Good Evening.
Something a little bit surprising happened today. And I don’t refer to the fact that I accidentally put supermarket ‘own brand’ bleach in my breakfast-time Buckie cocktail. For that is something of which we must never speak…
No, I refer to my encountering the remarkable spectacle of the Evening Shark-Jump fretting slightly about Sevco’s prospects this season.
Kilmarnock 1-1 Rangers: Plan A isn’t working for Mark Warburton in the Premiership
Of course, the fretting was couched in terms of the ESJ’s continuing and utterly baseless assumption that just because there is now an Ibrox-based ‘club’ in the Premiership, the title race is automatically a question of Celtic v PretendyGers. A notion which is as laughable as it is insulting to the rest of Scottish football.
Nevertheless, the ESJ is clearly concerned. It discusses the quality of Sevco’s performances this season, the distinctly unimpressive contributions of Joey Barton and the fact that Sevco have only notched up 8 points from a comparatively ‘easy’ set of four opening fixtures. To be fair to my favourite paper, it is an interesting piece, although I thought that @timomouse’s article on similar issues was far more convincing.
Sgt Warbo’s Lonely Barts Club – Joey Barton a symptom of Rangers’ wider problems
You get the impression from the ESJ piece and their usual output that Scottish football really isn’t supposed to be like this! Even though Sevco are unbeaten so far this season, they still trail Celtic and have been playing in a disjointed and unimpressive manner which raises the spectre of the Hoops blowing them away on 10 September. And that isn’t on as far as the ESJ is concerned. This is – after all – the paper which ran a pre-season article which included the words “they are going for 55”.
I freely admit that as a seasoned observer of the Scottish sports media I will be fascinated to see what they make of it should Sevco have (in their eyes) a poor season and end up trailing Celtic and others in the league by a country mile. I suspect that there will be a huge amount of anguish displayed as the realisation dawns that the peak David Murray ‘swagger’ years have not returned, and are never coming back.
Whether this anguish will also be accompanied by forensic questioning of those who run the ‘club’ and write the cheques, rather than a systematic effort to pin the blame at Warbo’s door, remains to be seen.
Call me cynical, but it could turn out that whoever pays for the better PR will get the better press…
By way of conclusion I have to recall the words of many Sevco fans who said (quite recently) that they could “smell the fear”. I can certainly smell something right now, but it certainly isn’t Sevco’s Premiership opponents getting in a tizz. It smells like a number of Sevconian cheerleaders have involuntarily soiled their trousers at the thought of what may lie ahead for the world’s leading baseless superiority complex.
#KeepOnClumping
The Clumpany 