I’ve spent the past five days trying to think of a previous episode in Scottish football comparable with the current Kris Boyd situation at Rangers. That’s to say, a club which, with genuine and realistic title aspirations, chooses to try to sell its principal striker who is on course for a 40-goal season. Answers on a postcard, please.

In the current case of Rangers, the circumstances are more than a mite familiar. The club’s balance sheet once again is starting to overheat, with bank borrowings beginning to rise from £15 million to £25 million and soon to be £30 million. Onwards and upwards the figure will remorselessly climb, and Sir David Murray, having been there before and caused the club years of suffering as a consequence, does not want to go back.

So some assets need to be sold, Boyd being one, Barry Ferguson being another. It seems Rangers need an influx of around £7 million to cool their situation, hence the “fire sale”. It is a phrase loathed by Murray, who duly rounded up the usual patsies last week to have the claim shot down in print. But a fire sale, metaphorically speaking, is what it is.

Indeed, the situation at Rangers just now is exactly as it was two years ago at Austria Vienna, who, in a near-identical crisis when they were required to rein in their budget, were forced to sell their main assets. Frank Stronach, Austria Vienna’s enigmatic American owner, suddenly decided that his lavish investments in the club had to stop, and they duly had agents put it about that their best players were up for sale.

Rangers, performing another of their famous financial botches, became the principal takers for Filip Sebo, Libor Sionko and Sasa Papac. Back then, no one at Ibrox quibbled about viewing the Vienna situation as a “fire sale”, yet that is what it was.

The current drama at Ibrox is fascinating in regard to Murray. Never again, he vows, will he recklessly take the club back to the days of £80 million-plus debts, and here he is duly sticking to his word. At the moment the Rangers debt is around £25 million but, if the current remedial action was not sought, the next set of Rangers accounts could show a leap in borrowings of around £20 million in two years.

It would not look good, and Murray knows it. He knows full well that the less pliable and poodle-like members of the wider Scottish media would highlight the fact that old habits die hard. In truth, Murray and Martin Bain are having to take tough decisions today, as much for their own reputation as that of Rangers.

Yet what remains utterly baffling is the Boyd sale itself. He is the one player in the current squad – there is no one else to match him – who might guarantee Rangers the 2009 title and the £10 million Champions League bounty to follow. Is there really no other fiscal option open to Rangers – no other rearranging of the figures – which could allow Boyd to stay, at least until the end of the season? I find it hard to believe that selling the striker is the only way out for Rangers.

Boyd, I believe, will still leave the club. The current assessment of the striker’s sale apparently being “dead in the water” is identical to the circumstances that surrounded Alan Hutton’s transfer last year. In mid-January, you may recall, the deal was supposedly dead, with Walter Smith asserting as much. Two weeks later, just as everyone guessed, Hutton was at Tottenham Hotspur for £9 million.

It will be amazing if Boyd is still at Rangers after the January window. The only factor that could keep him in Glasgow would be the player himself digging in and insisting he wanted to stay. But if Boyd leaves, following Hutton and Carlos Cuéllar, what would it say about the state of Rangers?

The club seem fragile and unable to go forward in their current structure. They need a new owner, a new strategy, new energy and fresh ideas. Murray’s famous phrase about “every so often changing the menu” appears to have finally run its course. There are no other dishes to try.

The sooner Rangers FC find that elusive man who has made his millions in North America and wants to “come home” to Ibrox, the better.

And another thing...

Another example of how TV has eroded crowds

Sir Bob Kelly, the titanic Celtic chairman of the 1950s onwards, was famously loathing of television coverage of football – and would have been even more loathing of the type of incessant live coverage we have today. In which context, Mr Kelly might have stirred in his grave at the scene at Easter Road yesterday.

The tousy Edinburgh cup derby had been hyped all week in the press, yet with football’s maddest kick-off time yet – 12.15 on a Sunday lunchtime, with full television coverage – Easter Road was far from a sell-out. The Hibernian end, in particular, had quite a few empty seats behind one goal.

A crowd yesterday of 15,500 was no disgrace – but what some of us would have given for a stadium bursting at the seams for such a clash. And such thoughts are only made worse by the sight, as you enter the Easter Road press room, of a 1950s Easter Road scene, with a crowd packed in toe-to-toe to watch the Famous Five.

No end to Boruc’s decline

Another weekend, another minor disaster for Artur Boruc. The days of this loopy Polish goalkeeper being quoted as fetching £9 million in the transfer market are long gone.

Boruc’s fresh air swipe at the ball that led to Dundee’s opening goal on Saturday, and subsequent gaffe in the second half that could have led to an equaliser against Celtic, were indicative of a goalkeeper in decline.

The more I see Boruc on the pitch, and hear of him off it, the more I fear he is another Dariusz Dziekanowski – a football talent who gradually unravels in the grip of life’s other fleshy pleasures.

Boruc was a fine Gordon Strachan signing, whose time at Celtic, barring a dramatic change of attitude, is drawing to a close. For Strachan, surely, Lukasz Zaluska cannot get to Celtic Park quickly enough.

Smith’s PLG moment?

There is a feeling, when Rangers go to play St Johnstone at McDiarmid Park tomorrow night, that this could be Walter Smith’s “PLG moment” – a reference is to the Perth club’s removal of Paul Le Guen’s Rangers from the CIS Cup in 2006-07 and the staging post that night became in Le Guen’s eventual downfall.

If Rangers lose tomorrow night there will be a full-blown Ibrox crisis – a cracked crest and all – but I can’t see it happening. More to the point, this is a game made for Kris Boyd to score the goals to thrust Rangers into the fifth round of the cup. Whereupon, the bleats will resume about the striker only scoring against the likes of St Johnstone. This is a debate Boyd simply cannot win.