WHAT began as speculation and claims about Rangers going into administration 18 months ago has slowly crystallised into acknowledgements and solemn nods of the head that, yes, it really is on the cards.

The Herald carried a piece about exactly that scenario in May, 2010, and back then it was dismissed as wide-of-the-mark and alarmist. Not any more.

The notion of a helpless Rangers having to be rescued by others has been drip fed into the general consciousness to the point that people have become desensitised and accepting of it. Some around the club are almost defiantly bullish about it as a sensible means of damage limitation. Maybe it is, but make no mistake: Rangers going into administration would be a disgrace.

Rangers have fundamentals that any other club in Scotland, bar Celtic, would die for: 50,000 crowds at every home game, multi-million pound sponsorship deals and regular access to vast Champions League income. And they’ve had most of those for a quarter of a century. Cash has simply poured into Ibrox since the club boomed at the start of the Graeme Souness revolution.

The place became synonymous with wealth and with spending. Never mind the headline folly of £12m on Tore-Andre Flo, there was a time when Rangers prowled the market chucking £2m, £3m or £4m at new players on an almost monthly basis. Whatever it took to keep winning the league; whatever it took to keep getting into the Champions League. Everyone became so accustomed to them living high on the hog that no-one batted an eyelid at their debts reaching £82m when Dick Advocaat was in charge. For as long as Rangers were in the hands of Sir David Murray the place seemed as safe as the Bank of England.

But Murray wasn’t safe and he wasn’t careful. Murray didn’t live within his means. We all know that now. Bills began to mount at Ibrox that Rangers couldn’t pay. Most catastrophically of all, Murray committed to paying players out of Employee Benefits Trusts and tens of millions were siphoned away from the taxman through that avoidance vehicle. Even if Rangers win their infamous tax case when a tribunal reconvenes next month, the EBT episode has been highly damaging to the club. As Craig Whyte says in this paper today, some commercial partners won’t do deals with Rangers because they don’t know what state the club is going to be in five years, or even 12 months.

In his revealing interview with The Herald, Whyte doesn’t explicitly say he will put the club into administration in a matter of weeks should they lose the tax case, but that’s what he means by bringing “finality” to the matter if the verdict goes against them. Perhaps Rangers will win the case and the entire landscape will change, but the vibes coming out have sounded a little more pessimistic recently. If they do lose it, administration would be the end game, the conclusion of their grotesque journey from money no object to money no’ there.

“We just can’t move on, put in place what I want in terms of the restructuring and ideas we have, until it’s resolved,” says the embattled owner. Depending on what you think of Whyte, he has been either calculating or shrewd in positioning himself as the secured creditor who would get his money back in the event of administration, with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs left to whistle for their £49m. His assessment is that if Rangers lose the case it will be better for him and for the club to take the short-term pain of administration rather than have another year or more of uncertainty, pressure and stagnation while appeals are heard.

Whyte has never publicly criticised Murray and it would be hypocritical if he ever did so, given that he knew exactly what state Rangers were in when he took them over after months of investigation and deliberation. But when he talks of Rangers being “in crisis” and “paralysed”, and states that he “inherited a mess”, it is a legitimate reminder that he’s not the only businessman whose deals and decision-making could justify a prime time television investigation.

Rangers seem almost to have come to terms with the prospect of administration. Perhaps Whyte has even looked at their 10-point lead over Celtic and thought he could take the plunge now, absorb the mandatory 10-point SPL punishment for going into administration, and still win the title. Administration could then be mortifying for two clubs.

Justifiable questions have been asked about Whyte’s resources and there will be more in the future. But there was no other buyer on the scene and administration does not loom because of him. Murray has been conspicuously quiet of late, but the state Rangers are in should be excruciating for him. An administrator walking into Ibrox to sort out the shambles would be a shameful and undignified punctuation mark in the history of a club which used to have it all.