Cavenagh goes full Tonto on the staunchness with a plan to turn Linfield into an Ibrox feeder club. Can you imagine Celtic doing that?

After last night’s exit from the Europa League, yesterday’s Ibrox story on their proposed Linfield ‘rescue package’ looks all the more amusing.

Although I’m not sure at this point which club needs rescuing…

I wrote yesterday about Graeme Souness turning himself into the transfer consultant who won’t actually work there, and I thought that would be my quota of Ibrox comedy for this week.

I was wrong, last night provided me with so much more.

But I couldn’t let yesterday’s Linfield story slip under the radar in the interests of maintaining the Sevco comedy shitshow.

Andy Newport in the Record delivered the main event on this one.

Rangers chief Andrew Cavenagh holds Linfield talks over investment in cash strapped Belfast side.

Linfield.

Of all the clubs, in all the leagues, in all the world.

Linfield.

And it isn’t just an investment, because the pitch put to him came with a wee footballing bow tied round it.

The plan handed to Cavenagh by a third party, according to the Record, included using Linfield as a nursery club to hand first-team minutes to the Ibrox academy’s youngsters.

A feeder club.

In Belfast.

At Windsor Park.

Now, I want you to sit with that for a second.

Because there is a version of this story that is purely a business story.

And there is a version that is something else entirely.

Everybody reading this knows exactly which one it is.

Nobody looked at a map of European football, ran the numbers on player development pathways, and landed on the Irish Premiership as the optimal solution.

They landed on Linfield because it’s Linfield.

Let’s be honest here, because the staunchness isn’t a coincidence, it’s the entire business case.

The American health insurance tycoon who bought the club last year with the San Francisco 49ers is being sold a nursery for his young players.

And it just so happens to be the one club on this island whose support and his own are practically interchangeable.

Peak staunchness.

Levels of staunch that even Staunch Del himself could only dream of achieving in his platform brogues.

And I’ll say this for whoever put the proposal together, they knew their audience.

Because if you’re pitching to a man who has spent a year being told that Ibrox is a cause rather than a football club, you don’t lead with the xG data, do you?

You lead with the flegs.

Meanwhile, ask yourself when you last heard of Celtic buying into the Irish Premiership.

Go on.

I’ll wait.

Never.

Not once, not ever, not in 138 years of existence.

We have an Irish heritage that is stitched into the badge, the name, the anthem, and the very reason the club exists.

And not one board in our history has ever thought the answer to anything was to go and buy a slice of a club in Belfast to hoover up the sympathetic support.

Whatever else you want to say about our lot – and God knows I’ve said plenty, and I’ll say plenty more before this window shuts – that particular idea has never once crossed the table at Celtic Park.

Dermot Desmond will lowball you over £257,000 for a striker, but he isn’t sitting in Barbados sketching out a cross-border tribal empire.

He wouldn’t spend the postage on it.

He’s too busy counting the prisoners.

And then there’s the small matter of UEFA, who tend to take a dim view of owning two clubs at once.

This is the bit the Record buries near the bottom, and it’s the bit that matters most.

Because if this deal ever got anywhere near completion, Cavenagh would have to explain how he intends to swerve UEFA’s multi-club ownership rules.

The very same rules that already cost them a director this year.

Paraag Marathe – senior 49ers executive, key man in the consortium that bought the club last summer – had to step down from the Ibrox board because of his chairmanship at Leeds United.

Purely to head off a UEFA investigation before it started.

That happened months ago.

At the same club.

To the same ownership group.

And now, apparently, they’re back around the table discussing a stake in a side that plays in European qualifiers every single summer.

Have they learned nothing??

Here’s the thing, though, and it’s the funniest part of the whole story.

The club they’ve been offered isn’t exactly a thriving asset.

David Healy’s side finished fourth last season in a league they used to own outright.

They then went out of the Conference League in the first round to Nomme Kalju of Estonia.

Estonia.

And they are, in the Record’s own words, cash strapped, with senior figures at the club talking to a string of potential partners because they need the money.

So the grand vision here is this.

A club who last night got humped by Jagiellonia in their EL qualifier, five points behind us on the 14th of August, and haemorrhaging money on ten signings, is going to ride to the rescue of a fourth-placed side that got dumped out by Estonians.

The blind leading the blind.

Make no mistake, nobody involved has thought this through.

Of course, once the story broke, everybody involved reached for the fire extinguisher.

A source close to it all told Record Sport:

Andrew is approached all the time about the possibility of investing in various businesses and this was no different. He was happy to have a chat but that’s as far as it’s gone so far.

Nothing to see here.

Just a chat.

Linfield chairman Roy McGivern was even more careful:

Linfield FC has been involved in confidential discussions with a number of interested parties about potential investment in the club.

We will not be making any public comment until we have discussed with our Board and our Club Members.

Confidential discussions with a number of interested parties.

Which is a lovely way of saying we’re skint and we’ll talk to anybody.

But note what neither of them actually did.

Neither of them denied a single word of it.

In reality, that silence is the loudest confirmation you’ll get.

The bottom line is that this tells you everything about how that club sees itself.

Celtic’s answer to a lack of first-team minutes for young players is B teams, loans to the Lowland League, and arguments about whether Colby Donovan should be at Ayr or Airdrie.

Boring, unglamorous, and entirely about football.

Their answer is a stake in a club 130 miles across the Irish Sea with a shared songbook.

One of those is a development strategy.

The other is a statement of identity dressed up as one.

And the tell, as always, is that not one person at Ibrox seems remotely embarrassed by it.

They never are, are they?

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