No Wonder Celtic Fans Are Laughing As Ibrox’s Trip To The Seaside Unspools The Manager.

As Celtic sits pretty on that much derided fiscal surplus – the only team in football to be constantly slated by its country’s media for actually running right – the search for spare change down the back of the sofa continues apace at Ibrox.

Their wee trip to foreign shores and foreign climates during the winter break was lauded whilst Celtic’s decision to stay home was questioned. Our players have had some down time. Their players, who have more games to play than us in the second part of the campaign already because of two in Europe and two rescheduled league games, crammed in a match.

And they played that match today, lost 1-0 and the manager was sent to the stand by the ref, which in a friendly match is virtually unheard of. Imagine what he must have said to earn that. There is a great picture of him doing the rounds on social media looking like a guy watching the game through a prison fence.

Oh, if only wishing made it so.

A couple of wags on my supporter’s bus chat have dubbed him “the man behind the wire.” Who said the Banter Years were over, eah?

But overall, he’s not had the best day.

And it comes amidst rumours of much worse that allegedly went on during their wee trip away.

The quest to raise money allegedly saw them implement a bizarre scheme which allowed well-off fans to pay £7,500 to actually attend the training camp. If that sounds too ridiculous for words there is plenty of stuff about it on the Ibrox fan forums, and reports are that it was every bit as shambolic as you would imagine with drunks staggering about whilst players were trying to relax and plenty of vomit and what we call industrial language getting flung about.

There may even – whisper it – have been the occasional naughty song.

Quite what Manneken Piss made of all this is anyone’s guess, but if it’s all true – and there are enough stories claiming that it is for me to believe at least some of it – then it’s no wonder he’s not found himself in the best of moods on the touchline today.

To say that the trip has presented him with a hard look at life at Ibrox would be putting it mildly.

When I wrote about perception versus reality the other day, I was not, of course, talking about their club but ours but this is another fine example of it. The reason those stories are doing the rounds is at least partially because it is all very easy to believe.

That Ibrox is charging well-heeled fans to attend their training camp for a few extra quid is not difficult for anyone to accept, as this is James Bisgrove all over, a carry-over from his days in charge of commercial contracts where the Ibrox jersey quickly became so weighted down with adverts that every player in their team was running like Cyriel Dessers until they got used to it.

Keith Jackson wrote a mortified article about it at the time – late to the party as usual as we’d all been talking about it for ages at that point – and made it clear that some of his much-heralded deals were for sums that were vanishingly small.

I might joke about them rooting around behind the sofa cushions, but in some ways that’s exactly what they were doing, going after contracts worth low five figure sums which Celtic probably write off as accounting errors.

And if it’s easy to believe that this is exactly the sort of thing Bisgrove would have gone in for, it is even easier to believe that there would have been a queue of their gullible fans waiting to pony up the money.

Since we’re on that subject, is it a stretch to think that the guys who can afford the expensive seats might embarrass them? A better question is, when have they not embarrassed them in the past? It was the “official travel club” who sang sectarian songs at one away game in Europe, when there were no ordinary punters allowed on the trip.

And who can forget the notorious US TV footage of pissed Ibrox fans on the Florida trip some years back, where they actually did compete for something called The Mickey Mouse Cup? Not since Castro emptied his jails onto the boats bound from Cuba had Floridians been treated to such a display of human filth and scum, where even the women could have been nicknamed Scarface. That clip brought home to the world what we live with constantly.

Those fans presumably had plenty of money to travel, to get boozy and to embarrass their club. At least this time there were no cameras to capture the worst of it, but with Ibrox fan media openly discussing it there’s not much doubt it was a mess.

That club’s desperation for cash screams at you from this, and they continually exploit the loyalty of their own supporters to a tremendous degree. But in doing so they forget sometimes who the Peepul they’re leeching from are, and that there is always the possibility that they will suffer for it.

That no media outlet has written this story doesn’t matter.

Inside Ibrox their manager and his coaching staff have had a front row seat to the freak show and they will not soon forget it, nor what it says about the dysfunctional lunatic asylum to which they have pledged their immediate futures.

In some ways he fits right in though.

He has that arrogance and egotism you associate with that club, and that he’s unravelled today in a friendly is telling. When you put that in the context of his spectacular ranting after the Celtic game, it all portends fun times ahead.