Burning Down The House

This morning, almost every tabloid in the country is united in telling the world how Dave King and the Sevco fans have “won” their battle to have the EGM staged at Ibrox.

Two things – both important – appear to have slipped the minds of the Peepil.

The first is that the EGM has now been postponed.

At the time of writing, no new date has been set for it, but it could be a while before there’s a resolution to this situation and they actually get their vote.

There’s also the possibility of King or someone else hot-footing it to the Court of Session to get them to fix a date and meeting place in stone. Don’t rule that out.

The second thing is far more important than the first, because even if this is nothing but a stalling tactic, the vote is going to take place.

It’ll probably take place next month. And, according to everyone who claims to be “in the know”, the Ibrox board is going to be removed at a stroke.

There will be ructions in the aftermath, as Ashley makes some crucial decisions and the SFA finally has to grow a set and make some of its own, but essentially, the job will be done.

The bigger problem is how much their club reeks at the moment, from top to bottom.

The fans don’t get to pretend none of this is their fault. So much of it can be laid squarely at their door.

I said in a couple of previous pieces, one on here and one on Fields of Green, that the real fun would start when King and his people get their hands on the controls, but before that even happens they’re going to have to confront the ugliness inside Ibrox’s own walls.

Today King, belatedly realising that he’s let the genie out of the bottle, is furiously backtracking and telling the fans not to attend a meeting he lobbied to have moved so that they could.

Supporters are not being given the choice of making a journey to London or staying at home; instead, they are being told it serves no-one’s benefit for them to go just up the road.

In fact, as King well knows, London was the best place for this meeting, as it would have been without any of the nastiness and vitriol that one in Glasgow assures.

It would have let he and his people get their project over the line, or not, in a business-like and professional way without the howling mob in the background.

Instead, he played politics with it and whipped up the mob, not expecting, perhaps, that the board would change their minds and decide to hold it where the mob could be given full reign.

This is typical of the way in which this thing has developed, and the media doesn’t skate off into the sunset either because they’ve been just as bad, promoting the lunatic fringe that surrounds Sevco like a toxic cloud, including John Brown … who is as about as far removed from rationality as your average Daily Record hack is from honesty and integrity.

The two hotels involved have said that part of the reason for their withdrawal was that they’d received threats.

Disgusting, but not surprising when one considers this is how a certain part of the Sevco support has long behaved.

Recently, though, this fringe has been prominent in a way they haven’t been for years.

They are the ones who tried to force their way through the front doors of the stadium after the abandoned Hearts match, the ones who fought with rival fans during that game, who attacked Hibs supporters recently and shamed themselves, and Scotland, with their sectarian songs during the League Cup semi-final.

This is what King, Brown, a handful of others and their cheerleaders in the media have encouraged, and now Pandora’s Box is wide open and all the filth is crawling out.

These are the same people who openly, vocally, loudly hoped to reach an SPL in which half the clubs had gone to the wall and the other half were on the edge of that.

To paraphrase a favourite character in a favourite show of mine (Game of Thrones! Get on it!) they really would “burn the country to be kings of the ashes.”

The worst of it is, when this thing is over, when the old board has gone, these people, the dregs of the gutter, will take a victory lap, believing they, rather than hard economics, rather the choices of those fans who voted with their feet, are what won the day.

They will assume it was a victory achieved by force, or the threat of force.

King’s “new revolution” will have been founded on the worst possible start.

I cannot think of anything more destructive to Sevco – and Scottish football – than that.