Wings Over Scotland

The last five months summed up in a single cartoon strip, there.

This could (we hope) be the last blog we ever write about the Rangers Saga. (At least until around November, when Charles Green’s new club almost inevitably goes bust.) Doggedly protecting their hard-won reputation for rank incompetence and cynical contempt for Scottish football fans, the involved parties made the announcement of Sevco Scotland Limited’s conditional acceptance into the SFA last night on the first bell of the Olympic opening ceremony, in a desperate and pointless attempt to minimise the reaction while the world’s eyes were on the east end of London.

It was pointless because it was the outcome most sensible people were expecting anyway. As we predicted days ago, the SFL agreed to sell media rights to the Ibrox club’s games to the SPL, so that they could protect their TV deal with Sky and ESPN, and Charles Green backed down over the SPL’s right to investigate the dual-contracts issue and apply any punishments to his newco, in exchange for them being allowed to take over Old Rangers’ SFA membership in order to play immediately in the SFL, rather than having to wait four years to apply for their own.

Within minutes, the announcement was followed by the public release of a statement from Ally McCoist, in which he raged intemperately at just about everyone involved in the fiasco. Bizarrely, he asserted that “Rangers were badly mismanaged for 10 months”, referring to the reign of Craig Whyte, apparently unaware of the 10 YEARS preceding that period which are in fact the subject of the SPL’s inquiry.

Perhaps the most remarkable section of the statement was this one:

“our right to past titles will be challenged. They want what we and our fans bring, yet seem determined to strip us of every bit of our dignity. It has to stop”

Just so we’re clear: the dual-contracts inquiry seeks to establish whether Rangers FC won somewhere in the region of 20 trophies illegally over the course of a decade by systematic, deliberate cheating designed to let the club field players it couldn’t otherwise afford. Mr McCoist apparently wants this matter swept under the carpet on the grounds that the new club he manages has, for completely unconnected reasons, found itself out of the top division and deposited in SFL Division 3.

Extraordinarily, rather than wishing to discover the truth, publicly disassociate himself from any wrongdoing and attempt to rebuild Rangers’ reputation from a bedrock of honestly-won honours, the popular manager seemingly considers the notion that the team – his team – may have been blatantly cheating for that entire period to in fact be an embodiment of “dignity” which none should have the temerity to even doubt.

We’re still not quite sure what name Charles Green’s new club will play under in the coming season, which starts tomorrow with a Ramsdens Cup tie against Brechin City. With strangely coincidental timing, the BBC and SFL websites were both updated yesterday afternoon with information about the new season, and both of them refer to “The Rangers FC”, listing the club alphabetically after Stirling Albion.

But what we can now seemingly confirm is that the club will be considered a continuation of the old Rangers FC so far as its official record of honours is concerned, and that its fans will therefore and with some justification consider it to be the same club. Legally it isn’t, but when it comes to football the game’s governing authorities can redefine reality and it’s ultimately their word that counts in such matters.

What we DON’T know is how many of those fans will still turn out to watch the team. Green’s ownership remains deeply unpopular, and we’ve previously documented the Ibrox support’s tendency to vanish swiftly when a steady supply of trophies dries up. Some sort of Blitz spirit will likely prop up attendances for a while, as will the slashed season-ticket prices, but we suspect the novelty of a diet of games against Montrose and Elgin City will wear off quite quickly.

It also, as noted above, very much remains to be seen if Green can possibly balance the Edmiston Drive books on an SFL3 income. Neil Alexander’s wages alone are likely to far exceed the entire annual running costs of any other SFL3 club, and the rates and utility bills for Sevco’s two big bricks-and-mortar properties will swallow up the revenue from 10,000 season tickets by themselves, should that many ever be sold. The newco is already in the red to the tune of millions of pounds, having agreed to be bound by Old Rangers’ football debts of over £3m as well as its £160,000 fine for bringing the game into disrepute.

But none of that is of any particular concern to a Scottish political blog. Yesterday we highlighted in a series of tweets why the ultimate fate of Rangers is an extremely significant topic of interest to supporters of Scottish independence, but any subsequent collapse of New Rangers is empty speculation until it happens, so those of you who wince at the very mention of football can relax for a few months at least.

(Of course, with politics still being essentially on holiday, that means you might be looking at a lot of pictures of cats on the blog for the next few weeks.)

It’s abundantly plain that neither Ally McCoist nor the bulk of the Rangers support feels any real humility over the events of the club’s fall from grace, whether over cheating their way to trophies or robbing unfortunate creditors – including every single person reading this article – of tens of millions of pounds that should have been spent on schools and hospitals and fire engines and paying small businesses what they were owed, rather than sending it out of Scotland in the pockets of millionaire footballers.

Instead, they’ve adopted a mentality of grudge, a paranoid persecution complex and a seething, burning desire for vengeance. It may be successful – such a strategy was one of the foundations of Alex Ferguson’s breaking of the Old Firm stranglehold in the 1980s. But we have a feeling there are more major events in this timeline to come long before Autumn 2014. If it happens, and we have to start blogging about Rangers again, be assured in advance: we’re very sorry.