Rangers fans are playing a blinder..but their loyalty is self-defeating...

[ian1964 10,720]

...says Bill Leckie.

 

All I can say is, how you stand for the mess that club has become is way beyond most of us.

 

YOUR fully-fledged, true blue Rangers fan is amongst the most unshakeably loyal creatures on earth.It’s just a pity that loyalty is as blind as Stevie Wonder with a lead-lined paper bag on his head.

 

They’re like the guy whose mates tell him from day one of a relationship that she’s no good, she’s a gold-digger, she’s putting it about behind his back, but he would rather square go the lot of them than admit he’s besotted with a wrong ‘un.

 

Then one day it all falls apart, she disappears with his brother and he’s left sitting on the floor of a living room with no furniture, the credit card company battering at his door and an unbearable itch in his pants.

 

Again.

 

Not that I’m suggesting this latest messy Ibrox break-up is all the fault of those fans. Course it isn’t.

 

All I’m saying is that by forever being more desperate to give two fingers to the outside world than they are to point one at the glaring issues within their own walls, they’ve enabled those in charge to screw them over for the umpteenth time.

 

Personally, I don’t give a toss whether Dave King and his goons succeed, fail or float forever on a beige cloud of mediocrity.I don’t care whether Mark Warburton had a magic hat or exploding underpants.

 

But I do care about football fans — no matter who they support and even despite how unpleasantly that support too often manifests itself — having their lifelong devotion used against them as a means of silencing any form of protest.

 

At Charlton Athletic, Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City and Blackpool, punters have had enough of this passive-aggression torture.

 

They’ve had enough of financing rank-rotten regimes. So they stay away. They ask rival fans to stay away. They use the media to raise awareness of just how bad their exiled, don’t-give-a-damn owners are, not just for their own clubs, but for the game itself.

 

But your Rangers fan? He just rings up a phone-in and shouts about history and culture and 54 titles and how WeArraPeepel.

 

He creates a caricature of himself and turns a serious problem at an endangered sporting institution into a national joke.

 

In truth, I tired long ago of writing about all this, because it got a bit like shouting up to a guy on the tenth floor of a blazing building that he needs to get the hell out and him shouting back:

 

“DON’T TELL ME THIS BUILDING’S BURNING! YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS BUILDING, THIS IS OUR BUILDING, IT’S A HISTORIC BUILDING AND YOU’LL NEVER BE FIT TO BURN IN IT!”

 

What can you do about an attitude like that? Knowing even if they escape and the building isn’t too badly damaged, they’ll be too proud to get the smoke detectors checked so the place doesn’t catch fire again?

 

They got burned under David Murray, they got burned under Craig Whyte, they got burned under Charles Green and now they’re getting burned under King.

 

They refused to see the smoke signals until it was too late when Ally McCoist was in charge and they refused to see them when Warburton was plainly toiling.

 

Who knows, maybe they go back to their boozers and tear his signing policies to bits, maybe they go home and kick Albertz the dog up and down the garden, but — and here’s the crux — what those in charge can always rely on is that they’ll always come back and they’ll always stump up their cash and they’ll always, always sing No Surrender so the world knows there’s nothing to see here, please disperse.

 

Except the world DOES know something’s wrong, very wrong. The world can see that without the amazing numbers who kept turning up in League Two, League One and The Ramsdens Cup and who now still turn up despite seeing their greatest rivals disappear over the horizon on a golden team bus, Rangers would be nothing. Dead. Gone.

 

The money handed over by those ever-loyal hordes allowed Whyte, Green and McCoist to make an almighty rick of getting back up through the divisions and it has allowed King and Warburton to put together a gang of overpaid, overvalued, underachieving mercenaries in the top flight.

 

See the link there, Bluenoses? Without your money, your £800,000 at the gate every other Saturday plus pies and programmes and whatever else — even with the THREAT of those fortunes drying up — none of these imposters could have operated.

 

If only you knew the power you had. It’s greater than just about any other major club, because if Man U or Liverpool or Arsenal fans stayed away they’d still have their £100million a skull from Sky and they could market themselves up new pretendy fans.

 

But you don’t get it. You think strength comes from roaring defiance at everyone outside Govan, from constantly reminding everyone Whit Ye Ur and what you stand for.

 

Well all I can say is, how you stand for the mess that club has become is way beyond most of us.

 

I mean, Barton? Senderos? Hill? Kiernan? Kranjcar? Who’s kidding who? Between them, they’ll have soaked up the first 4,000 admission fees every week.

 

That money was meant to get Rangers off their knees, give them a future, not to build a time machine back to the era of idiotic spending that brought them down in the first place.

 

Truth is, with a squad full of guys who have no re-sale value and whose best years are long behind them, Rangers have turned back into everything they were under David Murray, except a Poundland version.

 

And if anyone is daft enough to argue the toss about that, think on this.

 

Moussa Dembele cost Celtic £500,000, has scored 26 goals in 40 and is now valued at £40million, a fortune they can afford to turn down.

 

Joe Garner cost £1.8million, has three in 15 and might make the next gaffer £500,000 back if he cuts his losses.

 

That’s it. That’s the story, right there. Forget all your boardroom politics and management double-talk, that’s the bottom line.

 

Mark Warburton, on the advice of his scout Frank McParland, did that deal and Dave King let him.

 

While Celtic were signing assets, Rangers were stockpiling liabilities.

 

So Warburton can moan all he likes about not having the support of the board and King can bitch all he likes about the manager wasting “his” money, but they were in it together and they cocked things up together.

 

If Rangers fans didn’t see that coming, then they deserve all they get. If they did see it coming but chose to ignore it…well, I refer you to the previous sentence.

 

Now please assemble at the usual points while emergency services deal with the situation. This is not a drill.

[Bluedell 5,604]

Perhaps if journalists did their job properly and found out about the likes of Whyte then the Rangers fans would be able to make more informed decisions.

[Scott7 5,924]

He may have a point. I don't know.

 

If he has, it's hidden in an article written in the Ian Archer, semi-comical, post-Groucho, noveau-obscure style of Scottish sports journalism.

 

Is he saying Rangers fans are daft?

 

Aye, you an' aw, Billy boy.

[Bluedell 5,604]

And if anyone is daft enough to argue the toss about that, think on this.

 

Moussa Dembele cost Celtic £500,000, has scored 26 goals in 40 and is now valued at £40million, a fortune they can afford to turn down.

 

Joe Garner cost £1.8million, has three in 15 and might make the next gaffer £500,000 back if he cuts his losses.

 

That’s it. That’s the story, right there. Forget all your boardroom politics and management double-talk, that’s the bottom line.

What's the bottom line? Picking one player that Celtic got lucky with? How about Dedryck Boyata (£1.5 million) or Stefan Šćepović (£2.3 million) or Nadir Çiftçi (£1.5 million)? Have the been great successes for the oh so brilliant Celtic?

[der Berliner 3,719]

One of the most irritating side-effects of all things admin and afterwards is that we gave these pond-life* pen-wizards so much space to fill with their half-substantiated and conjecture-ladden drivel. And as most of them show next to no sympathy to the club (rather on the contrary), we are subjected to jests, jeers, glee, shame, lies and whatnot. And here there was hoping that 2017 would see an end to most of that. Alas, it is "only" February.

 

*Just a reference to the journalists' view (sic!) of Scotland being a country with two gold fishs in a small pond.

[theboyharley 5]

What's the bottom line? Picking one player that Celtic got lucky with? How about Dedryck Boyata (£1.5 million) or Stefan Šćepović (£2.3 million) or Nadir Çiftçi (£1.5 million)? Have the been great successes for the oh so brilliant Celtic?

 

Dembele is on 35K a week. Imagine we signed him and had him on that. What would the media be saying then?

 

 

 

[Frankie 8,536]

An incredibly bad and gratuitous piece of writing.

[aweebluesoandso 290]

Coming from a profession that's full of Goons, especially from that rag. Pot kettle black.

[Darthter 542]

I'll probably be in the minority here...I think the article has a point & I just put up a post along very similar lines (minus the fan stuff).

 

Sometimes the fans are just too loyal for their own good.

[26th of foot 6,054]

Ah Bill, desperate time demand desperate measures. We are all products of our conditioning, and loyalty to our club is the comfort blanket we are left clinging to. I remember yourself and Stuart Cosgrove on BBC Radio Scotland five years past, in triumphalistic mode, telling the listenership that Rangers meltdown would see them playing in front of 8,000 fans every other week. On Saturday, Hugh MacDonald on the same means was wondering aloud as to why Rangers supporters continue trap, given their culture is about winning. Stuart murmured approval. Their understanding of Bears is up there with the clown prepared to pen an analogy of a Rangers supporter kicking his pet dog, Albertz down the street.

 

There is a difference between what you, Stuart, and Hugh want it to be, and what it is. You have arrived at a conclusion and you are making your 'objective' appreciation fit your preferred conclusion. Desperate!

 

Talking desperate Bill, how's that internet dating site thing going?