At almost any time in Rangers' history it would have seemed no more bizarre to find prelates from Rome sitting inside Ibrox determining their future, than administrators.

Their traditions and finances were timelessly impregnable. That notion has now been terminated, whatever the outcome of the crisis.

All this has been exacerbated by the ownership of the club having ended up with a character whom Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler, in consultation with each other, could not have made up. Craig Whyte, admittedly, does seem more Dave the Dude than Philip Marlowe but, judging by the bemused expressions on the faces of the administrators as they tried to fend off questions about where the money has gone, since a baboon could probably do the arithmetic of income and expenditure for a year, this plot could yet be more byzantine than The Big Sleep.

So while we wait to what see what horrors are about emerge from what lies below, it is well worth considering the paradox which lies at the heart of this imbroglio. For this past week has been the culmination of those circumstances which began to besiege the club over three decades ago, compelling it, against its nature, to change its ways.

Modernity certainly became visible during the 1980s when Willie Waddell masterminded the construction of one of the best stadia in the UK. But at its heart lay the assumption of the board at the time, that the world still owed it a living, that the ethos of Bill Struth welded, as it certainly was, to recurring dominance and Protestant triumphalism, was as natural and as durable as the Old Man of Hoy.

The businessmen and local politicians surrounding Struth had every good reason to crow after the war when the club seemed to represent unchallengeable authority, off the field, as well as on. Celtic were seen simply as a useful underling prop, playing into the hands of those who could see the commercial advantage of the Billy and Dan enmities. This swelled the Ibrox ranks, while polishing the rhetoric of its detractors. But the world was small then. There was no need for vision. That was for opticians. Their supply of boys to play for the jerseys was so plentiful there was little need then to ask what school they went to. People I talked to in the past, who played under Struth, spoke in awe of him, as if he ought to have been mentioned in the book of Genesis.

So it is not so surprising that succeeding boards clung on to the belief that they did not need to wrack their brains to compete in the world; as the establishment, they had the pre-Copernican belief that the sun revolved around them. If you have a Jim Baxter in your team and a Millar, Brand and Wilson, to mention just a few, then who could dispute the fact that they were immoveably at the centre of the universe.

Some directors wore bowler hats around then, as if they were civil servants ready to rubberstamp the next triumph. They were not clinging on to the past; they were positively rubbing their opponents' noses in it. In the recurring disputes they were involved in, from the Struth era onwards, it seemed to be generally accepted that the juries would be stacked in their favour. The infamous Cox-Tully controversy over a kicking the Celtic player got in an Old Firm game in August 1949 was in that frame and, incidentally, gave birth to the 'paranoia' accusations against Celtic. The fact is that Cox admitted, long after, to the offence, although he got off scot-free at the time.

Thus, with their influence apparently spread over society in general, and with Rangers quite content for some of their directors to wear little badges on their lapels shaped as a "wee arra", the world was spinning on its axis according to their dictates.

Then a comet struck in the late 1960s. They named it Stein. The Rangers board at that time was led by a successful businessman, John Lawrence, who seemed, nevertheless, to be the caricature of all that was myopic and anachronistic in stewardship, by sacking a manager when the club was at the top of the league.

This panic eventually led to the coming of Willie Waddell. He made the board eventually look like waxworks. This was no bad thing and was, perhaps accidentally, the first stage of understanding that the world could possibly be leaving Rangers behind, if they did not get out of their Ford T model.

Waddell simply set the scene for Sir David Murray. When the entrepreneur bought the club in 1988, it was not in the spirit of Robert Owen, to create a socialist co-operative. It was to establish a fiefdom. Waddell, more covertly, had achieved that already.

On the evening of the Ibrox disaster of 1970, Superintendent Joe Beattie, of Glasgow Police, in charge of the preliminary investigation, described the Ibrox directors as "running around like headless chickens" not knowing what to do next, until Waddell marched in and took over. It is here we are seeing events dictating matters to men who were not up to that task.

The Rangers board, traditionally representing a slice of Scottish bourgeoisie, were in the process of being made redundant. In fairness, it was David Holmes, prior to Murray, who smoothed the way for him by rubbing the lamp and letting the financial genie out of the bottle in acquiring Graeme Souness. Suddenly you felt that good intentions were to be backed up by dynamic action.

In New Mexico, prior to the World Cup of 1986, the new Rangers player-manager told me that he would not care if Celtic beat them four times in the league, so long as they won it. He went on, in what was like foreign language to our ears, that he would sign Catholics, if it so suited.

He was to ditch the first notion and keep to his word with the second. But in total this seemed like the quantum leap that was taking Rangers to a new level of awareness of a new world around them, which was not going to sit back and allow them to harbour old prejudices.

Indeed, when he was first appointed, Holmes discovered that the board members used to run a sweep, to calculate the size of the crowd on match days. The chairman at the time, John Paton, was delighted when he won it one Saturday with a guess of around 23,000. The fact that the stadium could hold 40,000 at that stage was stark evidence of complacency by men who had a cosy relationship with the board-room table and nothing much else.

Holmes, employed by the Lawrence Building Group, felt he had an advantage of being an outsider unaffected by the traditional loyalties. Murray toppled Holmes, and the stage was set for an era of transcendental success, but which in the light of recent events, seems now like one of those mediaeval bacchanalian orgies, paid for by those serving the food and drink.

There has been a large casino out there, which Rangers entered with their gold-card credentials, attracted also by the tax avoidance game, which, in fairness, some civil servants have got away with for some time now. A club that never believed it was created to be humble, has eventually been humiliated. And the paradox is that the tradition had switched from men who did not know any better, to those who really should have known better.

There may be many banners held up at Ibrox today. In recognition of their services to this downfall, one for Murray and Whyte might read,

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive.

It would be apt. As any schoolboy would tell them, it is from a poem about the tragedy of Flodden Field.