Two wins over Celtic, and McInnes is suddenly a master tactician? The media is jumping the gun as usual…

This morning, the Daily Record decided it was time for a lecture on standards at Ibrox.

And who did they wheel out as the star witness?

Ally McCoist.

They dug up a line of his from 2013, from the very middle of the banter years, and held it up as the benchmark the club has since mislaid.

Here is what he said back then:

Those standards are as important, if not more so, than winning games of football.

We’ve always had fantastic standards and we’ve prided ourselves on that.

Hopefully that will never change.

Stirring stuff.

Who could possibly argue with it?

Well, me, as it turns out.

If you want to talk to me about standards at Ibrox, then we are going to have to talk about the Carnoustie Hotel

In January 2014, the Ibrox side were in League One.

The third tier of Scottish football.

They were skint.

And days before a trip to Forfar Athletic, the players had been asked to accept a 15% cut to their wages.

So naturally, the club booked the squad into the four-star Carnoustie Hotel for the occasion.

Forfar Athletic.

Here is McCoist defending it at the time:

I can understand people questioning it, but it’s my job as the Rangers manager to give our players the best opportunity we can to perform.

We are still Rangers Football Club and have always attempted to be as professional as we can.

That will never change as long as I’m manager.

To give the players the opportunity to play as well as they can you have to prepare as well as you can.

He went further and said it would have been “disrespectful” to Forfar to turn up without the proper preparation.

Disrespectful to Forfar.

Not disrespectful to the men who had just been asked to hand back a chunk of their wages to keep the lights on.

That, folks, is the standard.

Or is that the bit of the McCoist era the Record would rather we all forgot about this morning?

Four-star hotels in the third division – funded by the boys taking the pay cut.

The standards at Ibrox have been a running joke for the best part of fourteen years and the Record knows it

Because their own article makes that case far better than I ever could.

Connor Goldson, six years of service, spilled the beans on Open Goal about being shipped out on a TRAIN after being told his fate on a pre-season trip to Birmingham.

The club even paid to get him off the books.

James Tavernier, eleven years, Britain’s highest-scoring defender, ushered out after a public falling-out with Danny Röhl and a tepid wee presentation on the pitch.

Lee Wallace, suspended and ostracised for the crime of telling his team-mates that the performance wasn’t good enough.

Kenny Miller shown the same door beside him.

Giovanni van Bronckhorst, a Europa League final in Seville, gone within six months.

Where exactly are the fantastic standards in any of that?

Goldson summed up the Tavernier business, and you can understand why the Record led with it.

Here is what he said:

Mental.

I don’t know another football club that could do that after 11 years.

I said it after the League Cup Final that he won’t be appreciated until he leaves.

He isn’t wrong.

So how does a club with that record become the club that gets its standards back?

Two wins over Celtic.

That’s how.

Derek McInnes knocked us out of the Premier Sports Cup and then beat us in the league a week later.

And now he is a master tactician.

A man who “understands intuitively” what the traditions of the place mean, apparently.

A man who is going to restore the values of Bill Struth and Walter Smith, values that belonged to Rangers 1872 and died with it.

All of that from two football matches.

Are we honestly meant to swallow that?

This is the same manager who was getting pelters a few weeks ago for domestic stumbles and a pair of European horror shows.

Nothing has changed over there except a couple of scorelines.

Same board.

With the same American owners.

Same habit of chucking their legends out the back door.

The SMSM does this every single time a new man at Ibrox strings a few results together

It is as predictable as Glasgow rain.

He gets the honeymoon, the nickname and a seat in the pantheon.

Then he loses three on the bounce and they are handing him his jotters in the same column inches.

We watched it with Warburton.

We watched it with Gerrard, Van Bronckhorst, Beale, Clement and Röhl.

Every one of them was the man who would bring the standards back.

Every single one.

And how many of them are still in a job at Ibrox this morning?

None of them.

Now it is staunch Del’s turn.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend everything is rosy at our end.

It isn’t.

Celtic have been dreadful and we have been beaten twice by a side we should be putting to the sword.

That is on the manager, and it is on the board above him.

But writing us off in September because the Ibrox side have had a decent fortnight is pure folly.

Ask Shankland’s Hearts how a good start in September works out for you come the spring, because we broke them when we were the weakest we have been in decades.

Standards at Ibrox, master tacticians at Ibrox, a glorious new dawn at Ibrox.

We have heard every word of it before.

There is no point discussing any of it until next May.

Come and see me then…

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