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An Ugly Rumour, Or Are We Seeing The First Cracks On Dave King’s Sevco Board?

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Rumours.

Ugly Rumours.

That was the band Tony Blair was a member of when he was in college. It is amazing that Ugly Rumours have stalked him since he left office, but that there was never a whiff of some of them whilst he was in it. The media knows which side their bread is buttered on.

More than that, they know who it is who butters the bread.

I mention this because Ugly Rumours are all the rage in Scottish sport at the moment and our friends in the Scottish press aren’t paying attention. Sevco fans are pushing a number of them, and there’s an Ugly Website which thinks its business is to rake through as much past muck as it can whilst throwing big handfuls of it hither, thither and yon.

It is a well-funded website, although quite who funds it we’re not quite sure.

But it and several others are very good at making noise about “enemies” whilst the real problems are inside their own club.

This is just a suggestion to the hacks; I don’t expect any of them to take it on.

But there might be a story in pulling back the curtain on some of these sites, and the individuals associated with them.

As many of them spend their time attacking named journalists with intense hatred and in some extremely threatening language it might well be regarded as an act of self-defence, if they need to justify it to their bosses.

But beyond that, they’d find it … newsworthy.

But that’s a digression away from the main point, which is those Ugly Rumours that the press seems determined to ignore, although confirming them would simply involve picking up a phone and dialling the correct number.

Perhaps it’s not as simple as that, though. Perhaps the phone lines at Ibrox really are manned by PR people, whose job it is not to answer questions. Maybe all enquiries to the media office do have to go through those folk before an answer is given.

That might be an Ugly Rumour too.

Perhaps it’s just an Ugly Rumour that there are problems at boardroom level at Sevco. Perhaps it’s an Ugly Rumour that King is now being viewed as a liability by people on that board, and that efforts are now being made to find a way to move him aside. Perhaps this involves certain persons talking to the media and giving them a new narrative; the man in South Africa hasn’t delivered. It’s an odd coincidence that those stories have appeared this week.

How long before the others appear? Those which hint at talks with “investors” who’ve indicated that as long as his toxic presence is at the club no-one of means will come in to do what he can’t? Is it an Ugly Rumour that this is what lies behind the rash of Real Rangers Men asking when he’s going to put his hand in his pockets and spend?

If you were launching such a counter-revolution, who would you want on your side?

Easy answer, you’d want Walter Smith.

Isn’t it funny to see him leaning on King over spending in the same week that Keith Jackson finally wakes up to some Cold Hard Truth?

Odd.

If you’ve heard that this is more than a coincidence that’s probably just an Ugly Rumour.

Like the one that says the rash of Other Real Rangers Men coming out and saying the club has to live within its means represent a different perspective and the opposing side in a burgeoning boardroom conflict.

That conflict, by the way, is so much like the one that Ugly Rumours said was going on in New Labour for years – between Blair and Brown – and which both men routinely, vocally, and publicly denied … only for it all to be true, and much worse than the rumours suggested.

In short; this is a boardroom battle that’s more about power than principle, more about personal advancement than it is about policy direction.

Half of the board wants to see the colour of King’s money.

If he hasn’t got it they want shot of him, and this has ceased to be about the club’s wellbeing.

It’s about their own.

Because they know that he can hide over there but that they’re stuck here, and it’s them who’ll have to face the fans if the lights go out. And without their money the lights will go out over there, and it might be a while – and a whole different club – before someone switches them on again.

Some people at Ibrox are waking up now to a terrible truth; this guy has trapped them.

King has put them in an impossible and deadly position here. Their money is what’s paying the bills. If they stop giving it, if they stop paying those bills, game over, and who do you think will be blamed for the demise of the second Ibrox club in five years?

Not King. He’s not yet been able to do a Walter Smith or David Murray, and pass the mess on to some pre-picked patsy, but I don’t know a supporter’s organisation which shouts loud enough to be heard on the other side of the world.

If they went under he would wash his hands of his minimal investment, blame everyone else and get on with his life.

These guys can’t.

If they’re upfront when this thing runs out of gas they’ll carry the can although none was actually sitting in the driver’s seat. So King thinks he has them in a box where if he presents them with an invoice at the end of the month they’ll have no choice but to get together and find the money from somewhere.

Think of King’s actions here as a slightly nicer version of what Henry Hill, in Goodfellas, tells you is Big Paulie’s reason for bailing out the restaurant; now you have to do whatever he says, whenever he says it, and pick up the tab too.

“Business bad? F@@@ you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F@@@ you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? F@@@ you, pay me.”

These guys are being pushed into a corner, where they feel obligated to keep on funding this because if they didn’t no-one else would. And they no longer believe that King either can fund it or wants to. That opens up another deadly scenario which none of them wants to be involved with; taking the decision that the club should start making the necessary cuts to survive. King isn’t going to be the one who admits that needs to happen … and none of them will either, knowing they’ll be facing off the fans in no time at all.

Let’s be clear, everyone involved knows this farce is almost played out.

There are two solutions; austerity of the real kind or investment of the big kind.

Without one or the other – perhaps even both; there’s more needs done over there than spending on the team, don’t forget – the party is well and truly over, and not five years down the road. Soon. Close enough that none of them could run away fast enough to avoid the shrapnel.

If King isn’t going to, or can’t, do it these people would rather be in a position where they can talk to other parties and many of them are of the view – backed by talking to people in the financial industry – that a man like King is a big black mark against the club.

So some have decided to put him under pressure.

By suggesting that it’s time for him to spend.

His retaliation is to brand such people as mugs who want to take the club down the old road to ruin.

He won’t say that himself, and none of his board will, but there are always useful idiots who can be drafted in to say all the right things, whether they believe them or not. He doesn’t believe it anyway; if he could find people willing to give the club money he would have it spent on football operations “to catch Celtic” and massage his own ego in two seconds flat.

Stewart Robertson has, some say, been caught in the middle of this dispute but in point of fact he’s already chosen a side and it would be surprising if he hadn’t. According to this Ugly Rumour, he’s picked the side of the guys who want to put the pressure on Chairman Dave.

I get the reasons why; he spends his days working alongside those guys, at the sharp end, whilst the tax cheat suns himself in Johannesburg away from it all.

Unfortunately for him, he’s exposed in a way others aren’t and that’s why it was his personal details and recompense which were splattered all over the papers last week.

We’re watching the Endgame here, for the King regime at least. He is in the crosshairs of guys here at home who are now working, steadily, to convince like-minded individuals in the media and elsewhere that Chairman Dave doesn’t have the means to challenge Celtic.

That operation will be ramped up now, month on month, when cheque signing time starts to get near.

Eventually the pressure will either force a change or people will just refuse to sign those cheques.

Either way, there will be blood.

Of course, none of that could happen at all.

It could all just be smoke and mirrors, whispers and vapours.

Ugly Rumours, and nothing more.

Maybe if it ain’t in the press then it isn’t really happening.

But let’s face it, if you were relying on the media to bring you stuff like this you’d have been as well just switching off in 2012 and waiting for the ticker tape Breaking News bar on Sky Sports News to change, telling you that the whole thing had come tumbling down, in the face of months of denials that it was imminent.

For the record, my money is on a big loud boom.

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