More Hilarity For Celtic Fans As Trotter’s International Football Club Tries To Offload Its Old Junk.

The crisis at Ibrox deepened last night after an entirely underwhelming match against Birmingham, which they lost 2-1 amidst a chorus of boos from their travelling support. All told, their performance was absolutely appalling, disjointed, fragmented, tactically baffling and lifeless. Their fans cannot understand what they are watching, or see how it gets better.

But that’s where the media comes in, and that’s where they swing to the rescue, in a manner of speaking. And they are doing their bit today and then some.

There is an early episode of Only Fools And Horses where the brothers fall out over money and Rodney decides to go into business with Mickey Pierce instead. They attend an auction where they bump into Del, and he explicitly warns them to avoid the lot which is vaguely described as “assorted agricultural machinery.”

Like the dipshits they are, Rodney and Mickey misinterpret Del’s warning for an attempt at misdirection, they bid for the stuff, get it and then find out Del is the one who was selling it in the first place and that his advice had been genuine.

Outside, later, inspecting their gear, they find it’s exactly as Del described it; “a load of old scrap iron.”

Del comes by and has a good laugh at them.

When Rodney asks what they’ve bought, Del tells them it’s a bunch of lawnmower engines. “Listen, they’re not ordinary lawnmower engines,” he says, and Rodney, suddenly encouraged, leans in for more info. “They’re broken lawnmower engines,” Del says with a knowing grin.

And it’s hard not to think of that when you see that the media is trying to boost Ibrox morale with a transfer story today, and as they struggle to make sense of another one.

Let’s start with the first story, the one in The Sun and elsewhere, being trumpeted from the rooftops about how they are about to sign a player who “was worth £10 million just a year ago!”

Wow. Are these people being wilfully dense? Or are they actually this stupid?

A club paid £10 million for Vaclav Cerny last season, and they’ve seen enough already that they are cutting him loose in that short a space of time, to send him to Ibrox for a season, probably for a nominal fee, virtually guaranteeing that they write off their investment.

Not just any lawnmower engine, my friends, oh, no … and certainly not the “combine harvesters” that Rodney, for a brief moment after reading the description allowed himself to dream that they might be on the cusp of buying for a song.

It astonishes me that the media sells them this same bag of dung over and over again, and that they grab it and clutch it tight and convince themselves it is something special.

How many times are their club going to do this?

They did it with Diallo. They did it with Matondo. They did it with Silva in January.

They love bling. They are easily seduced by players who have gone for big fees and are now available for scratch … none of them ever sits down for two seconds and asks the question “why?” That might spoil the feel-good story.

The Todd Cantwell story intrigues me as well, and like the stadium story we’re getting only half of the tale from the club. The great thing is this; as with whatever has gone wrong at Lego Land, there is no spin on this which doesn’t, itself, cause more damage.

The Record is re-running old Cantwell quotes today in puzzlement; “The fans feed off us and we feed off them. It’s like a love story,” is a blast from his past and they cannot understand how he can have gone from such a sentiment to handing in a transfer request.

Watching them try to wrap their wee brains around this is hilarious.

I’ve been so fascinated by the Kamala Harris campaign so far that virtually everything else I was watching in my spare time has been put on hold as I devour everything I can find on her and listen to everyone dissect every element of her speeches and character. And I find the Republican Party’s response highly amusing; they are actually raging at Biden for quitting and for handing the baton to a woman of colour who has a sharp mind and a quick wit.

And there’s a lot of similar foot-stamping going on across Ibrox fan-media about Cantwell and about the manager and the same confused frustration which amounts to “what the Hell do we make of this, and what the Hell are we supposed to do about it?”

The media is scrambling in a similar way.

They’ve spent so long building Cantwell up and now some of them feel betrayed and they want to paint him as a bad guy, but at the same time they know they can’t just do a hatchet job on him at this point because they understand that there’s no way back and now he’s nothing but a drain on the wage bill that the club badly needs to shift.

So how do you portray Cantwell? How do the Republicans portray Kamala Harris? Trump thinks you do it by mis-pronouncing her name, which has already led one wag to speculate that she might do the same and start calling him “Don-Old.”

This stuff requires more thought than people like these can muster.

If the media brands Cantwell a traitor, how does that help the club shift him?

If they say he’s a player being unfairly treated, that’s not helping the manager, that’s not helping the club.

If they tell the truth – that not only is Cantwell not as good as the hype, but he’s a dreadful dressing room personality who caused exactly the same trouble at Norwich and was similarly sent to the B team whilst they tried to get shot of him – Ibrox will find itself struggling, as Rodney is in that episode, to work out how to get their rubbish out the door.

Ask Norwich how they did it.

Ibrox will probably get the same answer Rodney and Mickey got when they asked Del what they should do to offload their junk.

“Do what I did,” he says. “Find yourself a couple of right little plonkers with cash on the hip.”

(I’ve just remembered that this is the same episode where Rodney tells Del and Grandad that he and Mickey are going into the “self catering holiday trade”. “What for £200?” Del asks, and Grandad tops it off with perhaps the best throwaway line in the history of the show; “What have you got, a Wendy House?” I take it the Ibrox parallels don’t need to be spelled out here haha.)

Everything over there right now is madly funny to me, and I can’t see how they are going to get out of this hole they are in in time for the first Champions League qualifiers. They need to win that tie, because there’s a big financial reward for doing so and a shot at getting to the Groups themselves.

If they lose, they are in the Europa League, and that’s going to provide some small consolation, I’m sure, but not what they need most which is money.

The hacks might try to put glitter on this, but there’s no way they can pretty this up enough to hide the basic truth that the club over there is in big, big bother.

I am enjoying every second of it.