Ibrox’s Desperados are being offered new pre-Celtic game straws to clutch to.

The great Eagles song starts with the words, “Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?”

How many times have you, as a Celtic fan, wanted to scream that into the face of the nearest Ibrox fan when they start indulging in one of their mad fantasies?

I really want to do a deep-dive piece into the culture of insanity at that club, and I’m going to do it. It will be a lengthy article. It will take time, effort and proper care. At the moment, I have a lot to do, so finding the hours to write it, and then the hours to edit it, is not easy.

But we will get around to it. Because it is not just a culture. It is also about the people who feed that culture and the people who sustain that mentality. In Scotland, you do not have to look any further than the media, and certain media outlets in particular.

The Daily Record is at it again tonight, trying to find an upside to an Ibrox win at the weekend which goes beyond merely stopping Celtic.

In my lengthy piece this morning about my continued surprise that the media does not understand the Celtic fan revolution, I said that some of them read the blogs. I was not joking. I know that some of them read the blogs.

Talking points from Celtic fan blogs turn up in the mainstream media time and time again. Most people in the mainstream media have never had an original thought in their lives, and they do what a lot of people in the media sphere now do. They comb the internet for ideas and inspiration, and because many of them are incapable of organising a thought, they take the thoughts of other people, repackage them and pass them off as their own.

It is lazy. It is also arrogant to think that we won’t spot it.

I have caught these people doing this time and time again. Stories which appear on this site, or on other sites, are repurposed and appear in the mainstream media a week later, presented as original thinking.

It is rife. It is embarrassing.

Today gives us another example of it.

I knew there were media outlets that wanted to push hard on the narrative that the Ibrox club still had something to play for at Celtic Park. I can tell you exactly what it was, because I had already heard it on the radio, on the BBC and elsewhere.

The idea was that the Ibrox club would suddenly find motivation, and that this motivation would be stopping Celtic.

You know why none of them is really making that case now? Because this website and wider Celtic fan media dismantled that case and rendered it utterly ludicrous.

It was simple to do. If they did not have the motivation to win the title for themselves, why would they find the motivation to stop us?

Do they hate us more than they love their own club?

That was the killer question. That was the crucial point.

While we were at it, we demolished the idea that there is anything meaningful to be gained from playing for pride. That other old chestnut comes up all the time. Pride. Bragging rights. Something like that.

But where is the pride in winning a dead rubber? Where are the bragging rights if your team finishes third and somebody else has their name engraved on the trophy?

You would take the trophy over the bragging rights every single time, because the trophy is tangible. It is real. Bragging rights sometimes do not even last a day, which is why I have never taken comfort from them for anything longer than a 24-hour period.

Tonight, the Daily Record is trying to put a gloss on it by talking up the achievement for Danny Röhl if he becomes only the second Ibrox boss to win his first two games at Celtic Park.

This is a guy whose performance this season has people openly talking about when, not if, he gets the sack. Yet this is supposed to be the big thing for him now.

Two wins at Celtic Park. In a season where even if they get them, they may finish with nothing. Nothing at all. Potentially not even second place.

The headline of the Daily Record piece is, “Danny Röhl could join Ibrox royalty at Celtic Park as Youssef Chermiti hunts down derby record.”

So, he could become the second Ibrox boss after Walter Smith to win his first two away derby games. Smith of course, being the guy who spent so much money in his closing tenure at the first Ibrox club that he was instrumental in its slide into administration and liquidation.

This is supposed to be the great prize? It is pathetic.

This is supposed to rehabilitate a guy who has won nothing? This is supposed to fix everything that has gone wrong? Maybe for a handful of their fans, it actually would. But that is where you want to repeat those Eagles lyrics back at them.

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?

Is that how far your ambition has fallen? A single victory against Celtic in a game that might prevent us winning the title is enough for you in a season of abject failure?

The Chermiti point is even more pathetic.

His four goals against Celtic equal the Ibrox record for a single season. If he scores again at Celtic Park, he becomes the first player to score five goals in a league season in the history of the derby. I guess for some Ibrox fans, that too will be a big deal.

For me, if I had seen my club spend £8 million on a player, and other than goals against our rivals in the title race he had done virtually nothing else, I think I would be pretty underwhelmed.

I would not be inclined to put a poster of him on my wall. I certainly would not be having his name tattooed on my back.

What did I say about this guy after the game at Ibrox? What did I say after he scored the two against Hearts? This is a guy who can raise his game for big matches, but for the rest of the season strolls around like someone on holiday, visiting the bars in the resort. I would rather not have someone like that in my team most weeks.

Someone who can get himself up for the matches he fancies playing in, but for the rest of the time looks lazy, uncoordinated and unmotivated, is not a player I’d be celebrating too loudly.

I don’t care that Larsson, Dembélé, Édouard, Kyogo and all the other great players we have watched dominate these derbies over the years did not score five league goals in a single season against the Ibrox club.

I literally do not care about that statistic. I would not even have known that fact had the Record not promoted this story.

You know why I don’t care? You know why I did not know that Larsson never scored five in a single league campaign against them, or that Kyogo, Dembélé or Édouard never did it?

Because I was not looking for straws to clutch during those league campaigns.

Because guess what?

We were usually champions at the end of them.

So, who scored the goals mattered less to me than the fact that someone in the team did, and that our name ended up engraved on the trophy.

We live in a pathetic media environment. Absolutely pathetic. It is full of this stuff.

The efforts to make Ibrox feel good this week have scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard that they are now raking through the dirt underneath it.

We have the manager talking about three cup finals when the two before it have already been lost, rendering this match almost irrelevant. If Hearts get any kind of result on Saturday night before our game, it becomes irrelevant to their slim, virtually non-existent title chances.

Oh yes, they may still be able to harm ours.

Perhaps even fatally.

But it is pathetic nonetheless that a club which once boasted about its power, might and strength, even if all of that was borrowed from a club fourteen years in the grave, is now reduced to celebrating meaningless managerial and player records. That and trying to deny another team the glory they are not good enough to win themselves.

You know what else the great Eagles classic says?

“The things that are pleasing you can hurt you somehow.”

For every Ibrox fan taking satisfaction from these kinds of stories, there is your problem right there. That is why your whole club and your whole culture are stuck in the mud. It is obsessed with minor details, fake victories, false accomplishments and stuff that means nothing.

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?

Because the things pleasing you right now are not signs of life.

They are symptoms of failure.

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