Fear And Loathing And Rope A Dope At Ibrox: Has Sevco Run Out Of Juice (Or Caffeine)?

If Sevco were a TV family, which one would it be?

They would probably say The Windsor’s from The Crown; a monarchy which endures despite all the world thinking they are backward, racist, bigoted and clownish. Some would say The Sopranos; thuggish gangsters without a moral bone in them.

I would once have said that they were more like The Jennings’ from The Americans, a good wholesome apple pie and picket fence family whose entire existence is bullshit. Mom and Dad are Russian spies pretending to be good old fashioned US citizens.

Although they believe in their dual mission – work for their country and raise a family – nothing about their lives is real, from the travel agency they run to the relationships they have with friends, their kids and even with each other.

But over the last week, I’ve been watching Succession and the Roy family is definitely pure Ibrox, everything except the vast wealth.

They are bitchy, vengeful, self-serving, egotistical, arrogant, out of touch with reality and absolutely poisonous.

The idea that any of them – from their appalling patriarch Logan (played with magnificence by Brian Cox) to the spoiled sons and one daughter – has ever given a shit about another living soul is ludicrous.

How strange that in the week I watch the first two seasons a new Ibrox fan organisation springs up, born from the hilariously awful Vital Rangers website.

This is so like something one of the Roy’s would do (Kendell probably) that it made me laugh out loud.

Their support, let’s not forget, is already coalesced around Club 1872, but it’s in freefall.

So it makes sense that someone would spring up to take advantage of that and shove a knife into the backs of their fellow brethren. I look forward to the bitchery that follows. It will provide enough entertainment to last for weeks.

Who knows what’s going on inside the club right now?

I imagine there are scenes from their board meetings which make the machinations and goings on at Waystar RoyCo, the fictional empire run by Logan Roy, look tame by comparison and if you’ve seen the show you will know how incredible and compelling and horrific some of their gatherings are.

No less incredible must be some of the scenes in the dressing room as Gerrard’s team starts to come apart at the seams. For weeks they’ve ridden their luck on single goal victories; I said after their last one that luck like that couldn’t last, and today it ran out.

The amazing thing is that they punched themselves out instead of the away team. Hearts didn’t lay a glove on them in the first half; instead Neilson’s team played them for suckers, with a classic case of rope-a-dope. They scored in the last minute.

Celtic’s form has been so up and down this season it’s as if nobody has noticed that the form over there isn’t really that great either; in fact, Gerrard’s record this season is now virtually identical to that which he had in his first and second campaigns.

He can’t get more than a handful of wins in a row before there’s another setback.

I’ve looked at his record in some detail; it makes last season’s form in the league all the more incredible, all the more inexplicable. Based on the form of the first two campaigns they are having exactly the kind of start to the season you would expect; one slip up every three or four matches.

In Europe it’s even worse; they’ve lost four in six.

It makes me wonder. It makes me curious. It makes me highly suspicious.

Last year, I wrote a lengthy piece on how Gerrard might have pulled off the sort of form that had completely eluded him in seasons one and two.

The sort of consistency that was suspect.

Was it a coincidence that it happened in the year of the virus, when random testing and several other features of global football governance were on hold? Or was it just the right year in the three-year cycle?

Maybe it was a combination of both.

Let’s be clear, I wasn’t making an allegation any more than I’m making one now, but the flip-side of that cycle would look a lot like their form in this campaign so far. And things will get worse as the season goes on, as all come-downs tend to do.

Their fans have been on their own kind of heavy dope for the last twelve months.

They, too, are about to experience something of a crash.

They aren’t daft; they know this isn’t the team they watched last season, and although we’re still four points behind them we’re not the team that we were either. The first team to go on a long, extended run wins this … does that look more like us or like them?

They are worried about the answer to that question.

They are also worried about January, and they should be because we’re going to emerge from that month stronger than we went into it and there’s no guarantee that they will do the same. They aren’t sitting on a house of cards as much as Chernobyl.

That smell in the air is fear. The loathing is reserved for their internal political battles, which I imagine are as vicious as the Roy’s on their much smaller scale.

At the risk of a minor spoiler, their faceless investors must be pulling their hair out, a little like Roman, Logan’s youngest son, who, when he is inspired to buy his dad’s favourite football team as gift for him, has a coin-flip choice between two clubs in the same city and winds up with the wrong one.

To say Daddy isn’t thrilled is an understatement.