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On March 25th 1984, Rangers faced Celtic in the League Cup Final. Making his way into the stadium, Rangers boss Jock Wallace told reporters that “I fancy us to win very strongly. We’ve got the battle fever on”. Those words have entered Ibrox folklore, routinely wheeled out in subsequent years to rally fans and players alike.

On March 30 2018, Rangers introduced the term “OFFICIAL VAPING PARTNER” into the Scottish football lexicon. Official. Vaping. Partner. This is now, apparently, a thing. With almost any club outside Govan this level of barrel-scraping would be a surprise, but in the current Scottish football climate the only surprise is that Dundee United didn’t beat them to it.

Look, a club has to make money. Not many people know this, and fewer still like to mention it, but Rangers have actually encountered the occasional financial difficulty in recent years. No, seriously. I think someone actually wrote a blog about it at some point.

For decades football clubs have been more than happy to splash the names of lagers and gambling firms across their shirts and advertising hoardings. Vaping is just the latest in a long line of industries football fans can feel mildly embarrassed about promoting on their shirts. That wording though. “OFFICIAL VAPING PARTNER”? Are there unofficial vaping partners? Did Vaporized fend off competition from Planet of the Vapes? Did Partick Thistle pip Rangers to the coveted Darth Vaper deal?

Reaction was mixed among replies to the official Rangers tweet. Highlights included:

RyanReynoldsHeadInHand.gif - @colinrice11 and @NBW610

PhoebeBuffayScreamingOHMYGODMYEYES!!!.gif - @GarryCarmody

MarkMcGheeGetThatTaeFu.jpg - @GraemeC1986

ClintEastwoodRecoilingInDisgust.gif - @IainHarding

@coatsarch called it “an appalling announcement from a club that has been at the vanguard in promotion of healthy living”, a sentiment that only makes sense if you’ve wiped Kris Boyd’s 2014/15 campaign from your memory. Surprisingly, Celtic fans also took the time to comment on the bizarre photocall. “Liquidised and Vaporized…great piece of marketing” remarked @stevieleckie. The move could of course backfire on Vaporizer. Expect to hear ‘They’re no getting ma business – that’s a Sevco vape shop’ in the near future.

“It’s kind of like the real thing, but not quite” said a Vaporizer spokesman about Rangers. The strangeness is only heightened by Declan John, seen in the photo with an expression that screams “When I grew up tearing Dado Prso posters out of Shoot magazine, I definitely dreamed of one day promoting an e-cigarette company”.

Many pointed out the similarity between this latest hare-brained Ibrox scheme and a recent Only an Excuse sketch, in which a group of Rangers fans began playing their e-cigarettes like flutes to the tune of traditional folk ditty ‘The Divorce Papers My Father Signed’. The difference is, Only an Excuse just has to be funny once a year. Rangers are committed to providing laughs on a daily basis.

Perhaps it was all just one big April Fools’ gag, like the time your mum put the Coco Pops in the Frosties box, or the time your mum unplugged the Sky box and said she’d had to cancel your subscription, or the time your mum pretended she was working late when she was actually in a room at the Citizen M with Gary from HR looking at the colours in the shower changing while she emasculated your dad who was sat at home wondering if Babestation had an Agony Aunt feature. After all, Dundee United had pulled off a classic early April Fools’ by pretending to hire sociopathic MMA fighter Bilel Mohsni as a professional footballer.

Red Bull got in on the April 1 fun with a tweet (now deleted) featuring their logo emblazoned on a Rangers top. The comments were about as unhinged as you would expect, with people helpfully responding to a blatant April Fools’ by tweeting that it was probably an April Fools’. Genuinely. One guy literally tweeted “April Fools Day probably”. Yeah mate, you’re probably right. Naturally, with this being Rangers, there were a few fans incapable of taking a joke. “Shut up ya f**nies” and “Get your wings and f**k off” were among the highlights, but none were so eloquent, so rational, so goddamn poetic as @deano162:

“Stick to making cans of juice ya ***ks”.

For many, however, April 1 2018 was about more than just daft jokes. It would be handy, then, if I could somehow bring this column to an end with a profound parable that covered both Easter Sunday and our national game. Try as I might, though, I can’t think of a single story in Scottish football with any relevance to Easter’s message of death and resurrection.