The SPFL season is almost over, with a handful of playoff matches left to go. When that campaign ends and we know what the leagues will look like next season, and the whole of the game breaks off for the summer, the club chairmen should do one last thing before they sign off; they should tell Neil Doncaster that his time is up, that he should pack his pencils and piss off to his next gig. The game will be well and truly better off for it.
And it would be better for him too.
If Doncaster stays the heat under him is going to get very hot indeed. He’s lucked out – and so has his buddy Regan at the SFA – by virtue of our shitty media and their lack of scrutiny, but also by the fact that the mounting legal consequences of how Rangers and Sevco have been run will probably come to full bloom in the close-season when neither man has to front up and face questions over it. Not that many of us think those questions would have been asked, or answered.
But still. These guys are the luckiest men in football.
There have to be club chairpersons out there who know this stuff, who know these guys can’t be allowed to go on, but Doncaster in particular as we’re facing some commercial negotiations which he can’t possibly be allowed to lead.
He and Regan have been a joke, to be frank, and their gutlessness has been on full display lately, with their joint, and abject, failure to respond, in any way, to the atrocious scenes at Ibrox. That’s going to just be dropped now, it’s obvious.
There will be no “delegates report”, no disciplinary case, no push towards making people account for the deplorable events at Ibrox. And neither he nor Regan has opened their mouths on the Sinclair incident, which I intend to beat them with over and over again until the point is made.
I give Regan a hard time on this site, and he deserves it because his performance has been abysmal, but Doncaster is the larger problem of the two, in my opinion. It’s his grubby fingerprints that are most to be found on the Five Way Agreement. He knew what Whyte was up to probably before Regan did, and I maintain – as I wrote in this lengthy article for Fields – that he set up the clubs over the Sky deal, and caused all manner of chaos in the process.
Then he had to take Peter Lawwell with him to negotiate with Sky, after royally screwing up the decision on where to put Sevco.
He literally hid behind the coat-tails and professionalism of our own CEO, and I still think that damaged Lawwell’s standing with our supporters and was a needless, and self-defeating, exercise. Lawwell should have let him fall on the sword, and if he wasn’t prepared to our man should have picked it up and stuck it in personally.
Getting rid of Doncaster is more important to forward progress than getting rid of Regan is. Doncaster is the more aggressive pusher of the Survival Myth. He is the one who’s said to have given Sevco a guarantee that historic titles (you know, the ones they “bought” like an out of date packet of fish fingers) wouldn’t be stripped.
The SFA keeps on telling us that they don’t get involved in that, that it’s down to the league and they are only the appeal body … so the buck stops with Doncaster and if he really is ruling out re-opening the book on it he’s got to be first to go.
Because that book will be cracked open again.
That issue will have to be re-explored and some form of restitution made, or this game will forever be known as the one where cheating not only wasn’t punished but was allowed to thrive, to prosper, and we’ll never ever be free of the stink of it.