Ibrox’s Toy-Town Celebrations Tomorrow Are The Mark Of A Club Gone Insane.

Tomorrow Ibrox will have their title party, nearly two months into the campaign.

The timing of it is ridiculous.

They had intended, at one point, to have it when we came to town, but we had started to hit form and they worried it wouldn’t be much of shin-dig if we cleaned their clocks in front of their full house.

It’s just one symptom of a club gone mad. There are more.

Tomorrow, the SPFL will not send either of its two most senior officials to the game although it’s a formal occasion for the league.

The official sponsors of the competition will have no presence.

Much of the press corps will be unable to attend.

The BBC will have no commentary team at the match.

The fans will gather with the main supporter’s organisation under police investigation for racist singing. Their “official media partners” amongst the supporter’s blogs and podcasts will bask in their “special status.” It only cost them twenty-five grand.

At least one supporters bus has been disbanded and its members indefinitely suspended from attending games, so there will be a handful of empty seats.

Here’s my favourite bit; because of the SPFL sponsorship row, they will not be presented with the official league flag. So they are commissioning their own.

The whole thing screams toy-town. A fake club with a fake history flying a fake flag for their first league title … and the ground will be surrounded by mentions of how it’s number “55.” If there is an air of surrealism, it’s because that whole club is surreal.

It is preposterous. You could not make it up.

Since it crawled out of the grave of Rangers, that whole club has existed in a sort of twilight zone where reality bends around them, with only a chink of light occasionally getting in. There is no club like them anywhere in the game, no other with this reek of psychosis.

Which other club claiming to be welcoming to everyone would have hired an Ulster Loyalist to do their public relations? And what’s happened since? They’ve waged permanent war on the press and others, like some mafia family settling all debts public and private.

Tomorrow is historic, they say.

They are correct, of course, but not in the way they think.

It will signify the moment that club became all the way exclusive and insular, the province of the fantasists and charlatans and supremacists, existing in a kind of Trumpian funk; the moment where it became crystal clear that it has not simply lost its bearings but any connection it had with the real world.

Everything about tomorrow’s “party” is counterfeit.

The only thing real is the swirl of the chaos around them, all of it created by their own actions and brazen behaviour.

Tomorrow they celebrate their descent into full-on lunacy.