We’ve just had one of those special moments that come around every so often in Scottish football, almost akin to a statement from Buckingham Palace or the issuing of a Papal edict. When Sir David Murray, the chairman of Rangers, pipes up, would everyone please stand to attention and listen?

Murray is most upset at the alleged “treatment” of Rangers by the Scottish Premier League. Rangers, in reaching the Uefa Cup final against Zenit St Petersburg next week, are playing eight games in 21 days, and the Rangers chairman has raged at the SPL's refusal to cancel Saturday’s match between his club and Dundee United, which would have given Walter Smith’s men more breathing space before facing Zenit.

What Murray, like just about everyone else in this saga, has proved good at is producing much indignant and spluttering hot air. What he has not been so adept at, and certainly not while issuing his official statement the other day, is in offering a practical answer to a very teething fixtures problem.

Let’s put it this way. If the SPL had cancelled this Saturday’s match at Ibrox, then when could the game against Dundee United have been rescheduled? Answer... there isn’t a vacant slot for it anywhere between now and the end of the season on Saturday, May 24.

It is not a question of any agenda against Rangers, it is a question of practicality and available dates. In his public wrath, though, this appears to have by-passed Murray’s comprehension. The statement issued by the Rangers chairman seemed peculiar, not to say one which smacked of paranoia in its hint of a vendetta against Rangers by the SPL.

For instance, Murray warned ominously that Rangers had “not been treated fairly” and that he intends to “meet with the SPL at the end of the season to understand their decision-making process on certain matters”. My goodness, Lex Gold and other SPL apparatchiks will be quaking in their boots at this. Quick, lads, fetch the tin helmets!

What do these words of Murray hint at? Surely he does not believe the SPL was actually interested in hindering Rangers’ chances in the Uefa Cup final? If he does, we’re as well calling in the psychiatrists to attend this imminent Murray/SPL summit.

The SPL, in truth, has been interested in one thing and one thing only: fixing an end-of-season fixture schedule that had become nightmarish due to the problems and tragedies which have afflicted this 2007-08 season.

Murray, appearing a trifle off-beam, then cited the Russian football authorities and their treatment of Zenit St Petersburg, as if this had anything to do with it.

Zenit’s matches, unlike those of Rangers, have been cancelled with ease in the build up to Manchester next week, because the Russian season is still in its infancy. Frankly, they have dates galore in which to reschedule Zenit’s games, as would the SPL with Rangers if this drama was occurring in September instead of now.

Don’t people get it? It is a matter of too many games and too few available dates. And, because of the chase for third place in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, you cannot have Dundee United playing a game out of synch with Hibernian or Aberdeen, with any advantage that that might give them. Where is the “vendetta” or the “agenda against Rangers” in this?

Somewhat fatuously, Murray even claimed that “people will be laughing throughout the world” at the SPL and its treatment of Rangers. To be honest, I’m not sure if Scottish football is that important to have people the world over holding their sides with laughter. Closer to home, though, some are certainly starting to laugh at Rangers over their endless bleating and squealing.

There is one further irony in all of this, which is the position of the SFA. At the head of that organisation is Gordon Smith, a former Rangers player and a Rangers supporter, who you would ordinarily think cannot be counted among this apparently growing list of citizens and organisations who have it in for the club. Late on Tuesday night Smith was invited to join the debate and he, too, failed to see how the Rangers-Dundee United game this Saturday could possibly be cancelled. Smith was asked if the Scottish Cup final on May 24 could be put back, thus creating an extra matchday, but declined this proposal on practical grounds.

Is Smith, the great Ranger, now deemed to be antiRangers? I certainly hope not, as that would be preposterous as much as unfair.

Most of us have argued all along that the SPL owed it to the Scottish game to help Rangers as much as possible. I was among those who were less than enamoured with the revised fixture schedule that was produced on April 22, asking Rangers to play four matches in eight days. It seemed a stressful schedule in a hectic period.

But what cannot be tolerated is this pathetic charge of the SPL deliberately working against the good of Rangers. This kind of nonsense only stirs some of the neanderthals in our midst, and Sir David Murray should know better than to venture down such a road.