The Ibrox Club Lives In A Fantasy Where Almost Everyone Knows It And Pretends Otherwise.

Today someone sent me an article which said that the Ibrox club had narrowly missed out on signing a player worth £30 million. Obviously, on loan. The deal didn’t go through, but it was the headline that made me laugh out loud. This has been the thing for the whole pre-season so far. They have been linked with numerous players they could not possibly afford.

The whole club exists in a bizarre half-light of fantasy, and I used to think that there was rampant stupidity going on. But in fact, I now suspect that almost everyone who is involved has to know that ninety percent of what surrounds them is false.

One of my favourite books is the John Le Carrie novel The Tailor Of Panama. I’m going to talk briefly here about the movie rather than the book, as the film, whilst superb, simplifies elements of the story somewhat but still packs a punch. The point will very quickly become clear.

The film opens with Andy Osnard, an M16 officer who has been badly behaved and exiled to the backwater of Panama. (“The foreign minister’s wife, wasn’t it?” a sarcastic embassy official asks him. “His mistress,” Osnard shoots back without hesitation.) Osnard, played by a slippery, eel-like Pierce Brosnan in a role which he embraces gleefully as the antitheses of Bond (he conducts one memorable meeting in a dingy whorehouse room lounging, grinning, on a vibrating bed) has no intention of settling in quietly for an easy retirement.

It isn’t long before his research into the ex-pat community leads him to Geoffrey Rush’s Harry Pendel, tailor to the elite, whose firm boasts a Saville Row pedigree. Osnard knows this is completely invented; Pendel learned his trade in prison, and with this knowledge (a complete secret from Pendel’s wife, a suave Jamie Lee Curtis, who works for the Panama Canal Company) and using Pendel’s bad debts “recruits” him as a source and demands to be shown around.

“Welcome to Panama,” Pendel toasts him, as they sit in a high-brow nightspot full of the elites. “Casablanca without heroes.” He readily embraces the role for its glamour, the money and a chance to show off his knowledge (both real and not so). Over the course of the night, he spins a few tall tales, but none more perilous than the one he saves for the end; that the angry drunk who embraces him, Mickie Abraxas – a stupendously good Brendan Gleeson – a former anti-Noriega rebel, is “still at it” and a leader of what he calls “the silent opposition.”

And this is just what Osnard wants to hear.

He arrogantly tosses his “knowledge” in the faces of the other embassy intel bods, mocking them for their lack of a local source. He keeps on pressing Harry for more information, information which Pendel readily supplies, for cash, and as the stuff Osnard is taking back to the embassy, and which is finding its way back to an increasingly interested Washington, becomes more complicated and swells to involve the future of the Canal and the involvement of China, it’s never really clear how much he believes, how much his bosses believe or even how much those in DC actually believe.

But there’s really no place where someone stops to say “hey, can we have this stuff checked out and independently confirmed?” before they send more money to fund “the resistance” and start preparing for ever more dramatic measures should they become necessary.

And that’s the thing. Osnard has to know that he’s taking lies back to his bosses. The feeling is clearly conveyed that the British have at least some idea that what they are feeding Washington is undiluted bullshit, and there are some in Washington who obviously recognise it as such … so why does anybody actually go along with it all?

Pendel tells those lies because he needs the money and wants to keep his secrets from his wife. More than any of that, he seems to enjoy being at the centre of big events, whether real or imagined, and likes to tell stories. Osnard wants to believe them because he needs to impress his bosses in London and he likes to show off how smart he is around the embassy. The embassy goes along because London seems to like what they’re getting and keep asking for more, and as such they keep sending the money to fund Osnard’s operation.

But why does London go along, when their top brass is surely aware of how far-fetched some of what they are hearing is? Well, the answer to that is hinted at by Dylan Baker’s US general who wants to re-take Panama for the “missing star” on the flag. Washington may or may not believe the stories; they certainly intend to use them for their own ends, and the British, who have their own interests, are happy to pass along the info and let the Americans make the call.

And it’s that kind of weird circle of co-dependence which lies at the heart of what we see in front of us, every day, with Ibrox’s annual summer transfer window fantasies. Nobody actually believes any of what they are slinging. But they all do it anyway, because everyone involved is getting something out of it. Let’s look at this in a little bit of detail.

You start with the media. They have to know 90% of what they are churning out every day is utter rubbish. But the hacks writing it get paid, no matter what rubbish they turn out. In fact, the more spectacular, and unlikely, the story the more traffic it gets so in fact they are encouraged to sensationalise and lie and get fans hopes up.

And agents and clubs know this, of course, and so they leak stuff to these people knowing they will run it all, and the crazier the better. Which is great for them as it sparks interest in their players and if they get lucky there can be bids … although not from Ibrox.

This is where it gets interesting. Because from the media it goes to the next link in the chain … the fan media. They are supposed to filter out the garbage and present the truth to the fans. But as I’ve written many times here recently, they actually cover every one of the lies and exaggerations and pass them on virtually intact, and even embellish them further.

They do that because they, like the media, are more interested in hits and numbers and money than they are with actually informing their fans about things. It’s terrible how little they care about their fellow supporters. A lot of them do it because they know the club itself wills it … and that’s a problem all on its own. Because the club does play a role here.

The club needs this stuff to keep onside a fan-base which otherwise would be riotous. I just read the transcript of the Bennet interview, and I’ll be dealing with that subject tomorrow, but it was an atrocity, an absolute car-crash, in which he tried hard to dissemble and not to come straight out with some hard admissions, but where (in spite of his best efforts) most of it is pretty clear anyway; they have no idea what they are doing and they are skint.

But this is the time when you need a squirrel, when you need to give the fans some hope to chase, and their manager provided that today with his “let’s build the house” nonsense he talked; again, I’ll cover their mad day of statements and nonsense tomorrow, but you can see the need the club has for the lies and why it plays such a role in pushing them.

Which brings us to the fans, and they lap all this stuff up, and if they were the supporters of any other club, I might even feel sorry for them. But I don’t. They too have to know that some of this stuff is loony, but they lap it up because it makes them feel a tiny bit better about the steady erosion of their belief in what they’ve always believed was their own superiority.

Now, finally, and if you read that interview you will see this clearly, all the chickens are coming home to roost over there. Their fans are more in need of some delusional and deflection than ever before, and that’s the most dangerous time because promises made now, if they are taken seriously, can bind people to the sort of decisions they wanted to avoid.

The next week or two is going to be very interesting indeed, both at their club and ours. They will continue to live in their fantasy as long as they can hold it together … but that might not be for much longer. That volcano is about to blow.