JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT CAN’T GET WORSE FOR MURTY...
IT is getting painful with Graeme Murty now. Like watching a bumblebee caught in a spider’s web.
Still struggling away, still trying to dream of smelling the flowers again, but isolated, helpless and slowly realising that this game ends with him as a hollowed-out husk.
The grim inevitability of now being stuck in the middle of a Parkhead title party next weekend is akin to a passer-by pulling his legs off as he awaits his grisly fate. The cruelty just comes in waves.
Not since the ill-fated Kenny McDowall has anyone looked as brutalised by the Rangers manager’s post, but it is a job that can do that to you at the best of times, far less when it is chaos behind the scenes.
Murty (right) has been hung out to dry. He had no qualifications to be manager, but took the role on to help out. As a result, he fields the flak — occasionally close to tears — while the likes of managing director Stewart Robertson and director of football Mark Allen hide in their offices.
The players are now undermining him too — and it is shameful. We may never know what unfolded with Kenny Miller and Lee Wallace, but Andy Halliday and Daniel Candeias afforded him no respect during the Old Firm semi and that ought not to be forgotten. Of course, this cycle of managers being reduced to babbling shells at Ibrox is becoming a habit. There is a real sense of Back To The Future at Rangers right now. The ‘We Deserve Better’ campaign, resurrected on a bedsheet tied to the gates at Auchenhowie, is gathering steam — and is likely to gain as much traction with the likes of Dave King, Paul Murray and Alastair Johnston as it did in 2009 when they were sitting on the board with their fingers in their ears humming the ‘Dambusters’ theme as Oldco lurched towards disaster.
The board are stuck in a bubble, players are being suspended and Harry Hardcore and his mates are lobbying kit manufacturers Hummel for a new orange top.
Yet, there is one thing showing no signs of a return as the madness continues. A trophy.