LET'S be honest, if Ron Atkinson was to be trotted-out today as: "The Man With The Answers To What Is Wrong With Present-Day Football", the public would look, laugh, then say: "Aye Right".
So, how come Jack Irvine - as much of a failed media executive as Big Ron is a failed footbal manager - keeps getting trotted-out as the current Rangers management's spin doctor.
Irvine lost all credibility, I had thought, in his catastrophic management of the then Mr David Murray's short-lived attempt to found a Scottish media empire back in the 1980s. Irvine is as much yesterday's man as the Lisbon Lions, the Barcelona Bears or the Gothenburg Giants. Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen wouldn't put these legends in their first team today - so how come Irvine still is thought of as having street cred, even in Grubb Street?
But, that is now Rangers' lot - where once Partick Thistle were: the other side, "the third team" in Glasgow, the joke XI. Now, regardless of how hard their sledgehammer cracks the nuts in SPFL One, or Level Three in Scottish football, the efforts of Irvine, and the rival factions in the battle for what "soul" is left around Ibrox - let's call them the Sharp-Suit Sect and the Brown Brogues Boys, has surely made Rangers Scotland's joke club.
THE on-going Edmiston Drive soap opera tends to dominate the Saturday morning media agenda, but, I have to say, this weekend's effort to get Celtic a mention, was a fairly poor show.
I know several members of The Celtic Family, who would be out there celebrating if young Master Stokes was to take what little talent he has elsewhere at the end of this season.
Sure, he is, if we are to believe what we see in print, Old School. Aye, he is word-perfect on the Fields of Athenry and the other anthems of Celtic's glorious Oirish past. This fails to acknowledge - as goes equally if not more so, unacknowledged across the city - the fact that, when you re-invent your club as a thrusting, stock market-quoted "brand" in the sports-recreation field, the Nationalist/Protestant, Northern/Southern Irish baggage, is frankly embarrassing
Stoke is, apparently, "One of the Bhoys". Equally certainly, he can score goals in Scotland - but, so too can Kris Boyd. Boyd never came remotely close to his domestic strike rate in Europe, Stokes too struggles to hit the net when it matters for his club - in Europe. So, is he worth keeping?
This is the big question for Neil Lennon and Stokes's unfortunate ability to get onto the News pages as often as he can the Sports pages, might make it an easy call to let his contract lapse, or, to off-load him in January.
MEANWHILE, in my own second-favourite club, Kilmarnock (here in Ayrshire, the local junior team comes first - thereafter you support, as second-pick, whatever half of the Big Two you are linked to "culturally", or Ayr United or Kilmarnock), all is far from well.
I believe, given time, Allan Johnston, will get the club back into the top six, but, this will only happen once the boil of the relationship between Michael Johnston and seemingly everyone else in the Kilmarnock quarter of Ayrshire is lanced.
Johnston is a Marr College-educated, Alloway-living, Ayr-based lawyer. Therefore, by definition, his head is jammed up his own arse; he known so shame. He has to go, if Killie are to move forward, just as surely as the Laughlin brothers and their cohorts had to fall to the Fleetings back in the late 1980s.
But, for this to happen, a Fans' Champion has to emerge and I don't see anyone bending down to pick-up that challenging gauntlet. Until such a man emerges, the in-fighting and uncertainty will continue.
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