The Adjustment Bureau at Ibrox

With the club action hiatus, there has been plenty of time for Sevco’s dignified customers to reconsider their place in the scheme of things.

This has, perhaps, led to an overindulgence in schadenfreude from the other side of the city.

Indeed, there is now a veritable smorgasbord of Sevco podcasts catering to Timmy voyeurism.

Of course, it couldn’t be an episode of the Ibrox excrement exhibition without it being Statement O’clock in Johannesburg.

For the purposes of dignified posterity, here it is in full:

 

“It is incredibly disappointing to hear that a small minority of supporters are letting their anger temporarily overcome them to the point of directing personal abuse at our players.

“We are all immensely disappointed at the performance of our team and its decline since title 55. That, however, is not the fault of the present team or the individual players who were approached to play for the Club (not the other way round) and who are mostly doing their best.

“We all judge player performance – that is part of being an emotional supporter. We wish slower players to be faster, we wish less creative players to be more creative, etc. Ultimately it is the balancing of many factors that create a successful team.

“That is why player recruitment should assess multiple aspects, inter alia, the player’s technical ability, temperament, character (very important at Rangers), leadership, and team compatibility.

“Different skills sets are required to ensure a balance in any successful team. Any player signed by Rangers must assume that he passed that standard and thereafter must perform in accordance with his abilities and the manager’s instructions for any given game. Individual players cannot be held accountable if the combined result of recruitment and team preparation results in poor performance.

“Rangers supporters are loyal supporters. Turning on our captain, who has been 100% loyal to Rangers and (memories are short) repeatedly saved us in key games for a decade, is the opposite of loyalty and I hope that most supporters will join me in condemning such behaviour. Supporter anger should not be directed at our team.

“Our Club finds itself in a largely self-inflicted decline but turning on our own players is not the Rangers way. I know John Bennett is devastated by current events and is working immensely hard behind the scenes. We have a challenging period ahead and need to pull together to get through it.”

 

Actually, it is rather appropriate for Mr King to interject at this juncture.

The last significant chapter in Sevco’s short history after the Off Licence Putsch in 2015 was when the convicted criminal in South Africa moved to bring Steven Gerrard to the |Ibrox club.

What then ensued was several years of unsustainable spending.

The Holy Grail in the Blue Room was to stop Ten In A Row.

With the assistance of a pandemic and empty stadiums, they achieved that.

Since then, despite two years of stellar revenue (the Seville final and cashing in on Calvin Bassey), they continued to post losses in their year-end accounts.

Now, in the aftermath of the most recent caning at Paradise, the Ibrox klanbase has taken to podcasts to assess their situation and their future.

For the avoidance of doubt, the “soft investment” from the Blue Room that funded Mr Gerrard’s squad would not now be allowed under UEFA’s new dispensation as per FSR.

Perhaps the Sevco High Command has finally realised that there isn’t any magical shortcut to slowly and methodically building up the business.

Fergus McCann did this in the second half of the 1990s for the club he had saved from insolvency.

It took time, money and business acumen.

The new stadium was key to the dominant position that Celtic now holds on Planet Fitba.

Consequently, the Copland Road shitshow across the city is too deliciously contrived for a novel.

They’re simply the second best, and some of Sevco’s supporters are now comparing their club to Espanyol!

For a subculture socialised into supremacism, this will be a difficult adjustment.

Moreover, there isn’t a door that opens to an alternate reality, no cosmic shortcut.

I’m sure that Mr David Cunnigham King appreciates that and only wants to help.

As the featured image shows, he always knows what to say to The People.