Russell Martin; “There ain’t no coupe-de-ville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.”

Ronald Reagan used to tell a story about a kid who got up on Christmas morning expecting a fine present. He went downstairs, was led out to the back garden, and found himself standing in front of a steaming pile of shit.

He was handed a shovel and told to get busy.

Another kid, who lived across the way, came by and spotted him digging furiously, a smile on his face. He asked him why he looked so happy. And the kid with the shovel said, “There must be a pony in here.”

Reagan didn’t invent that story, but he liked it a lot, and he used to tell it often. Political writers and social theorists have long wondered what the point of it actually was, as deployed by Reagan. I’ve always believed it was deeply, deeply cynical. It wasn’t about eternal optimism in the face of hard odds, or any of the other sentimental interpretations usually ascribed to it.

Reagan was a hard-right, slash-the-state, no-social-safety-net politician who was about as far from a bleeding heart as you could get. That little parable, to me, is about how he saw the American people: endlessly optimistic — and that optimism could be used to manipulate them to suit his ends.

People are always encouraged to look for the pony. No matter how bad things are, no matter how tough — they’re told to find the silver lining, to believe there’s some hidden benefit, even when there’s no evidence of one at all.

Look at how the Tory government from 2010 onwards framed its cuts to the social safety net. Did it focus on the devastating human impact of those cuts? Of course not. They focused on the supposed positives — on food banks. On how communities “came together” to help each other. How we were all “pulling together” through adversity — without ever acknowledging that it was adversity they had caused.

Brexit, which was in reality about the loss of our rights as European citizens, was sold to people as “taking back control.” Taking it back from who, exactly? And what kind of control were we supposedly snatching for ourselves?

There are still people out there, to this day, shovelling merrily. Digging away at that pile, looking for the pony. Ever hopeful. Eternally convinced that the Brexit dividend is just one more shovel-load away.

And it’s in that spirit that I want to think today about the media and how it’s going to help sell Russell Martin to an Ibrox fanbase which now finds itself standing with a shovel in hand, looking at a pile of shit, and wondering how all the optimism of just a few days ago has been snatched away — leaving them staring at another car crash campaign fronted by a guy they don’t really believe in at all.

This managerial hunt has come full circle, it seems to me. When it started all those many, many, many months ago, and they appointed Ferguson as interim boss, the Ibrox fans were encouraged to speculate wildly on who might replace Philippe Clement.

And that speculation went nuts. Some of the names being thrown around were off-the-charts ridiculous. One Scottish hack — Bill Leckie, I’m going to name you and shame you — even suggested that because of the 49ers-Red Bull connection, it wasn’t out of the question that they could go and get… Jürgen Klopp.

Mourinho’s name got mentioned. Marco Rose even looked like a bookie’s favourite for a while. Some in the media seemed almost masochistically determined to torture themselves — and the Ibrox faithful — with an ever-increasing number of mad options that never stood a chance of coming off.

And hilariously, each of those names brought with them a rash of speculative nonsense about who their first signings were going to be.

This culminated in two of the daftest stories the media has run in recent years: the one about how Ancelloti might bring the best of Madrid’s academy to Ibrox, and the other — a proper howler — that Luka Modric might want to follow him there.

Oh, and Gerrard had apparently already secured Jordan Henderson not just for his backroom team, but as a key part of the Ibrox midfield.

Lots of promises. Big names. Glitz, glitter, and glamour.

Well, this is where it all ends.

With a guy whose name was on the table for so long that they could have appointed him the day after they sacked Clement and saved themselves all this bother.

I mean, that’s the real punchline here — it’s taken them all these many, many, many months to arrive at a guy they could have had already, and almost certainly would have had, if he truly was the outstanding candidate they’re now all going to have to get in line to pretend he’s always been.

So, as with everything else, the media — which promoted all those big names and fancy options, that talked up cosmopolitan football royalty and all the rest of it — now has to contend with cold reality once more.

And like a lot of people, I’m very interested to see where they go next in trying to flog this to Ibrox fans who, let’s be honest, weren’t expecting a pile of shit.

First out of the traps yesterday was the BBC, with a truly wonderful attempt to put glitter on this turd. They opened their piece with a quote about how Martin was going to be a great manager because he had the right personality and temperament.

Now, from which elite coach from the lofty heights of the global game did that quote come? Which chairman of a European super-club? Which former pro who’s worked under the greats?

Er… actually, it came from celebrity chef Delia Smith.

When that’s your opening endorsement, it really leaves you scratching your head and wondering where you go from there.

Perhaps next we’ll hear from a third-rate actor or a washed-up pop star. Maybe even a disgraced former politician now making the rounds on reality TV. Why not? That’d be about as relevant to football as the Delia Smith endorsement was.

To their credit — if we can use that word in such a profoundly silly manner — they did manage to dig up a few ex-pros who were willing to say he’s a nice guy, and who tried to promote his style of football as somehow visionary and game-changing.

Not bad, considering his 40% career win ratio.

They did manage to find one tiny silver lining: a single goal his MK Dons team once scored which involved dozens and dozens of passes. They even compared it to some of the football played at Barcelona during their peak. But that one’s just too smelly and lumpy for even the average Ibrox fan to swallow.

So I regard the next few days as an amusing lesson in how the media does spin control. It’s going to be fun watching them try to paint Russell Martin as the progressive, forward-thinking candidate — when he’s been available the whole time and the club couldn’t even be bothered to approach him until now.

It’ll be interesting to watch them try to turn this lower-league scrapper into the new Messiah, especially when he’s been the one candidate that everyone — including the press — has been determinedly overlooking since the start.

They will, of course, find people to talk this up. Martin has friends in the game, and they’re already lining up to say what a good manager he is, what a good guy he’ll be in the job. But none of that’s going to fool fans who came downstairs on Christmas morning expecting a shiny new bike or a stack of presents… and were handed a shovel and directed to the back garden instead.

Some of them will keep digging for the pony. Others can already see — with grim clarity — that it’s just a big pile of shit. And fooling them on this one is going to be very difficult indeed.

Because even they have their limits.

There’s a point where the delusion breaks down. A point beyond which even the most loyal supporters refuse to swallow any more of the BS. They aren’t going to waste their time digging for the pony or, to quote Jim Steinmen, from the same song as I got my title “looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks.”

They know what they can see in front of them.

And nothing anyone says over the next few days or weeks is going to convince them that Russell Martin is the elite-level manager they were promised. Or the one they expected to get.

That doesn’t mean he’ll be a failure. But for a support base that has spent months seducing itself with dreams of big names, glitter, and bling, this isn’t just a disappointment.

It’s a slap in the face.