With Shankland seemingly bound for Ibrox, the overdue reality check has arrived at Hearts.

Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, I have a piece to put up about the current situation at Ibrox.

I was going to talk about their signing policy. I was also going to talk about Celtic and the fundamental misunderstanding some people have about why we are so successful, which also involves that signing policy.

At the risk of writing three different articles on the same subject, I’m going to talk about Lawrence Shankland.

If you’ve heard the news that he is in advanced talks to sign for the Ibrox club, you’ll know why. But I’m not going to talk about him mainly in the context of Ibrox and their transfer policy. That will hopefully differentiate this enough from the other two articles.

I’m going to talk about what this means for Hearts.

Hearts fans who read this story when it broke in the Sun last night, or saw it elsewhere this morning, will be dealing with a horrible series of realisations. Just as with our title triumph, I find that I have limited sympathy for them.

This is a mess partly of their own making.

Part of it comes from allowing themselves to believe in all the myth-making around Jamestown Analytics, Tony Bloom and the bright future they thought was in front of them. Part of it comes from entrusting fair-weather friends. Part of it comes from thinking that all of Scottish football really was rooting for them after all.

I appeared briefly on Paulina’s YouTube channel the other day, talking about Scottish politics, and I mentioned the con played on the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 coalition government.

The Tories realised that chaining the Lib Dems to their own policies had made the Lib Dems grossly unpopular, with support leaking to Labour in some places and to the Conservatives themselves in others. As soon as that polling was in, Tory central office began moving the pieces into place to capture a slew of Lib Dem seats.

A senior Lib Dem MP, I’m sure it was Danny Alexander, had been given a cabinet role. He visited a factory in his own constituency and found out that it was scheduled to host two Tory ministers within days. He contacted them to ask what the hell was going on, and they told him it was a scheduling error.

But the ministerial visit went ahead.

After the election, Alexander contacted Lib Dems across the country who had lost their seats and found that similar shenanigans had gone on elsewhere. The Tories had been preaching the merits of the coalition out of one side of their mouths while scheming to win those same seats out of the other. It worked.

In 2015, the Tories won a majority partly because they eviscerated the Lib Dems in what the Lib Dems had thought was their own heartland.

You have to be ruthless. It is part of the game. The really good players are the most ruthless and the most strategically smart. What the Tories did was not exactly ethical, but it was strategically effective.

Needless to say, when you are patting your Lib Dem colleagues on the back while scheming to snatch their jobs, that is ruthless.

I don’t know how many times I wrote in the run-up to the grand finale of this season that, if Hearts fans really believed the whole country was rooting for them, they were crazy.

That was a marriage of convenience if ever there was one.

The Ibrox-loving West of Scotland media would have taken a Hearts win if it stopped Celtic. But no one actually wanted one. Their preferred club had blown it. That is why the last three or four weeks became all about Hearts. That is why they started selling the great fairy tale.

It was not the one they had in mind.

Now the season is over, and the facade has collapsed. There is no need for it any longer.

Hearts will not be able to pursue any kind of meaningful claim against Celtic. The European places are settled. The trophies are won. The book is closed on 2025/26.

The West of Scotland press has no problem reverting straight back to type. They are loving the Shankland story. They are loving the idea that he could leave Hearts and move to Ibrox. They are gloating about it. They are gleeful about it, especially if it turns out he does so for nothing, or for a nominal sum.

Hearts thought about this the whole way small clubs do. The problem is that they forgot they were a small club.

There are no circumstances under which they should have re-signed Shankland with a clause that made this possible. They had the whip hand. He had already shopped his name around clubs all over the country and nobody had bitten. There was no serious rush for him.

Yet they still gave him a contract that may now allow him to walk.

That is small-club behaviour.

That is player-bigger-than-club behaviour.

That is insanity.

It does not suggest Jamestown Analytics and the people getting all the credit are quite as smart as many have been claiming.

Over on the Hearts forums, they are alternating between disbelief, resignation and a strange sort of defiance.

I understand the first two emotions.

Disbelief is obvious. Resignation is a sort of premature acceptance of their place in the food chain. The Ibrox club finished third. Hearts will be playing Champions League qualification football. But if Shankland wants to move to Ibrox, none of that appears to matter.

It does not matter that he is Hearts’ captain. It does not matter that he did all that badge-kissing through the season.

For him, it was a marriage of convenience, just as the media’s support for Hearts was. He knows where he wants to be.

Some Hearts fans know they cannot compete with that.

It does not matter how low the club across the city has sunk. There are people in Scottish football who would prefer to be there under any circumstances than at the clubs they currently represent.

Champions League football? Apparently, that makes no difference. I don’t even think it would have made a difference had Hearts won the title.

So yes, resignation I understand. Some of them have finally accepted a hard truth.

It’s the strange defiance I find hard to credit.

This is your talisman. This is the guy who scored big goals against all the top clubs. He scored the last-day goal at Celtic Park that could have given you the title.

Do not pretend losing him is not massive and destabilising.

Shankland was not just the talisman. He was the club captain. Nobody should be pretending it is no big deal to lose him to another club in the same league.

It is a disaster of the first magnitude.

To lose him to a club in the same league for free, or close to it, would be a cataclysmic event. They can be as defiant as they like. Nothing is going to make that less of a blow.

So, the friends Hearts thought they had are gone. The people who were cheerleading them from the sidelines have drifted away to follow their favourites once again. The assumption that Hearts had grown over the season into a serious contender has been ripped from them and revealed as a fantasy.

The media is laughing its arse off.

Ibrox fans do not even pretend not to be ecstatic. Not only at potentially capturing the guy many of them wanted, but at rubbing Hearts’ faces in it.

Second place finish? This is what it’s worth.

As for the Ibrox club, what exactly they think they are getting, I don’t know. A guy who will be 31 in a few months, abandoning the club where he was captain, his dressing room, his teammates and the supporters who worshipped him to sign for them?

That is not a leadership move.

The “staunchness” in which so many people are placing such stock, and which is what I’m going to write about later, does not disguise the fact that this is another of football’s losers, perennially stuck in Scotland because it is the only place where he looks like a credible footballer. In that regard, he is very much like this generation’s Kris Boyd.

He has a League One title and a Scottish Championship title in his trophy cabinet. So, signing a winner? I’m not so sure about that either.

But for a while, the West of Scotland media will be happy. For a while, Ibrox fans will be over the moon.

For Hearts fans, the message this sends is simple.

Know your place.

That is not me saying it. That is the rest of the Scottish football world they thought was on their side saying it. This is a reality check.

It is an overdue one. Wake the fuck up.

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