Penalty to Rangers! – Tinfoil and Conspiracy

You have been duped. You have all been duped.

Any time you have entered Ibrox Stadium or followed The Famous away, you have been supporting a team that is playing a rigged game. As the Establishment Club I am afraid to inform you that we have been relentlessly benefiting from funny handshakes and masonic winks. Again. Yes, my friends, we have been cheating. The trouble is, we’re not very good at it.

For all the years that the game has been tilted in our favour, with referees coordinated to our benefit, we have amassed over the last decade the grand total of one title and one major trophy. It is a scandal, an absolutely travesty, that our influence that permeates our game has yielded so little. As conspiracies go then it’s up there with the earth being flat. Or so you would think.

Despite Celtic racking up title after title, treble after treble, it has been the big bad Rangers that have been stacking the deck each week. This is the fantasy land in which many rival fans – and now commentators – choose to live their lives, under the comfort of their tinfoil hats. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so bloody ridiculous.

So to recap – a football club has been cheating. They don’t use the word ‘cheating’ of course for fear of their lunacy being revealed to the world but that is the term they dance around so daintily. That football club was of course the same one relegated to the fourth-tier of Scottish football, losing hundreds of millions of pounds in the process and handing their rivals 10-in-a-row on a silver platter. It was the one given an illegal transfer ban by the football authorities which had to be overturned in court. It was the one fined for something an independent commission ruled it could not be fined for. And so the cover-up, the deception, has been absolutely genius.  Fair play, lads. Play the long game.

As things stand back in the real world however there is one club that has been awarded more league penalties than any other this season, and it ain’t Rangers. And yet we’ve had opposition managers such as Barry Robson (and I use the term ‘manager’ loosely), so-called journalists and every mentalist on social media all build a narrative that is now prevalent and permanent.

Penalty to Rangers.

As inevitable as death and taxes, apparently.

Celtic of course defeated Rangers in the 2019 League Cup Final courtesy of an offside goal and similarly saw Kilmarnock denied an injury-time stonewall penalty in the recent semi-final despite what can only be described as a full-blown rugby tackle by Giorgos Giakoumakis. I guess the Masons took those days off, or something.

And as we delve further into the actual statistics, not the made up ones that seem preferable these days, then the great conspiracy theory truly begins to unravel. The good man @Jas72Boyd on Twitter has done the Lord’s work and compiled some absolute crackers and so credit for that goes to him. So let’s be having them.

Since season 2016/17 Rangers have had 42% more red cards than Celtic. In fact, the team from across the city once went SIX years and 138 games without seeing a player sent off at Parkhead. Yup, six years. But who needs 11 players anyway, eh?

Now back to penalties. In the last 7 years Rangers have conceded more penalties in domestic cup games than any other club despite Celtic obviously playing more games in this time. And in a cup game, it’s 90 mins and out. You can’t make it up later in the league season. But again, why bother with facts?

Rangers recently went 51 games without conceding a penalty in any competition. That’s odd, right? Could the conspiracy theorists actually be correct? Well perhaps but they’d also have to factor in that Celtic twice exceeded this figure in runs in 2003 and then 2009.

Ahhhhhh, you say, but surely the real truth will emerge in Europe when the corrupt, biased Scottish referees are removed from the equation? A credible shout, my friend. Again taking figures from 16/17 onwards Rangers have been awarded 4% fewer penalties by Scottish referees than by their European counterparts. Celtic on the other hand have are awarded 40% more domestically. So, dear conspirator, the line of questioning was a valid one but the outcome has probably melted your tinfoil. Alas.

If we can be serious however for a moment it must surely be acknowledged that the allegations of cheating or favoritism are simply nonsense. Yet time and time again we have to endure managers saying “it doesn’t look good for Rangers to get another penalty”, podcasts debating blatant awards and even Super Ally having to provide a defence on TalkSport this week. All the while we haven’t actually received the most penalties in the country.

The problem we have at Rangers is a distinct lack of useful idiots. On the other side there is Scott Brown out to state there’s no chance of an Aberdeen penalty on Sunday, ex-Celtic player Barry Robson questions the award of a cast-iron penalty and then you have faux-controversy of Sutton, the dribbling of John Hartson and the brain-drain of McFadden to add into the equation, amongst others. And it works.

We don’t do that sort of thing. In fact it is our silence that has probably contributed to the snowball effect that has seen a light-hearted joke – penalty to Rangers – become an actual ‘thing’. It’s so much of a ‘thing’ that genuine, blatant penalties are now controversial. “Aye but you’re the only club that gets those kind of penalties” it was said of the recent Dundee shirt-pull some fortnight after Celtic were awarded a penalty for the same thing. The latter didn’t even merit a mention.

It would be remiss of me though not to acknowledge Rangers’ 70-game run without conceding a penalty in the league. It is, in truth, a remarkable anomaly. But as we’ve seen above anomalies happen – Celtic’s six year red-card gap at home, their vastly superior penalty-award statistics domestically vs in Europe, their 2003 and 2009 runs without conceding a penalty in any competition. So either these things can happen or Celtic must too be ‘cheating bastards’, no?

The truth of the matter is though that despite the light-hearted and jovial nature of this article, it’s bloody tiresome. Every time Rangers win a game there has to be controversy. In fact I’m not sure we’ve won a game fairly since about 2005. Or was it 2006? Anyway, I digress, because if it’s tiresome for me I dread to think of the inner workings of the minds of people who actually believe this crap and allow it to affect their day. *shivers*

But anyway, we must move on.

There is a Cup Final on Sunday to win and I, for one, need to give some thought as to exactly what minute we will be awarded our penalty.