Scottish Media Gets Out The Begging Bowl As Ashley Gets His Judicial Review

Over the last few days it’s become increasingly apparent that what the Scottish media wants for Christmas is a big emergency aid parcel to arrive at Ibrox, via South Africa, and labelled “transfer war chest for Warburton.”

They’d be better of writing to Santa.

It is truly desperate stuff, but then desperate times call for desperate measures.

So how desperate is it over there?

Well, today they were knocked back in a move to sign Dean Windass’ son Josh, who plays for the mighty Accrington Stanley.

Yes, you read that correctly. It is not a mis-spelling of AC Milan.

The League 2 side, who were formed in 1968 after the liquidation of Accrington FC (no “continuation of history” guff here, these guys are pretty clear on what happened) slapped a Not For Sale sign on the player over the weekend.

And Sevco have accepted this! Like it was a major obstacle!

Because, as a wee check of the records will show, Accrington’s record sale thus far stands at a mere £50,000 for Brett Ormerod.

If Sevco aren’t willing to go higher than that then you know things are bad.

Things are very, very bad indeed.

And they are!

On the park, Warburton has blown what looked like an unassailable advantage in the league.

They’re already out of the League Cup.

If they slip further in the league race the pressure will be well and truly on.

As we’ve discussed before here, fancy football is all well and good when the pitches are fresh and green and the sun is high in the air. Add a little Scottish rain, only the most basic level of grounds keeping, a touch of frost and ice and the game changes radically, especially when you have a manager who like our own Ronny Deila appears wedded to one tactical system.

So the Warburton Revolution is running into the all-too-predictable problems.

And Sevco and its newspaper toadies are resorting to the most obvious solution; spend more money.

You have to hand it to these people, they really are great at that. At offering friendly advice on how rich men should sink their cash into the bottomless pit of Ibrox.

For years they clamoured for Murray to do it, not realising, perhaps, that the cash wasn’t coming from him but from a bank that would ultimately send the final bill for the nine in a row years to the taxpayer. Then it was Whyte, apparently without them realising he had none. Then Charles Green was going to bring with him the “rich investors” to throw their money away. Shame that his actual objective was to get as much of it out of the fans as he could before sinking it into real estate investments in France!

But King is the real prize for them, the one guy who’s already “put his money where his mouth is” in terms of “investing” in Rangers.

They forget that he threatened to sue Murray for that money when they went bust, as well as overlooking that he declared some £18 million in returns from that club when he filed his now famous South African tax return.

(Yes, this was amongst the very few assets he did declare to the taxman.)

As you’ll know, I’ve never believed this guy would sink money into Sevco.

I don’t believe he has the means to for a start, whether he’s filthy rich as some claim or with simple “lifestyle” wealth but not the Fortune 500 kind.

There are too many obstacles in the way, including South African tax laws and the terms of his legal agreement with their government.

Yet even if everything I’ve written in the last year is wrong, and this guy has the cash and the ability to get it where the Scottish press wants it to go … what a brass neck they have for expecting this. When does this club start to accept that living within its means is going to be the future?

The future took one step closer today when the SFA lost in a court attempt to have Mike Ashley’s request for a judicial review into how King was awarded fit and proper status denied.

That review has now been given the green light, and so Regan and others will have to go in front of a court, in April next year, and give an explanation for this scandalous decision.

That will be an interesting hearing, to say the very least.

It comes just days after Ashley won an injunction against the Sevco board in relation to the coming Ibrox AGM, in which they tried to exclude him from voting.

That is now off the table, and another chunk of King’s credibility with it.

But the SFA hearing is shaping up to be a clash of monumental significance.

We got a hint today of what the SFA’s position is, when the respected blogger and Bampot James Doleman tweeted from the court that the association’s lawyer attempted to defend this outrageous abrogation of the rules on the grounds that “Scottish football, and Rangers, have suffered” and that the “uncertainty must end.”

The “uncertainty” that currently engulfs the Scottish game is a direct consequence of one thing; the gross mismanagement of our sport by the governing bodies.

I agree with them on one thing; it has to end.

And it will.