Watchmen

Comic_Rorschach

“Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll whisper “no.”
– Rorschach

“What the club actually needs is to be totally cleansed.
– Ally McCoist

In the wake of the departure of Charles Green from Ibrox*, Ally McCoist emerged as an unlikely Rorschach figure claiming what many had been saying for decades, that the club needed to be ‘cleansed’.

This echoes what many Rangers fans have said that there is continuity between Murray, Whyte and Green (see Joker banner below). What would that clean-up look like?

First it would have to end the farce of a £7 million pound wage bill for a club playing in Scotland’s lowest league. Such a budget can’t be justified – certainly not when players and managers performances fail at such a basic level as they have done. What was the intention or the business model for having a ‘£10 million war-chest’ as Green claimed for playing in the Second Division? Such statements and intentions defy and undermine credibility.

Second it should examine why and how it pays anybody – the salary that Charles Green was paid, reputedly £340,000. This is supposed to be a club that is re-building and has a major restructuring programme to see through. This in a time of austerity, when the whole of Scottish football is undergoing changes and cutbacks seems absurd for anyone, let alone a 3rd division club. The Ibrox-based club can carry on pretending it’s living in the 1980s if it likes, but the inevitable outcome of that is plain to see, or should be to any thinking fan who has watched their club being ruined by wealthy businessman on the make.

rangers_2261012bThird, whoever and whenever they appoint a new chief executive, there needs to be a culture where it’s not acceptable to call someone a paki or a ‘darkie’. Can you imagine paying someone over £300,000 to be the figurehead and spokesman for your business or your enterprise, and that entity having – let’s say at best – a troubled and contentious history around issues of race and sectarianism, and for them to then use such abusive racist language?

This also applies to the constant pandering to the sectarian element within the clubs following, from the idea of reinstating the orange strips to the ‘No Surrender’ remarks on Radio Clyde. If The Rangers Football Club want to genuinely re-build trust and openness as McCoist suggests, this needs to include a genuine and real attempt to re-cast the club culture, from top to bottom.

Fourth, any real investment should be in youth training, facilities and scouting – in other words in long-term commitment and planing for the clubs future, not wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on corrupt incompetent duplicitous fantasists.

This would bring what, presumably, the clubs fans actually want, some stability. As McCoist stated:

“No matter who is in charge we need a bit of stability, there is no doubt about that. I’ve never felt we were beyond it all. I always felt there were things unfolding because there were stories appearing here and there. We were never going to get an opportunity to move on. We need everything out in the open. We need to let everyone see what has been going on.”

Fifth, and connected to the previous points, what the club needs most is to learn some humility. They are not “Scottish football’. Their departure from the league has not caused ‘social unrest’ (unless you count Berwick) and Armageddon has not befallen the rest of the game. The whole Green era was based on the assumption that such were the clubs influence on Scottish footballing authorities they would soon be parachuted back into the top flight.Whatever assumptions this was based on or whatever assurances were given, this hasn’t happened and looks unlikely to happen any time soon. Rangers are not going to be ‘second only to Manchester and Arsenal’ as Green claimed but well ahead of Ross County. So a new reality beckons: lower league football is likely for two or three years.

I don’t expect any of these changes to happen, ever. Which is a shame because The Rangers Football Club could be a big part of Scottish football. Neither they nor Celtic are going anywhere. But what TRFC need is stability not fantasy.

* This gets about as complicated as 3d chess but the basics of it are that the last owner of Oldco Rangers revealed that he was also a director of Sevco 5088 Ltd, the company who had an agreement to buy the assets of Rangers from administrators Duff and Phelps. In other words, the truth about his links to the now disgraced and vilified Craig Whyte couldn’t be contained any longer. The extent to which this is an ongoing crisis for the Ibrox club (whatever they’re called) is that Sevco 5088, which Green remains a director of, is now owned by Worthington Group PLC and has started legal proceedings against Rangers Football Club Ltd, claiming ownership of their assets, including Ibrox, Murray Park and all intellectual property. Basically, the club is eating itself.

Comments (4)

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  1. Albalha says:

    Interesting article thanks. Where does the recent ruling in favour of Ticketus fit in? If CW does still own assets then they may be used …… or perhaps I’m talking nonsense?

  2. Hats off to anybody trying to get to the bottom of this lot. Never thought I’d hear myself say this too, but I miss Jim Traynor on the radio since he got sucked in there. It doesn’t look like his PR efforts there are working at any rate, though I’m sure even Max Clifford couldn’t gloss this year’s disasters alone, far less last year’s.

  3. The role of the Scottish press and BBC Scotland in the Craig Whyte farce vis a vis Rangers has been nauseating. 8or9 years ago I was reading articles about Whyte’s financial chicanery in the columns of Private Eye which resulted in Whyte’s financial disbarment from dealing on the Stock Exchange for a minimum 7years at the end of which he comes up here,buys up Rangers without the hacks in the Sports Section of the Herald or The Scotsman investigating his background,financial or otherwise.

    People complain about the downturn of professional football in Scotland. At the same time we read eulogies to a Celtic team which rarely fields a team with more than 3 “homegrown” (Don’t you jest love it?) players and a sullen manager who seems to spend half his life moaning about referees and the SFA. The one good thing about the whole Rangers debacle is that they are currently-denied the opportunity to poach players from the”lower” (I.e.financially poorer clubs.

    Yesterday (I watched a game between 2 amateur teams,both well turned out and ably refereed by a SFA- qualified referee.The main interest seemed to centre on the fact that the home team were 3 players short which was reflected in their 5-1 defeat. Conjecture was that the missing three were probably at Parkhead…

  4. Tom says:

    WGAF. Football occupies, sometimes more than half of our broadcast ‘news’, yet it is no more than a dead-end for sad obsessives, identikit clones in their club regalia, more opiates for the masses. Football is a cancer and a blight on Scotland.

    Demolish their stadia, plough the parks for allotments.

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