A lot of people are waking up this morning to a simple home truth. The person who has done most to damage Sevco since it crawled out of the grave where Rangers was interred, is the current chairman David Cunningham King.
Sevco fans have spent so long pining for this guy, hoping he’d come to their rescue, waiting for him, that it has to be hard to hear this. But it is a fact, and one that has always been crystal clear to the rest of us. He represents lethal dangers for the club.
From the very first day Charles Green bought the assets, King, Murray and others were working to undermine his efforts.
Their media campaign never let up. At every stage of the three years which took Sevco from the Third Division to the Championship, King lingered in the background like a bad smell. His destabilisation campaign in 2011-12, aided and abeted by a media which, this morning, has as much to answer for as anyone, cost the club enormous sums of money and wrecked what might have been a fruitful partnership with Sports Direct.
Since taking over, he has dragged them into court cases, alienated sponsors, got into a wholly needless fight with their kit manufacturer and lied about everything. He has co-opted the one fan organisation there was into his schemes (whatever they are) and his decision to sack Warburton, Weir and McParland how he did has probably cost them upwards of £1 million not only in pay-off money but in reputational damage payments too.
And all of this was eminently predictable.
I will be covering the media and the SFA side of this later, but for now let me simply remind people that none of this is a surprise. Not a single Scottish football fan outside of Ibrox did not see this coming a mile down the road. It astonishes me that others simply shut their ears to any negativity although this ending in tears was an utter certainty.
King has been in charge at Ibrox for two year, and those years have been disastrous. They’ve made it back to the top flight, but it’s been a nightmare for their fans … but then, they deserve everything they get because they wilfully ignored evidence that it was leading here.
His toxic legacy will be hampering them for years to come.
We can defeat Sevco on the park, but the real danger – as Rangers saw – always lay within. It can level their club like a nuclear detonation.
King’s arrogance and bluster and the damage he’s done are a parasite that will still be eating away at them long after he has gone.
When you think about it, King has been astonishingly selfish here, but that has been his MO for the whole of his professional life.
Today his actions have wilfully put the club and the other directors in harms way.
They are fools if they allow him to remain there for one extra minute.
