Sevco Resorts To Threats As Ashley Strikes Over SFA Double Standards

Last month, the House of Lords stepped in where the elected representatives of the people didn’t want to go, and turned George Osbornes tax credits plan around.

I thought the irony of the moment was best summed up by Alex Salmond, who taunted a Tory frontbencher by asking if it was the first time a chancellor had ever been bested in protecting the working poor by hereditary toffs.

Such surrealism isn’t confined to the political arena, it seems.

Today’s news that Mike Ashley is taking the SFA to court to find out on just what basis they granted Dave King “fit and proper person” status is magically barmy.

This guy, who’s no friend to football supporters of any kind, has emerged as the man who might well strike the first blow on behalf of the growing coalition of Scottish fans as we aim to get justice, at last, for the EBT years and the scandals which evolved from those.

Let me be clear on something; Mike Ashley isn’t a spiv, and no-one ought to call him one.

He’s a toe rag though, a guy who treats his workers abysmally and who behaves with total ruthlessness whether he’s dealing with business competitors or critics in the media.

I said in a piece over on Fields a while ago that this was the worst possible enemy for King and his board to make, and that’s proving right, but I don’t like this guy and none of us ought to.

Regardless, he’s emerged as an unlikely hero here, because he’s the first person with the means and the muscle to demand answers to some of our questions.

The media has that means, and the muscle.

But it’s filled with people like Graham Spiers, who for all I like much of what he writes blows it when he says, as he did earlier this year, that it would be an outrage for King to get passed as fit and proper but that it was also inevitable and we should just deal with it when it happened and “move on.”

A lot of people are suggesting we move on nowadays, and some, like the CEO of Sevco, Stewart Robertson, have even resorted to throwing around veiled threats in an effort to silence the one group of people who’ve been consistently banging this drum.

These people are scared to death right now, and they ought to be.

As I said in a recent piece for Fields, they’re in a bad spot and they can feel the walls closing in.

Note to Robertson, if he’s reading, as he’s vowed to do;

You don’t scare us, chump.

You think this is a matter of money? Do you have any idea what kind of support network exists here?

We might not be media outlets with very deep pockets but some of us know our history.

Ever heard of the McLibel case?

The leaflets those kids were handing out didn’t have a circulation of more than a couple of hundred.

Within weeks of the case being filed, the central claims on them appeared in major newspapers all over the world.

For free.

The kind of publicity they couldn’t buy for their claims if they’d had an advertising budget like Coca Cola.

The Scottish press has worked diligently with you to keep a lid on all this; do you really want the media in the rest of this island to wake up and start writing about it?

Those kids didn’t have unlimited funds, but they were determined, and they knew the more they fought the more the media would cover it, and they opened a big can of worms and even forced senior executives at McDonalds to take the stand and defend themselves in front of a court.

You get it now, yeah?

Some of us would like nothing more than to get you and your bosses in front of a judge, under oath.

Because it’s one thing playing the big man in Scotland when a court 4000 miles away has called you a “glib and shameless liar” but a perjury trial in front of a jury right here would be a different ball game and maybe I’m crazy but I’m not convinced it’s a road you want to go down.

As it turns out, that might happen even without our input.

King’s position is already under serious threat with Ashley’s decision to question the SFA’s fit and proper person decision in open court.

When Regan and his people get up there, under oath, to explain how they arrived at this decision every word will have to be weighted perfectly, or consequences are going to follow that these people can’t even imagine.

How this guy and others have remained in office in the first place continues to elude me.

There’s no chance in Hell of them staying there if this goes the way it looks like.

The folly of King making the issues between him and Ashley into a personal thing is now apparent to even the most blinkered supporter of the Ibrox chairman.

The media can try to throw as much mud at Ashley as it likes, and there’s legitimate reason to criticise him, but what they can’t do is attack him as a spiv or suggest he’s at it.

In trying to paint as the villain of this piece a man who personally built a multi-billion pound enterprise, legitimately, the weakness of their position is revealed, especially when you consider the man they are bearing the standard for.

Ashley has simply had enough.

Enough of being treated like the bad tempered step child by King and his acolytes in the Scottish media.

This is a guy with the wherewithal to turn the lights at Ibrox out, by embroiling them in a court case every month until they’re financially exhausted.

Today he’s got the SFA in his crosshairs as well.

I cannot think of anything that should scare Regan and his colleagues more than this.

The people who fined Ashley himself over “undue influence” when they had a President who had held shares in Rangers whilst working at Hearts, who just appointed a guy to a key board who was Head of Football Operations at Ibrox during the EBT years, and who had one himself.

It’s squeaky bum time at Hampden, and with bloody good reason.

Read “No Justice, No Moving On” from On Fields of Green here.