ALL of us on the outside have tried to look interested for as long as humanly possible.
But somebody's got to say it out loud sometime. So it might as well be me.
This whole Rangers business would officially give a Nurofen a migraine.
Don't get me wrong. I sincerely hope everyone at Ibrox keeps their jobs and that the fans keep their club and that the bad guys get what's coming to them and blahdy blahdy blah.
There are, however, times in life — when the wife's nagging or a teacher's droning on or Coldplay are playing — that no matter how important those making the noise think they are, you can't help but tune out.
For me, that moment came in an Indian restaurant the other day where a bunch of us had been invited to pick the players and managers of the month in the Irn-Bru leagues.
A Celtic-daft colleague from one of the posh papers couldn't stop going on about the evils of Rangers.
They'd cheated their way to Nine-In-A-Row. They must be punished for issuing illegal contracts. Their use of Employee Benefit Trusts was clearly against the law. If they get away with agreeing a Company Voluntary Agreement, it's a disgrace. There's an outside possibility he even suggested UEFA should strip them of the 1972 Cup Winners' Cup "just because".
Seriously. Another five minutes of it and I'd have lapsed into a korma.
Then I get home and there's an email from a Rangers punter about it all. Well, I say 'email', when it was more like an extended disc of War and Peace.
Chapter upon chapter and verse after verse after verse about how when David Murray paid stars through offshore EBTs it wasn't illegal and how retrospective punishment would be wrong and how it might have been different if they hadn't paid the players in question, but they had, so how could anyone say their victories weren't fair and square? And anyway, what about stripping Celtic of their titles because of the Boys Club scandal and on and on and bloody on.
Now, they might both have been making valid points. But from the start of my irate fellow journalist's rant to the end of Mr Defiant Bluenose's screed of harumphing, it sunk home that, quite simply, I really didn't care.
Again, this isn't a case of not caring about the perilous position one of Scotland's biggest clubs finds itself in, because it's a hugely serious matter and remains a major news story.
It's just, well, there must be plenty more out there who've long since started glazing over at the hectares of newsprint and hours of airtime being devoted to the kind of nit-picking detail that will be, without doubt, crucial to any future court cases or HMRC hearings.
But which engage the average non-Old Firm punter as much as the kind of BBC Four documentary that has more people working on it than watching it. Who promised what to whom. Who claims to have been lied to by who else. Who claims the ones saying they were told lies are actually the liars. Who reckons they were conned out of what money and whose millions are in what legal firm's bank accounts.
There's barely a word of it that anyone but the absolutely obsessive either understands or is remotely interested in.
You know what's most boring of all about this story, though?
The fact that it so quickly, so totally — and so chuffing inevitably — became not about Rangers v the Taxman or right v wrong, but about Blue versus Green.
There genuinely does seem to be no issue that Old Firm fans will not twist and mangle into another reason to abuse each other.
If Al-Qaeda invaded and turned Britain into an Islamic State, they'd have a square go about whether it was a Proddy Islamic State or a Catholic Islamic State.
And, of course, no matter how often anyone else says we can't be doing with either of them, they will never stop picking apart our every syllable to try and prove we're lying.
Take this email that came in on Friday, at first glance taking issue with a column I'd written in the news pages about gay marriage, but which went on to claim that "you're just upset because your team's going to fold".
It's moments like that, reading gibberish like that, when you really start to wonder what the bloody point is.
I think — this could be miles off the mark — that it would be a fair reflection of how fans of the other 40 Scottish clubs feel about the Rangers tax case to say we DON'T feel cheated out of titles, because our teams were never going to win them anyway. But we DO feel that if they haven't paid their taxes and have issued illegal contracts, they should be made to pay in legal and sporting terms.
In the case of the latter, my hope would be that if they go into liquidation they're chucked out of the EssPeeEll and made to state the case against the likes of Cove Rangers for the spare place created in the Third Division.
Do what's fair. Do what's right. Do what has to be done to discourage others from acting in such a reckless manner.
But more than anything, please do it soon.
So the rest of us can get back to that thing we used to call football.
Read more: http://www.thescotti...l#ixzz1otXnlqMW
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sheeptastic, on 04 March 2012 - 11:24 AM, said:
