If you had to come up with a caption for the above photo you could do worse than; “I once told a lie this big ….”
Yes, nothing we didn’t already know, Dave.
Well now begins the backlash.
King has escaped real scrutiny up until now, but with his club 19 points behind ours (and we have a game in hand) their fans know this is the window where he has to deliver. Nobody realistically thinks that he will; the economics of this don’t lie. The money isn’t there.
Things would be a whole lot better at Ibrox if King and his board had admitted that right from the start, and if the media hadn’t pushed nonsense about “war-chests” and “catching Celtic” in the first place. Arrogant, elitist nonsense unsupported by facts.
Lying to people isn’t a long-term strategy.
And making promises you can’t keep or won’t isn’t any kind of strategy at all.
That realisation that they were involved in nothing but a con-job has started at Ibrox; the league table doesn’t lie after all, no matter how many people think the three games where we’ve beaten them were “closer than they looked.”
Miller’s shot that came off the post is the straw some of them now clutch to; it’s pretty pathetic to be honest.
We’re not so far out in front on the back of two league games against them. We’ve been consistent, even consistently brilliant, since the season started. They’ve dropped points hither, thither and yon. Because their team of second-rate players from the English lower leagues is a mid-table side at best, and in a year where their actual rivals – Aberdeen, Hearts, Motherwell, Inverness etc – were capable of stringing together four or five wins at a time they’d already be in a world of trouble.
I have no sympathy for Sevco fans at all.
The dawning of truth and reality is hurting and it’s going to hurt a lot more, but I can’t muster one iota of goodwill for them.
Because King had such a long history of lies and this site, Fields and others conducted such detailed scrutiny of this guy before, during and after his takeover, that the collapse of faith in his promises should have come as no surprise whatsoever to them.
I pointed out, on repeated occasions, that if you believe King’s tax returns (hahahahaha!) he doesn’t have the personal wealth to take the club forward. And whether those returns are kosher or not, the legal minefield he’d need to navigate to get money out of South Africa makes it too cagey a proposition for a guy who’s already spent years of his life fighting their justice ministry. The idea that he would – or could – spend upwards of £30 million was a fantasy then and it’s a fantasy now.
Those saying “Show me the money” are the last people in Scotland who get that.
When it comes to King, the Bampots were, as usual, way ahead of the media and the Sevco fans sneered at us like they did with Whyte and like they did with Green and as they did with Ashley when The Daily Record and other outlets were telling them he needed a Sports Direct advertising board for Europe and therefore was good for the club.
On every occasion they were warned. By us.
And they didn’t listen to a word of it.
No wonder dodgy geezers think they can breeze in there on the back of glib statements and shady business plans and fleece them like penned up sheep. It’s wilful ignorance like this which attracts those kind of men to Ibrox in the first place; the most gullible fans in Europe.
How many times do we have to be right, embarrassingly right, before they listen to us and not the deluded fantasists in their own support and the press boxes?
These people still haven’t adapted their outlook to what happened in 2012.
It wasn’t simply that Rangers was liquidated; Rangers itself had been existing, for years, on the basis of fraudulent spending. They never had the money in the first place to live as high on the hog as they had been. The club they thought they followed was, itself, an illusion. It never existed. 2012 simply washed away the fantasy and the club that grew out of it was one that had to live within reasonable means and according to the same rules as everyone else.
Their mentality is such that they haven’t been able to manage that, and what should scare these people most isn’t that there’s been some chronic underinvesting at Ibrox, it’s that this is what overinvestment looks like now.
This is a club still spending beyond its means … but no longer with the indulgence of banks and other organisations to pump their meagre resources full of steroids.
A team of Accrington Stanley players. On bigger wages than those guys ever dreamed of.
Yes, Dave King lied.
He lied to the most pliable fan base on this island. He lied to people who wanted to be lied to, people who didn’t want to believe that the bubble had burst and that they had been reduced to the same level as everyone else.
That the days of big name signings on somebody else’s tab are over and done with, forever.
And they still don’t get it.
They still long for a sugar-daddy. Which makes the kind of crisis they are in now seem almost moderate compared to what would happen if they were taken over instead by the kind of people who’ve got their hands on Coventry, or the rag-bag of charlatans who’ve traipsed through Leeds these past 15 years.
There are worse things than having to live within your means, of having to accept second best in a good year.
But not for the Peepul.
Which means that the using they’ve had is nothing compared to the one that might still be waiting for them. Because when King realises he can no longer fob them off, when his board decides they’ll not spend another penny to keep on the lights, these people better be wide awake and watching for whoever ends up owning their club next. Because they ain’t seen nothing yet. 2017 might be the year they learn the harshest lesson every dished out to football fans in Scotland.
If they survive at all, that is.