Ibrox’s Impoverishment Is Obvious When They Are Talking About Matondo Again.

Ibrox’s footballing situation is a mess. Not that you would know that to see the way the media handles them with kid gloves. Our club has stuff to sort out; that much is pretty clear. But the club across the city is shambolic, in spite of us repeatedly hearing that they are getting their act together. Our window has been slow. Theirs has been a nightmare.

They got the early blow in, if you believe the media, in grabbing Silva, who had been linked with us.

The bloggers did a fantastic job of wrecking their narrative on that one by being almost unanimous in declaring, beforehand, that we didn’t think he was the kind of player we should be going for.

A pure bling signing with nothing substantive to back it up.

I love it when our sites do that, when they spoil the scheme being played out even as it is still unfolding.

The Celtic sites stamped on that one early, and well, and so when the supposed blow landed, we didn’t even flinch. Even when he was supposed to have had a dig at us by talking about signing for the “biggest club in the country” the response to that was we laughed. What else was a new signing going to say, after all?

So their early blow failed to land. Most of us didn’t believe Celtic had been interested in the first place, and even those who thought there might have been a shred of truth in the story, instead of just an agent offering players and a media determined to paint a negative picture even if they had to literally make stuff up … not even they were particularly bothered.

Ibrox has shipped out one striker who doesn’t score goals to bring in another striker who doesn’t score goals. It’s not hugely significant, really, is it? And that aside, their window has been a series of stories which have led nowhere, signing targets they’ve allegedly been on the brink of bringing in just to have nothing happen. They have one obvious problem here.

They don’t have any money to sign people. That’s the issue right there, that’s where all the collapsed transfer stories have broken down. We keep on hearing that they will spend this or that on some player – the Josh Doig story was particularly amusing – but it never happens because whenever a club demands a decent transfer fee they back off.

If you want to know how bad things are at their club right now, look at the comments the manager is making. He isn’t going to let go of either of his left-backs because he knows there’s no money to replace either of them. Yes, the board might want to get the cash and give it to him to prioritise another area of the side, but I don’t think he’s convinced.

Instead, he’s forced to try to rehabilitate other members of the squad. This is why Yilmaz has been playing in the first place, this is why he’s messing about promoting guys like Ross McCausland and putting guys like Sterling into the team.

But when you see Scott Wright getting games and Rabi Matondo suddenly getting talked about again as if he was a world beater you know the cupboard has to be just about bare over there. The desperate pleading has already gone up from their websites and the manager seems to think that some deals will be done late in the day … look out for more bling on loan.

Yilmaz wants to go, apparently. The Ibrox club thinks it can get £5 million for him. That seems to be pie in the sky. He’s certainly not worth that with the scant game time he’s had at that club in the past three years, and all at their club have to know it.

The suspicion persists that they want to sell so they can put in an offer for Shankland. Let’s be honest, if Hearts accept an offer now with two weeks to go it will look bad. In another week it will look even worse. It’s hard to see where they get a replacement in that sort of time frame, and so their fans would be perfectly entitled to go nuts.

But I doubt that will happen now anyway. Ibrox will struggle to scrape together the cash for that sort of deal whatever else they do here. That club is a mess, and it’s a mess because it continues lying to its fans about what it is. We are the only club in this league to have spent proper money in this window. I suspect that will be the case when it shuts.