When the Craig Whyte trial ends, I’m going to finish a project I started several years ago and intended to be a two part piece. Like George RR Martin losing his mind in the complexity of what he was working on, that project wanted to grow beyond the boundaries I had set; it will probably end up four parts and around 20,000 words. A dissertation, or thesis, called A Very Scottish Scandal: How Rangers And The SFA Almost Wrecked Scottish Football.
You can read the first two parts over on Fields.
What stopped me from finishing it was the spectre of court cases, and one other thing; I didn’t want to write it without an ending.
At the time I finished part 2 we still didn’t have that. The Sevco board was being run by Charles Green’s handpicked acolytes.
One of them, Graham Wallace, had not long before completed the 120 day review, which was so laughably bad my mate Chris said to me, upon reading it, “Not bad. But what he did he do with the other 119 days?”
The trouble is, there’s no ending yet. Not even in sight.
Dave King’s departure might close another chapter, when it comes, but we’re still miles off from anything like calm.
I can finish it when the trials break up because I know that if I wait for a real ending I might wait until my hair has gone and I’m a doddering old man contemplating the afterlife. I’d rather I was finished before then, with some room to spare.
The Whyte court-case has been eye opening.
I suspect I know how the verdict will go, and I’ve harboured the same view from the start. For Sevco fans waiting to see the blood flow, I say “be careful what you wish for.”
The only thing worse than Whyte being found not guilty would be him getting sent down on both counts.
Who knows what he might do?
But whatever else comes of this trial, let’s say this with utter surety; the books which will be written on these matters, mostly by the Bampots, will have plenty of material to work with and the culpability of the Rangers board in priming the nuclear bomb which wiped the club off the map in 2012 is now established, to use the legal term, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Today we got a couple of sterling examples as to why, as James Doleman came through for us all again in fine style with some quality tweeting from the courtroom.
Two stories stand out; that for all his bluster, Alastair Johnston was as deluded about the state of the club as David Murray.
He blamed the bank for the state of Rangers … because they were willing to loan the cash.
And there I always thought a bank loan depended on someone actually utilising it. By his reckoning the bank was forcing the issue, forcing the club to accept cash, telling them to spend it. Have you ever heard such obvious nonsense in your life?
Well it gets better, because Paul Murray had an even stupider notion.
That the bank would write off the debts.
That they would simply swallow them and move on.
How many of you want this guy as a financial adviser? He’s on the board of Sevco right now; he, in fact, is in line to become chairman when the City of London formally bans King. No wonder no banking institution anywhere will give this mob a line of credit.
The incredible thing about these revelations is that it’s taken Donald Findlay to get to the heart of them. They have peeled away any notion that Craig Whyte alone was responsible for running that club into the ground. And yes, he’s doing it to get his client off, but I wonder if there’s a part of Findlay that just thinks we’ve had enough of the bullshit, enough of the dodgy narrative that surrounds Murray and those years he was in charge.
I wonder if Findlay just wants to set the record straight.
And he is.
Boy, oh boy, he is.