“Fake news” – how rival may be trying to upset Rangers

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed our reporting the Greg Docherty to Hibs story earlier this week.

We certainly hope it’s nonsense, and there’s been little to suggest otherwise, but nevertheless while there’s no smoke without fire, it comes as no surprise that it’s Hibs we face this weekend.

No denying Rangers have history for unsettling players at opposing sides – Lafferty, Walker, Hastie, – it’s happened many times just like it has with Celtic, where both sides would put information that we were interested in a player just before we played their team.

It upset the player, and it upset the dressing room. It’s a perfectly fair tactic, and all is indeed fair in love, war and football.

So with Rangers facing Hibs this weekend, we can’t help but wonder if this story has been put out to unsettle both Docherty at Shrewsbury, and our dressing room at Ibrox when our bogey team this season come to visit.

We are no stranger to these tactics, with opposition sides targeting our players or club in some way – and this story about Docherty came so much from left field that we cannot ignore the likelihood that it’s purely to disrupt our preparations.

Sure, second place is sealed now anyway, but Hibs would absolutely love to be the only team in the SPL Rangers couldn’t beat all season, and while it’s nothing more than symbolic and ‘bragging rights’, given the depths to which the Easter Road side plummeted with us in the past, we really wouldn’t put it past them.

Hopefully this nonsense will get knocked on the head in due course, preferably with a good hiding handed out to the Edinburgh Celtic, but nevertheless it was rather unwanted.