The opening is horrendous.
That’s the first thing to be said about Jackson’s latest dirge.
It is the sort of thing that would never have gotten past the editor of a high school newspaper, and yet here it is in a national title.
What offends me most reading writing this bad is the implied insult to the audience. They are deemed too stupid to recognise it.
“Maybe it’s time for Douglas Park and Dave King to settle things by whipping them out on the Ibrox boardroom table. And then, once they’ve finally established which of them has the biggest chip on his shoulder, both men ought to leave by the nearest exit, preferably taking their tone-deaf head of communications with them.”
Jesus. Whipping out the chip on your shoulder.
That’s ghastly, isn’t it?
That should get you drummed out of the National Union of Journalists in an instant.
If there were intelligence tests for membership most of our hacks couldn’t score higher than a rhesus monkey.
This is the guy who thinks Steve Clarke is “hands down” the manager of the year, so that type of writing should hardly come as a surprise.
Jackson and his cohort prove something that some still struggle to comprehend; this stuff is harder than it looks.
I used to watch snooker and think it looked like the easiest game in the world. Then I tried it.
Writing is the same. You can teach anyone to be competent at it, but you can’t teach someone to be good at it far less great … if only Jackson had not lacked a formal education. Competence might well be within reach.
I don’t want to waste further time on his command of the craft, he doesn’t possess any and so it’s pretty pointless as a subject for discussion. Let’s talk about the article itself, or rather the point of the article itself.
Jackson’s article reads an awful lot like something written by somebody who has had a right good slap.
Remember how I wrote that he was backing King and Stewart Robertson in his last article? Today he’s turned on both of them.
Instead he’s singing the praises of some of those who are in the Ibrox boardroom but largely remaining silent.
He still has targets in that room; Park, Bisgrove and David Graham, who he has rightly surmised as pygmies, but he’s late to the party on that as with everything else. But he’s now also identifying some heroes within, which is interesting.
The guys he’s shilling for today are Letham, Scott and Bennett.
So who is pulling this guy’s string?
It’s clear that he’s still backing the calls by Club 1872, and so he’s not completely switched sides … is it those guys who are steering his coverage or is there some other element in this we haven’t guessed at yet?
He’s flip-flopping all over the place in this piece.
What seems clear is that Jackson just nudged us into a new phase of the battle. In singling out certain members of the board as competent whilst he turns on the others, he is actually participating in a scheme to divide them.
He is promoting an internal boardroom coup!
Just what a club at war with its own fans and with an external trouble-maker needs.
Nothing says “unity” like palace intrigue and a little bit of backstabbing inside the walls.
But in whose interests?
That’s a “take your pick” question.
King would certainly benefit if there were people in the boardroom who were willing to get rid of those most opposed to him, so I don’t know that we should read too much into Jackson’s decision to pan his “offer” to settle the financial penalties of pulling out of the Australian tour.
That might well be a little misdirection, although someone else would have to be pushing that as he’s way too dumb to come up with something like that on his own.
It could be Jackson trying to ride the fence, but in the article he says that it’s “difficult to see how the current regime can remain in place”.
But even the rhesus monkey would be able to identify the flaw in that argument; there is no mechanism for removing them and nobody on the other side of this has a plan for finding another way to get the job done.
Or maybe it’s just that Jackson is a desperate, despairing Ibrox fan who sees nothing positive in any of this and only charlatans on all sides.
What we can say for sure is that this gets murkier the more you go into it.
There are more factions in that club than any of us ever believed and none of them trust the others and now that the fuse has been lit all of them are jockeying for position and waiting.
Waiting until the league slips away and the cups with it.
Ironically, they are waiting on Celtic finishing this campaign off for them so they can get down to the real business of tearing each other apart. That might be my favourite bit of all this.