Mad Ibrox Number Crunchers Think They’ll Snatch Celtic’s Title On The Campaign’s Last Day.

I read some truly mad things during my troll through all the sites in Scottish football, and believe me when I say that I do visit them all, regularly. And my jaw dropped when I saw the following headline on one of the Ibrox sites on the NewsNow aggregator; “Helicopter Sunday repeat on cards after numbers crunched to make Rangers title prediction.”

I’ll be honest; I thought “Christ almighty, are they really reduced to that?”

And you know what? They actually are! This article is exactly what it sounds like. An Ibrox site called The Rangers Report has “crunched the numbers” – six games into the campaign – and they’ve predicted, based on a lot of nonsensical stuff based on how many goals we concede, that they will pip us to the title on the final day.

I thought the famous FiveThirtyEight projections were mad enough. They, at least, are fairly straightforward and run based on numerical probability calculated off the current form. I don’t know what data set these muppets are using, but I do know their Twitter feet is sniggering over the numbers of Joe Hart. That’s their level.

Hey, I care about one set of numbers; the ones on the league table, where we already have a four point lead. Over the years though we’ve seen Ibrox fans embrace all sorts of nonsense like this, like “the 80-minute league table” and all manner of other such guff. These guys are patting themselves on the back because they’ve twigged that the sweet spot for taking a title race close, if not winning it outright is around the 90-point mark.

What do they want for that? An SPFL medal? I wrote about that magic place-marker more than two years ago when I was writing about the start we made under Ange and how difficult it would be to hit that target, which in the end we did.

I mean, read this nonsense; this actually appears in the piece. “There are the standard caveats given how early in the season we are, but Celtic are currently conceding more chances than almost half of the league in terms of expected goals.”

I had to read that a coupe of times just to work out what it meant, and I’m still not 100% sure that I have grasped it, but all I would say to it is that we’re still putting points on the board and you do that by scoring more goals than you concede. I thought that was obvious.

What does it mean to be “conceding more chances than almost half of the league” when your team has a four point lead on the one whose fans are coming out with this rot? Who looks at that stat and draws solace from it when we’re four in front of them?

It is astonishing the straws these Peepul clutch to and the fairytales they tell themselves. Do you think this stuff helps them sleep better at night? Do you think it helps them get through their days? God blimey, it’s a marvel what we’ve done to these folks.

In that piece I quoted the other day, the lengthy one on the possible future for this Ibrox club, I quoted David Murray on Rangers when he called them “the second biggest institution in Scotland after the church.” Would an organisation that thought of itself as a continuation of Rangers subject themselves to this pitiful grasping at straws?

If they weren’t possessed of such a mad mind-set you might actually feel sorry for these folks.

But that’s impossible to do.