Ibrox Fans Cannot Now Be In Denial About The Consequences Of Celtic’s Recovery.

The resignation of Stewart Robertson, which was announced at Ibrox tonight, means that the whole upper echelon of the club which this time last year believed it was on the brink of one of the greatest season’s in its short history, will be gone when this campaign comes to an end. It is now beyond question that something is seriously wrong there.

The manager was fired. The chairman fled like a thief in the night.

Wilson took the first job offer he got, apparently unconcerned that he was moving to a club where his job might soon be to make savage cuts and shop in the bargain basement.

Now the managing director has decided that the time for a sharp exit has arrived, and although he’ll be at Hampden it will likely be the last game of consequence in which he will watch them as a key figure.

Look, there are two possible scenarios unfolding over there. In the first, there is a war raging behind the scenes which has claimed three enormous casualties and doubtless will claim others. That should not be ruled out, although there is nothing in the wind about it except for the one difficult to ignore clue; the reek of freshly spilt blood.

But even if it’s not something dramatic like that, the three top guys have not all walked in the space of six weeks because they believe that the future over there is secure and that they are heading into a brave new dawn.

The feeling that we’re seeing rats leaping from the deck of a burning ship is a difficult one to shake considering the summer they face.

I wrote here a week or so ago about how they got here; by blindly believing in Dave King’s “house of cards” theory.

They “front loaded “spending knowing that all the money would have to be paid back to their directors at some stage, and that was before COVID hit the whole world like a sledgehammer.

It wasn’t meant to matter. Our collapse was supposed to write us off as a major force for years.

Except it never happened.

Celtic’s recovery, the speed of it and the scale of the rebuild we were able to do, was the proof of our own robustness and their own foolishness.

Now the costs are mounting. The rent has come due.

No wonder the top guys at Ibrox didn’t want to stick around for the full measure of it.

God alone knows what else is going on behind the scenes and which we’ll soon see evidenced … but it’s increasingly clear that those who were, this time last year, full of optimism, do not want to be on the bridge when the ship enters choppy waters.

Ibrox fans are pleased enough that Robertson is gone, as they welcomed the departures of Wilson and Park before him, ever thinking that because their hate-figures are walking one at a time that good things automatically follow on from that.

James Bisgrove is their new MD.

Still clinging to hope lads?

Ronald Reagan used to tell two versions of a story which he thought was an illustration of how some people are more hopeful than others.

Depending on who was re-telling it, the tale was either about two brothers or about two boys who lived beside each other. The cocktail party version is about two kids, one an optimist and one a pessimist, who get taken to a shrink.

The other is about a kid on Xmas Day, and that’s always been the version that I preferred.

Both pretty much have the same punchline.

A kid gets up on Christmas morning and runs downstairs to find nothing under the tree.

As he stands there puzzled his dad takes him outside, and gives him a shovel and points to a great big mound of shit and tells him to get cracking. He sets about the task with glee, grinning from ear to ear.

As he’s working the neighbour’s kid looks over the fence and clocks him. “Why are you doing that? And why are you so happy about it?”

“There must be a pony in here!” the kid with the shovel says.

Nice to keep your hopes up, but sometimes it’s not optimism, it’s delusion and all you are doing is sifting through mounds of shit.

One day they’ll wise up. Hopefully not any time soon.