Jackson’s Latest Sycophantic Ibrox Piece Misses Crucial Bits Of The Jigsaw Out.

Keith Jackson is back to his Ibrox boot licking best today with an article which is quite astonishing in its desire not to look at the big picture and its clear intent not to join the dots.

Everyone who has looked at the situation over there clinically knows a few things which aren’t in his pro-Van Bronckhorst puff piece, for very good reasons.

He is the latest hack to talk about a “spending spree.” If you can call it that in the modern game when you only have a few million to spend.

They didn’t fork out one penny on Souttar or Lawrence and the fees for the Croatian striker and the Welsh winger will be lower than £2 million apiece.

Amazing that he never concludes that these deals were only possible because the club has sold Aribo. Amazing that he hasn’t used the words “quantity over quality.”

Of course, it would be foolish to dismiss these players before they’ve played games up here, but we can only watch what Ibrox has done in the last couple of windows. Free transfers and loan deals have been the order of the day. Almost all of them have flopped.

That they are finally able to spend a bit of money is, I suppose, progress of a sort but their judgement clearly isn’t up to much.

Perhaps John Park will change that, bringing with him, as Jackson claims, a contacts book and a ready-made list of targets. Yeah he must have acquired a lot of them at Blackburn, Sunderland and Legia Warsaw, right?

Jackson freely admits that none of the new signings would get into the team ahead of Morelos or Kent, but never actually explores what this means in real terms. Van Bronckhorst has used the Aribo money to add numbers to the squad … important, as we saw last season, but Ibrox has done this before. In fact, Ibrox does this all the time.

Let’s be honest; they had to respond to Celtic’s big spending. They had to put something together, as we’re getting to the point where if we can get the last two or three pieces of the jigsaw into place we’re going to be extremely hard to stop. The sight of us splashing out tens of millions was always going to galvanise them into some kind of action.

On top of that, the need to sell key players approaching the ends of their deals was always going to give them a little bit of money to play with; they made it clear early on that they weren’t even prepared to contemplate a full-scale rebuild though when they started re-signing their old crocks on one-year contract extensions.

That should have been the moment when even their most blinkered fans saw the writing very clearly on the wall. And yet they remain ignorant.

Jackson is getting himself very excited this morning, but I don’t believe he doesn’t see the big picture, which is of a club doing cut price business because it has no other choice. Both Lawrence and Matondo were offered to virtually every club in Europe. Their agents were linking them both even to Celtic. We didn’t express the least interest.

The Croat seems to have been signed on the basis that he looked good playing against them in the Champions League last year.

This is how their “scouting system” appears to work.

There is no real underlying logic to any of it that I can see, but I could be wrong and Jackson could be right. This could be joined up thinking at a club running on high gear.

But I really doubt it.

As the streets of Scotland clean up the mess of Halloween in July, read our searing article on The Filth And The Fury, written at the time of the George Square riot but even more applicable today …

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