Rangers should find it a cinch to be more tactful
WAll Rangers’ posturing over the issue has only served to increase the brand’s profile in Scotland
HO is your friend with the allergy to something so strong that they walk around with a defibrillator in their backpack just in case?
And, of course, you don’t believe for a second that they are actually allergic to anything.
Yes, them.
Exceptionalism seems to be a contagion of our age, worse than anything that can be thrown at us in a speck of spittle when someone sneezes or through a gas cloud erupting from a fellow passenger’s lungs as they cough into an underground train carriage packed with people.
I can’t have that. I. Me. Not you. Me. Just me. I can’t.
Selfies, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Look at me, look at me, look at me.
I confess I suffer a touch of exceptionalism myself when it comes to pets. You see, the problem is, I don’t really like pets. I don’t mind animals at all, but I find pets, moreover, people with pets, pretty tedious.
Yes, when I’m around dogs and cats I do become quite sniffy, sneezy, wheezy, but I also suffer from hay fever and do not have a no-grass policy approach to life outdoors.
But the general itchiness combined with the general apathy for the pets combines to generate an irresistible scenario where I can avoid both inconveniences by highlighting my physical discomfort.
Pet-ownership is really like someone telling you the contents of last night’s dream on a blow-byblow basis: first, it’s not that interesting, and second, it’s all make-believe.
The pet has no clue who you are, you’re just the vessel that feeds them. And don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the pets say.
That’s exactly how a sponsorship deal ought to work. So long as what’s on the label does not condone the torturing of animals (because I don’t hate animals), take the money and pretend you like them.
Right? Well, here on the stage
script it says “Enter: Rangers Football Club.
RANGERS
No one likes us, we don’t care.” You heard it here first – well, right after Sports Direct released it on their website – that this mantra will be stitched into next season’s home jersey.
Yes, Sports Direct and Mike Ashley, reviled among the rank and file at Ibrox for the uses and they might say abuses of their merchandise dealings in the years following Rangers’ collapse in
2012.
Notice what happened there when a disputed figure apparently ousted from the club’s internal organs came into the equation? Inadvertently, the brand he owns was mentioned. Sports Direct. There, it happened again.
A similar thing has occurred throughout the 2021/22 season in the cinch Premiership, as Rangers’ board have been spotted with bottles of Tipex glossing over any mention of the used car company within the Govan ground. Some supporters were even evicted from the club deck by security officials after proclamations of “we’re staunch” were mistaken with “we’re cinch”.
On the back of a post-pandemic stand-off with the SPFL, this latest fight was apparently to do with a conflict of interests with Ibrox chairman Douglas Park, who owns Park’s Motor Group.
The sorry saga nibbled away at headlines throughout last season as Rangers stood firm in their position that they would not promote Park’s rival brand payrolling the four professional leagues in Scotland.
Now you can have an allergy to used car salespeople – most people do – but just like the whole business of not really liking a specific brand of animal
(namely the pet), there are more tactful ways of getting this across. My worry for the people who go on about allergies and pets and the dos and don’ts of life is that they seem to think everyone else works around them. That they are truly exceptional.
But the crux of the cinch circus is that the company have now decided that Rangers’ participation in promoting their branding is so insignificant that they can continue on the same terms with the SPFL without them.
Indeed, all Rangers’ posturing over the issue has only served to increase the brand’s profile in Scotland, as a survey by YouGov recently confirmed. Much as their dispute with Mike Ashley previously tends to see Sports Direct mentioned more than once any time Rangers’ merchandising is discussed.
Perhaps rather than going around with the mantra that no one likes you and you don’t care, maybe it would be better to be more tactful about how you express the things you don’t like.
I’m one to talk. I go into other people’s homes hoping that they will exclude a being living there for my benefit. But I’m the exception, just like everyone else these days.
Susan Egelstaff