My old man sent this to my phone this morning, and I just had to laugh.
There is an entire generation of our fans with no concept whatsoever of what the David Murray era was like. If you’re in your 20’s or 30’s the whole thing would have passed you by without you ever developing a clear understanding of what we who went through it experienced.
At times it was awful. This was not one of those times.
This was supposed to be a story which terrified us.
It convulsed most of us with laughter instead.
If you had the slightest insight into this nonsense you knew that’s exactly what it was. It was an early example of the Ibrox board handing out little packets of seeds and their fans hoping to grown beanstalks.
I hadn’t long started blogging – I was writing for E-Tims – when the story of Moonbeams Park, which is what we called it, broke.
I knew our media was a joke even then, it was hard not to, but that idea was so obviously ridiculous that I could not believe anyone took it seriously. Friends in the political scene, who were at some of the council’s feasibility meetings, confirmed later what many of us already knew just reading this; it was pie in the sky.
“They sounded like people trying to convince themselves as much as us,” was how one of those individuals summarised it for me.
The Sun dredging it up today for reasons unknown to all but themselves is sort of unintentionally hilarious. “Why it never happened” is simple enough; it was nuts. You might as well ask why the long imagined unicorn derby never happened, and in a very real sense that’s what this was. There was not the remotest possibility of it ever coming to pass.
The cost of it was mad enough; £200 million. Paid for by a bond scheme. The one they touted as their template was the one Arsenal introduced to build their shiny new ground. The one that hampered the transfer kitty for 20 years and has helped deny them a title, the one that saddled with the club with a vast debt, in spite of their EPL wealth.
Who the Hell was going to buy £200 million in bonds anyway? The Ibrox fans couldn’t cobble together the £6 million that Charles Green paid for his “basket of assets” in 2012. I looked into this story at the time, and wrote a huge E-Tims piece about it and stripped down the numbers and the Arsenal comparison, and quickly concluded it was a joke.
Yet our media clung to the fantasy for what seemed like an age. They were still promoting it as a possibility when Gordon Brown torched the scheme, and then it was all talk about how unfortunate it was because Ibrox had been a leading candidate … which is absolute guff. Ibrox’s proposal never really got past the “theoretical concept” stage, floating pitches, retractable roofs, the grand casino; none of it was ever going to happen.
What we were just starting to understand – it wouldn’t even be 12 months until I wrote my first major ground-shaker article The End Of Rangers? where I suggested that the club was facing a phalanx of issues which brought its very survival into question – was that the place was already a casino, with Murray making ever bigger bets in an effort to keep pace with us … and it was one of those gambles, his game of chicken with the tax-man, which wiped them away.
This is why we’re all entitled to have a good laugh about this nonsense, which we all probably thought was in the past and that’s where it would stay.
Quite why The Sun chose to resurrect this lunacy today I do not know; slow news days are one thing, but this is another. To even pretend that it was a real prospect and something they were unlucky to miss out on is actually laughable.