Ibrox Continues Its Crazy Policy Of “Self-Isolation” Heedless Of The Consequences.

At the end of the last article, I said that if Ibrox wants to get its violins out they should do so for their isolation and alienation from the rest of the game.

Then, just after I posted it, I realised that they’ve wound themselves so tightly around paranoia and the siege mentality that they can no longer be easily separated from it without major trauma.

To put it more plainly, this now part of the club’s DNA.

This is one of the ways in which they sell tickets and get their fans to keep forking over ever increasing amounts of money.

They fill the heads of their fans with so much of this stuff that the support’s grasp of reality is tenuous at best, and the thinking that the world is against them is so ingrained that any effort to snap them out of it would be devastating.

And in particular, to their bottom line.

What’s clear is that under the present leadership at Ibrox – and I don’t see how any other sort of leadership is possible in the future – there will be no rapprochement with the rest of Scottish football.

No more mending fences. No more working for the common good.

Their club, like some extremist tyrannical government, now depends, for its very survival, on the constant manufacturing of grievance and victimhood and the creation of enemies.

It is, far and away, the most formidable weapon in their entire PR arsenal.

And this is not designed to fool the rest of the world, which understands that this stuff is hysterical and ridiculous … it is only designed to fool their own fans, and continuously reinforce the idea that war is being waged on them.

But by who? Our own board doesn’t have the stomach for it.

The idea that the governing bodies do it is laughable.

The proposition that the Scottish Government is doing it is so insane that it doesn’t need explaining. I suspect that our politicians – who are dealing, every day now, with matters of life and death – have slightly bigger things on their minds.

Yet you see, I understand that this is one of the principle attractions of the whole idea.

Think of how it looks from the inside, if you can wrap your brain around it for half a second.

You’ll see how the central concept might be compelling.

It requires you to have the belief that amidst the largest crisis to hit the civilised world since the Second World War that those running things still spend much of their time worrying that the Ibrox club might win a trophy or two.

It’s the ultimate in ego-massaging.

Indeed, it takes self-delusion and egomania to a different plane entirely, to an extent matched only by history’s great megalomaniacs; those dictators who name everything after themselves, the Caesars who acclaimed themselves Gods, the ones who put their faces on the coins and who demand that every home has a copy of their autobiography in it.

But this is about more than ego, of course, as those things are.

This is about power, and the Ibrox’s board’s power over its fans comes directly from the central idea that they are the only people who are fighting their corner against an unjust and even hateful world.

That gives them huge sway.

And it helps to sell tickets and assorted cheap tat at extortionate prices.

If they suddenly decided to re-admit journalists, to end the war with the BBC, to reinstate our 7000 tickets for Ibrox, to make peace with the governing bodies and to engage fairly and sanely with the rest of the of the game here – or if they even did one of those things – what do you think would be the reaction in their stands? Or on their forums?

There would be meltdown.

Ibrox is in the midst of a long spell of self-isolation from the rest of the sport.

They may have gotten here without realising where the road led, but they are fully aware now that they can’t but follow it to wherever it goes next. They are trapped on it.

And as long as they are, the rest of the game will continue to look on them as a reactionary club focussed only on itself.

Which is fitting, since that’s exactly what they are.