Stupid, Stupid Peepul: Robin Propper

It’s always amusing when someone at Ibrox—whether a player, coach, manager, or even a club official—starts making grandiose claims about their supposed mastery over the rest of Scottish football. Tonight’s example comes courtesy of Robin Propper, who is evidently still “settling in,” but fancies himself playing well enough to declare that he aims to be the “undisputed starter” by the end of the year. Hilarious.

To make it even better, he’s added a side-swipe at Scottish football by claiming he doesn’t rate the game here because too many teams “play the long ball.”

This joker has already faced us once, and, let’s be honest, it didn’t end well for him. In fact, his lapse during Kyogo’s first goal in that game was so bad that Neil McCann took him apart on Sportscene, tearing into his defensive positioning.

It’s fair to say that plenty of Ibrox fans are equally unimpressed with what he’s shown so far. And for anyone in that team to criticise others in Scottish football for being “long-ball merchants” displays a stunning lack of self-awareness and an arrogance that’s laughably misplaced.

We’ll see him again soon enough in the cup final, and when we do, we’ll give him a lesson in what actual football looks like. He played at the weekend after being dropped for the last couple of big games, and he was woeful.

I’d honestly be surprised if he’s in the lineup against us for the final. He looks slow, miles off the pace, and positionally suspect. That said, it doesn’t mean he won’t play—I just doubt he’ll get the nod, given how unimpressed everyone has been with him so far.

At the weekend against Dundee United, he was utterly exposed for their goal. It was a simple ball into the box, no marker near the scorer, and Propper was left standing. Any defender worth their salt would be ashamed of that performance and think twice before running their mouth. But, as we all know, self-awareness isn’t exactly a common trait over there.

The next month or so will be brutal for every player in that squad, but especially the defence. I hope Propper plays in the cup final. Truly, I do. I hope he gets selected because he looks slow, lacks positional awareness, and I think our team will absolutely tear him apart.

When your team is in crisis—playing poorly, lacking organisation, with a manager clinging to his job—maybe it’s not the best time to boast about how brilliant you are. Especially when you haven’t been brilliant at all. But nothing stops these guys from doing it. Nothing prevents them from constantly tripping over their own words.

No club in football is more in need of proper media discipline. They speak when they shouldn’t, and when they should speak, they stay silent. Watch over the next 24 hours—there’ll probably be a flurry of media stories about how they’re “finally getting it right” off the pitch and putting structures in place to challenge us. Grandiose promises will abound, and for a brief time, they’ll kid themselves that they’ve turned a corner.

But as we’ve seen time and time again this season, these boasts don’t last five minutes before reality sets in. Jack Butland is another example; after the last game, he declared that the title race is still on, despite being 11 points behind us and sitting below Aberdeen. Instead of focusing on “one game at a time,” they’re back to projecting into a future that isn’t theirs.

When your defence is this fragile, when your team is this far off the pace, when the next few weeks are filled with gruelling matches—including two against us and one against Spurs—maybe boasting about how great you are isn’t the smartest move. But then again, it takes a special kind of daft to play as poorly as Propper has and still talk like this.

And that’s why he’s the third Ibrox player to feature in this series of Stupid, Stupid Peepul.

Take a bow, Robin Propper.