Desperate Jackson pleads for Cavenagh to end Celtic’s dominance … by giving Bazza the job!

You have to laugh, don’t you?

It was just yesterday that I posted my latest piece on the Ibrox managerial merry-go-round, and said that the fakeover and the length of time it was taking, combined with what I call The Barry Ferguson Myth make it more and more likely that he’ll end up with the gig.

Today, Keith Jackson published his latest piece, and you know how this works by now. We have to dissect it line by line. But it’s another step away from the story he proudly boasts that he broke … and the further fuelling of the Ferguson Myth. It’s as if a realisation has dawned that these things might have an influence on each other.

As usual, though, Jackson misreads the landscape. What a clown.

I’ll do a larger piece on the implications of this article later; for now, let’s just get down to pulling it apart bit by bit, starting with the headline.

(Ibrox) takeover better get a move on and Cavenagh can help himself by making Barry Ferguson an offer – Keith Jackson

Aaaah the sweet smell of panic in the air. Lovely, isn’t it?

The smart money says nothing much is likely to change over the course of the next 12 months with Celtic large and in charge

And defeatism too! Where is all this confidence that Jackson was exuding not that long ago? Vanished like a fart in the wind, the lot of it.

The party may have been postponed with the last kick of the ball yesterday afternoon.

The party was still being had. You just weren’t invited chump.

But, even though Ianis Hagi pulled the plug on it in spectacular style, it’ll come around eventually.

See above. This time of the season, it’s just one party after another with our fans.

And when it does the season will end exactly the way almost everyone thought it would before a ball had been kicked last August.

Not true. There were one or two hacks who made wild claims about what Phillipe Clement would do to us once his signings were in place and he had a summer behind him. That’s revisionism at best and outright lies at worst.

The way it always ends. With yet another league title wrapped up in green and white ribbons and delivered to Glasgow’s east end.

Hurts, doesn’t it? Maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad if you Peepul kept some sense of perspective and didn’t go nuts after a couple of good results. But this is the pro-Ibrox tendency. This is why every season feels like an extended misery.

Granted, back then, it would have been impossible to imagine that the final chapter would involve Barry Ferguson playing such a prominent part.

Oh but I wouldn’t have ruled it out either. It was just daft enough that you could have put money on it and not felt you were just giving it away.

This old adversary appeared to have gift-wrapped the trophy for them when he sent out a reserve side and watched it being roundly pummelled at Pittodrie – two goals and one man down by half time.

Let’s get it straight, clown; nobody needs to “gift wrap” the trophy for Celtic. This is exactly why I’m not too bothered about yesterday’s result; I’m not having this narrative being spun. Celtic deserves the title. We won the title. We have amassed the points necessary to be sitting here today needing just one more to finish the job. Nobody gave it to us. We took it. And winning it on our own, that will be perfect. That will do fine.

And Ferguson’s levels of distress may just have made the moment all the more sweeter for Celtic’s supporters who were already making their way towards another celebratory knees-up while their rivals still had 45 minutes more to suffer in the north east.

Ferguson’s “distress” or otherwise would not have factored into any of it, for any Celtic fan. Winning the title will be a sweet moment for what it means to Celtic, not how it impacts on the emotional well-being of a corner boy with a fancy job title.

The pain that was etched all over Ferguson’s face throughout that first half yesterday afternoon will only have added to Celtic’s enjoyment.

It mattered not at all except in that I generally like seeing Ferguson suffer. That comes from all the years he’s spent up to his knees in the blood of my family, friends and others. And if he doesn’t like that too bad.

And even though Hamza Igamane and Hagi combined to dig Ibrox out of that hole and keep the champagne on ice, Ferguson knows his side’s fate has been long since sealed.

Yeah so enough of the rubbish about Celtic being handed the title.

That he will be in the driving seat when Celtic finally do get their hands on the big prize, provides an unexpected footnote to make the climax to this campaign a little more memorable than it might have been had Philippe Clement still been dozing behind the wheel.

In whose eyes exactly? He is the footnote. He’s one of those trick questions people will get in a quiz one day and only a handful of people in the pub will know the answer. “Guy who was in charge of Ibrox during Celtic’s fourth title on the way to their first dozen in a row … Graeme Murty? Shit, no, that’s not it, is it ….?”

Ferguson and his back room team represent a reminder of what Rangers used to be all about back in the days before they rendered themselves pretty much irrelevant in their own back yard.

Hahahaha. My favourite paragraph so far. Let me tell you what Ferguson and his backroom team are; they are not the symbol of bygone days of yore and the greatness of the former Ibrox club. They are the final degradation, the final proof of how far removed this Ibrox club is from the first one. They are a joke. Everyone in Scottish football who is not looking at it through a blue tint thinks they are a joke. That appointment epitomises the collapse in every measurable standard, in every measurable ambition that the current board has left. They are the ultimate proof of decline, rot and decay. They are the final evidence of the utter irrelevance of Ibrox.

And let’s make no mistake here. With just one top flight championship to their name in the last 14 years, that’s exactly what they have become in terms of contesting a title which has made a home for itself on the other side of Glasgow’s divide.

Correct. The Ibrox club is nothing. Watching them celebrate yesterday as though snatching our title party from us in the last minute was a great triumph for them was the last evidence that their Espanyolification is complete.

So, yes, when it does come Celtic’s supporters will take a further dollop of delight from seeing them in such obvious discomfort, having arrived back at their old club just in time for another painful whack of rock bottom.

Celtic fans will be too busy celebrating even to care. Why is this stuff not clear to you?

By their very presence, Ferguson, Neil McCann, Billy Dodds and Allan McGregor have helped to ensure that yet another Celtic title winning season stands out from all the others, which are in danger of blurring into one another.

Yeah, only in that they are the final evidence that the club has now scraped the bottom of the barrel. This season “stands out” only for the brilliance of some of our football. It’s had big European nights. It’s had our confirmation that we’re punching our weight again in Europe. It’s going to end at Hampden with a treble. The latest arse to occupy the Ibrox electric chair is of no consequence to us at all.

But that’s the thing about Scottish football. It’s nothing if not gloriously imaginative with its own storylines. Even if, inevitably, the outcome is almost always the same.

There was nothing imaginative about that Ibrox management team. It was gloriously, easily, predictable. A last desperate effort to reconnect with the glory days of the former club. Everyone saw it coming a mile away.

Of course, Andrew Cavenagh and his associates from the San Francisco 49ers will have their own ideas about becoming disruptors but, even though the American consortium might be coming, the smart money says nothing much is likely to change over the course of the next 12 months.

Cavenagh and his “associates”? Not “business partners”? And where did “might be coming” suddenly spring from? Oh wait, Keith, you’re surely not suggesting that these people may not “sweep to power” after all, are you? You’re surely not about to drop another big hint that the takeover is a fakeover? Well god damn, who would have guessed that? Ahem … everyone who likewise saw the Ferguson temporary coronation. Even I never believed it would happen in quite the manner you seemed to be suggesting, and I was very late to the “fakeover” party compared to others.

Because Brendan Rodgers and his squad is already so far ahead of the race for next season that no amount of new money and fresh thinking from across the pond is likely to make any discernible difference to the bigger picture.

And the “new money” was never going to be spent as lavishly as Jackson had indicated. You regular readers already knew that, of course!

To be frank, Cavenagh and his legal team are making it more difficult with each day that passes without the paperwork being signed, sealed and rubber stamped on this impending takeover.

“Oh please do it soon … please, please, please … I don’t want to continue to ignore those looks around the office from people who wonder if the reputation of the whole paper has been put at risk by our pushing another obvious fiction on the only part of our target audience which still takes us seriously …”

While Rodgers will already have one eye fixed firmly on what he needs to improve his team over the summer and will have placed his irons in the fire, Rangers are stuck in a state of almost perpetual flux.

If I didn’t know better I’d start to think this is taking on a very familiar tenor … didn’t I say something about this last night? Didn’t my piece about the Barry Ferguson Myth not say that Cavenagh and his people might just opt to go with what’s already in the building, rather than subject the club to a long managerial search and then try to assemble a squad at high speed? Why do I hear echoes of that here?

If they are not hunting for new managers, they’re rebuilding entire squads and now they’re changing owners into the bargain.

Yep. We’re getting to it now. Best just to leave Barry in charge. He’s brought back the standards, after all … What did I tell you! It’s good to be right! And if even a moron like Jackson here can see there’s a certain demented logic in leaving the current management team in place then you better believe it could happen. On another point, the club is not going to have “new owners” at any stage of this. It will have, at best, a new majority shareholder, and as I’ve pointed out that’s not the same thing.

But Cavenagh – who was back in Scotland last week – will have to get a move on if he is to conclude this buy out and still have enough time left over to put a proper strategy in place for the coming campaign.

Yeah, may as well get your excuses for next season in early, Keith, eah?

With that in mind he could do himself a favour by sitting Ferguson and his coaching staff down, offering them one year rolling contracts and asking them to put their own plans into practice in terms of recruitment.

All you Ibrox fans who doubt the common sense on this blog … dear oh dear, when will you ever learn? The Ferguson Myth is powering the club towards its next disaster very nicely indeed. That and the crumbling fakeover.

But the longer that conversation doesn’t take place the less chance there is that it ever will.

First, until the fakeov … haha I meant takeover … is complete, he doesn’t have the authority to do any such thing. He can’t even change the guy who licks the stamps or the one who searches down the back of the sofas for the spare change. Secondly, you’re dead wrong on the timing, and this is the beautiful part; the longer it takes for the big reveal on the takeov … haha sorry, I meant fakeover … the more likely it is that they will look at the ticking clock and realise that the answer is right under their nose. If these guys “swept” to their 51% shareholding tomorrow, they’d have enough time to get the search for the next boss underway. The longer it takes, the better the chance that this “management team” gets the gig for the next campaign.

Of course, Ferguson could change all of that by beating Athletic Bilbao in Spain on Thursday night and booking a place in the semi finals of this season’s Europa League.

And I could grow my hair, put it in dreadlocks, start jogging five miles a day and start my own hip-hop label. I think those things are unlikely.

And that thought will have been in the front and centre of his mind yesterday when he chose to send out a shadow side against Aberdeen rather than risk any more casualties ahead of the second leg.

A shadow side. Aberdeen fans would have laughed at that. Just two members of that failed football team – Danilo and Bajrami – cost more than the entire Aberdeen team combined. What a hilarious waste of money they are!

By giving so many of his key performers the day off, he was also inviting the fringe men to step up and prove that they have been wrongly overlooked since Clement was sent packing.

Those fringe men – and we should include Cortes in there, who they have an obligation to buy on haha – are staggeringly poor but were shockingly expensive. Those are the very guys who are sucking money out of the club like a vampire gorging on blood and whose resale value falls like a rock with every day that passes.

They managed to do nothing much more than underline precisely why Ferguson thinks so little of them in the first place.

Clement didn’t think much of them either, to be honest, although he signed a few of them. Or so we’re led to believe.

Danilo and Oscar Cortes were hooked at half time and may not be seen again for as long as the interim boss stays in charge.

Well I can only say what Cavenagh might say if and when he gets into the club and not just into the hospitality section. “If they’re not in the shop window they are rotting in the back room. Get them where we can sell them.”

Ross McCausland was sent off before the interval having picked up two yellow cards and he too will have been left in no doubt about his own responsibilities to the team. The winger might just have earned himself a permanent place among Ferguson’s untrustables.

Until the next time he needs warm bodies on the pitch or on the bench.

Nedim Bajrami – who was replaced by Hagi later on – may already be stuck there too.

He might be the biggest waste of cash I’ve ever witnessed at that club, and that’s saying something considering the company he’s in.

If Ferguson was properly empowered to start putting his plans in place for next season then it’s probable that some if not all of these players would have been told already to get their agents on the case.

These guys could have Harry Houdini on the case. There’s no way out of Ibrox because nobody is going to actually offer money for them, or actually pay them to hang around their ground pretending to be footballers. Ibrox is stuck with the lot of them.

But, the longer Cavenagh’s takeover rolls on without a decision made on the manager, the more likely it is that they’ll be back again in time for pre-season training when they could become someone else’s problem.

I’m afraid, Keith, that the takeover has to happen first. And the chances of that being done quickly are about as slim as my chances of getting into a 32 waist sometime over the next 12 months. Until these people are in nominal control Ferguson and everything else over there is stuck in limbo. Which is amusing to me.

And the more certain it is that next season will end the same old way that it always does. With another party in the Celtic Park car park.

What, even with the fabulous wealth that the Americans will bring to the table? It’s almost as if Jackson has finally sussed that’s not going to happen … and he’s mentally preparing his readers for the seismic shock of it.