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After a blizzard every other day for, seemingly,about eight months in Glasgow, spring has emerged. The days are getting longer, the nights are getting warmer. YES, you shout. I WILL go to the Garage wearing just a denim jacket tonight. I will be comfortable. Summer is not far away, with the heady promise of beer gardens and festivals. And just to get that familiar summer feeling, you pause to consider Rangers, and just like every single fucking summer for the past six years, you go “Fuck this. We need to rip the whole thing up and start again.”
It didn’t look like it was going to be like this just a few weeks ago. But then we bottled it against Celtic, and lost repeatedly, and our only good defender announced he was leaving, and our manager revealed himself as an incompetent, and now the players are fighting among themselves. So naturally, the time has come to do what Rangers fans always do in times of adversity - start forming factions and cliques and fighting each other.
It’s quite hard not to do it this time, admittedly. The problem is that solutions were visible before. Remove the spivs - done. Appoint a proper manager - OK. Sort out the retail deal and our income streams - roger. Sign some proper players to compete in the Premiership - fine. The problem now is that we’ve done all that, and we’re still shite.
We need to get a manager in, and there are no obvious candidates available. Basically, not one person - really, think back to every conversation in every pub and gaff and smoking area and water cooler you’ve had about this - has been able to come up with a suggestion that doesn’t need a lot of disclaimers and “hear me out buts” that is not a “i’m going to burn down Auchenhowie if they give it to him” red line for half of the support.
So, there’s that. Getting a manager in is difficult. Nobody can even come up with a credible replacement for David Bates, who is our best defender despite being - basically - a big daft ginger boy who wasn’t starting that often for Raith Rovers. We can’t even think of anyone better there, let alone find the next Walter Smith.
Then there’s deciding who stays and who goes. Is Graham Dorrans really good enough? Is Ryan Jack? Is even Alfredo Morelos, at this point? What’s going on with Jason Cummings? Should we fire Bruno Alves out of a cannon into the sun or just into the sea? Again, nobody really has a clue. For almost every player in the side, you can usually find a fan to declare that the team should be built around him or that he should have his contract terminated on the grounds of being unable to play football.
Can we even fix it at this point? Is it even possible? I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the vibe from Rangers right now that we have one of those weird diseases that football clubs get that they just never seem to be able to get rid of, where they can’t defend and lose daft games all over the place. Think Liverpool and Arsenal. It just feels like that - that we’ll just always be like this no matter who we sign or who sits in the dugout this week.
If you were expecting us to come up with some solutions, I’m afraid to say that we’ve got hee haw. And the board need to have very clear, very good solutions for all of the above problems and put them into action in the space of a few weeks. Just like they’ve had to do every other summer, and failed to do, when it seemed to be a lot simpler. So, let’s end on a positive note: just remember that when they inevitably fuck this up again, you didn’t have a scooby either. See? Every cloud.