t even look at.
It’s like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
The narrator freely admits to murder; the point of the story is to convince the reader that he’s sane. But he’s buried the body under the floorboards, and it’s driving him off his nut.
The story ends with the police sitting in his living room, and he’s fully convinced them of his innocence, but he thinks he can hear the dead heart of his victim, beating so loudly it drives him to rip up the floorboards and expose himself and his crime.
Is that what it’s like for them, trying to defend and explain and excuse and cope with the various contradictions of the Survival Lie? Is there a nagging voice in their own heads, the voice of sanity perhaps, that they just can’t silence?
Here’s where I laugh at this talk of a “level of leadership and professionalism which would be benefitting of this 150-year-old institution.”
Who in the Hell wrote that? An Ulster Loyalist?
They do have one in the press office, after all.
But imagine it’s true.
Imagine they are the same club.
Would this be the leadership and professionalism which saw them instigate a sectarian signing policy which lasted for more than 50 years? The leadership and professionalism which led to EBT’s? To Craig Whyte’s tax fraud? The leadership and professionalism we saw from a convicted tax crook who spent his time over there tearing up commercial contracts and fighting in court over them and whose takeover saw the City of London put the black spot on him?
What about the allegations that a murder was committed on the famed Marble Staircase?
Where do these 150 years of dignity tally with decades of sectarian singing in the stands, which went unremarked on? Where does it fit with the abuse allegations they won’t even apologise for?
And let’s not piss about, let’s get it front and centre; would this be the same leadership and professionalism that led to not one, not two, but three accidents on Stairway 13 prior to the one that killed 66 people?
If they are going to play that card, then they better understand what’s on it.
They don’t get to moralise about the last 150 years when so much of that time was spent mired in filth and shame.
The idea that the organisations which have worked out of Ibrox are paragons of virtue and decency, that they are somehow above the rest of us, is not just laughable it is offensive.
The history associated with that club is regularly grotesque.
And what we’re learning, of course, from these kind of deranged communiques is that nothing has changed.
There is not one iota of concern or consideration for the people of this country.
Nothing to condemn the law-breakers who smashed windows, benches, pissed up the war monument and fought with the police, to say nothing of all of it violating social distancing guidelines.
Instead, they blamed the government.
They blamed the police.
They blamed the council.
Peter Smith of STV says the club has also written to Police Scotland and Glasgow City Council asking why the benches and other objects weren’t removed from George Square prior to their “celebrations”.
Can you believe that an organisation which bangs on about 150 years of standards and professionalism is actually saying “you shouldn’t have left our supporters with stuff that they could vandalise” as part of their defence?
You could not make that up.
The club claims to have done “all it could.”
I make no apology for calling that out as bullshit.
Their manager did not have to walk the team across to the lawbreaking fans at Livingston, nor thank them in his after-match statement.
He did not have to drive them through them at the weekend giving it the triumphant fist-bumps, like Hitler coming down the Champs-Élysées after taking Paris.
He certainly did not have to walk his players across the pitch at Ibrox to an open security gate, or to encourage whatever show that was they put on at their training ground.
Had he said, after the Livingston game, that their fans should have stayed at home that would have been a step forward.
He encouraged it instead.
Their statement tonight encourages further disgraces.
The scenes at the weekend were appalling. Any other club would have been deeply embarrassed, and even ashamed, by them.
But not this lot. Far worse than the behaviour of the fans has been the club’s response to them.
The self of entitlement, of contempt for others and the bullying hectoring tone of the communique is quite despicable. No serious, professional, organisation behaves like this.
When we went to Dubai we issued an apology through the CEO although the trip was fully authorised.
The contrast between us and them could not be more stark.
When fans protested outside Parkhead we put up security fences and the club made it’s anger clear. We got criticised heavily, but we took our medicine and shut up about it. We would never have released moon-howling nonsense like this.
Honestly, they without an iota of decency or social responsibility.
This should remind us how lucky we are that our directors are at least sane, and genuinely good men … they may think of as mugs at times but they are not psychopaths.
Indeed, our club has responded to Ibrox’s diabolical attempt to drag us into this gutter with them, and I can think of no better response to put at the end of this article than what our club has just released on its official Twitter feed.
