Why is the Scottish sporting media ignoring a great story? Because it suits its agenda better to peddle the myth of the club that can’t die, that’s why.
On Saturday the draw for the semi finals of the Scottish League Cup was made. Now the last four of the third most important domestic football competition is not usually seen as a major occasion. But this year it appeared to matter more to the media than usual. The draw, live on BBC television, firstly paired football’s New Firm, Aberdeen and Dundee United. And that left two Glasgow teams: Scottish champions Celtic and the league’s newest club.
Now surely that gave the media a story to run with: the first ever match between Celtic and The Rangers. The chance for the new kids on the block to test themselves against the country’s top club. The beginning of a fresh Glasgow rivalry.
But instead they continue to promote the Big Lie. They are still insisting that the new club formed in 2012 and now playing at Ibrox is actually the same club that was liquidated after a financial meltdown in 2012.
We all know the history. How the old Rangers fell into massive debt after years of overspending and was placed into administration. How a creditors agreement was refused plunging the financially crippled club into liquidation. How the Charles Green owned Sevco Scotland Ltd (or was it Sevco 5088 Ltd?) bought the assets of the dying Rangers to form his new football club. And how some of the players were TUPE transferred to this new club while many others exercised their right to walk away.
We all remember how the old club called a vote of the former Scottish Premier League members in an attempt to pass its SPL place to Green’s new club – a move that was roundly defeated. How an attempt to bring the new club into the top tier of the Scottish Football League was also foiled. And how the 2012 club was finally admitted to the bottom tier of Scottish football – without any of the country’s long established non league teams even being given a sniff at the vacancy.
The Rangers (formed 2012) are not Rangers (formed 1872). It is as simple as that.
And when former Ibrox director Donald Findlay becomes the one figure from the old club to acknowledge this fact, then you know things are getting very silly indeed. Findlay as the voice of sanity? Really?
In its near three year history, The Rangers have managed to win the two lowest level league championships and get themselves up to the second tier. It has cost them many millions to do so, though. Led by the oldest apprentice boy in town, the man who holds the world record for most overpaid lower league manager ever, they have also had a string of cup failures, culminating in a defeat by Raith Rovers in the final of last season’s Ramsden’s Cup. (For those who don’t follow the lower echelons of Scottish football, this is the tournament for non Premier League teams, invented to give the diddy clubs a chance to win something. It’s now known as the Petrofac Training Cup apparently.)
So reaching the semi finals of the League Cup is actually a pretty big deal for the new club. And to be drawn against the biggest club in the country should be a real opportunity for The Rangers to test exactly how far they have developed.
But instead the media is full of stories about past games between Celtic and the former Ibrox club, as they attempt to consolidate the Big Lie. The tactics are simple ones to anyone with a knowledge of propaganda: repeat the lie over and over, hoping that it will eventually become accepted. Rangers were somehow demoted to the bottom league – so those votes I referred to above must never have happened. The old club somehow came out of liquidation – a concept unknown to anyone in the legal or financial worlds. No, every piece of evidence, logically analysed, is in fact wrong, they tell us.
Yet we know that creditors of the old club never received their money. We know that the new club won’t pay them. And why should they? It was an entirely different club that ran up the debts.
So we must all challenge the Big Lie wherever it is used. We must remind the media that the original 1872 Scottish blues, like the famous Norwegian Blue, have ceased to be, have shuffled off this mortal coil and are in fact an ex football club.
Or else Scottish football enters a realm of silliness that even the Monty Python crew couldn’t have come up with.
Double Trouble 