In August 2019, Neil Lennon said “We’re up to 8, I’m greedy, let’s make it to 15”. This was on the back of taking over from the creepy but capable Brendan Rodgers, where Lennon would then steer his advantage and team over the line, with a little help from the Compliance Officer.
Of course, Lennon’s not wrong yet. But his words are starting to look more ill-judged and unrealistic by the day. As much as we can all enjoy laughing at him now, the thing is that at the time 15 did seem very possible and indeed probable. The sequence of events required to not achieve their ten in a row* (against Aberdeen) was unimaginable. And yet here we are.
Rewinding back to 2012 and it was a similar slanted landscape to what Lennon saw before him in 2019 and the tweet above summarizes it perfectly. Rangers in the bottom division slogging it out against part-time clubs whilst Celtic had won against Barcelona in the Champions League group stages. Even with everything going smoothly it would be difficult to envisage any real challenge at any point in the next decade.
But then everything wasn’t smooth back then. The club was in terrible shape, with playing squad and infrastructure utterly decimated. But worse than that our owners didn’t have the club’s best interests on their agenda. It’s up for discussion about how they were allowed to get there and what their intentions were but there’s no debate that it wasn’t good. It’s one thing having a ruthless or greedy owner but that can sometimes be overlooked when there’s a mutual ambition to succeed. The spivs didn’t even have that and had King and the 3 Bears not took over then I hate to think where we’d be.
Over those dark years we had progressed through the lower leagues but with a turnover of £15-£20m couldn’t really fail not to. Nothing much else progressed in three years – investment, ambition and initiative were all stark. The only constant was the unwavering backing of the fanbase. We then witnessed the spivs bringing Mike Ashley to the table. Mutual interest and any sense of shared success don’t seem to matter to him and his attitude to Rangers was hostile from day one – it certainly looks like he was willing to forego relatively easy profit to damage and hinder our clubs rehabilitation.
These years of turmoil and despair and the constant flurry of body shots eventually culminated in our failure to escape the Championship (by some distance). Three years and we’d built and achieved very little. McCoist was on a hiding to nothing and done what he had to do. The takeover in January 2015 was effectively our ground zero, now close to 6 years ago. But the punches weren’t finished. Ashley had his hooks in deep and this would severally cripple our commercial revenue stream until summer of 2020.
Warburton was probably the right man at the right time but ultimately the task and the pressure was too much. And between Caixinha and Murty we had probably wasted a good year of our recovery. This was not smooth sailing.
Not that I solely blame those managers as I believe they too were on a hiding to nothing from the start. Our detractors had (still have) a stranglehold on the media and when not informing the nation how terrible Rangers and the Rangers support were, they would take to lampooning Caixinha. A self-fulfilling cycle and much of it over the top, but from day one it had started a narrative that would be hard to reverse. Later, and although Gerrard’s name commanded considerably more respect and more careful handling, we’d see a similar attempts at undermining and ridiculing from the Scottish hacks.
There’s one theme that Rangers fans are historically loath to discuss and that is refereeing. For me, one recurring or defining memory of the lower leagues was the regular horrific challenges against our players. Many of them resulting in injuries and being accompanied by time out of the game, with very few of them being appropriately dealt with by the officials. This was laughed away as part of the game in the lower leagues. Unfortunately, the violence followed Rangers back into the Premiership and assaults were downplayed or even applauded by the press. The editorial team at the BBC certainly never dwelled on them and not once clambered for the Compliance Officer to get involved.
Again, as a fanbase we’re quick to forget or dismiss this but this was the reality, this was a hurdle in Gerrard’s first two seasons (and probably still would if Clare Whyte wasn’t being more closely watched). The attention the Compliance Officer paid to our players whilst ignoring others is nothing short of corruption in my book. It’s not even a conspiracy, the evidence is there. For those seasons, it’s a background noise that’s hard to quantify, we cannot say whether it transferred directly into points dropped but it did results in players being unavailable (in our case) or available (for celtic) when they shouldn’t have. Maybe we wouldn’t have won those seasons but I’ll never be told that it did not play a part.
All in all, when considering where we were, who was running our club and the obstacles faced it’s a miracle that we actually got passed the Championship. A single straw more of bad luck or one more poor management decision and it could all be completely different – Lennon could be looking good on his prediction. As things stand, the world is lining up to celebrate the sporting achievement of the century (maybe even all time?) at Ibrox; whilst BBC Scotland look on from the outside on a patch of grass across the road and celtic wonder how on earth they managed to squander every possible advantage.
Upping the output 