Ralph Topping is a guy who Scottish football will remember in years to come and not for anything good. He’s done his part for the spiralling crisis level, and he’s brought gambling into our sport in a way it’s never been there before.
The media will argue his contribution has been good and Sevco fans will applaud his current stance on title stripping, but as far as many of us are concerned this guy is cutting and running, leaving behind him the dire consequences of some of the things he has done.
Sevco fans in particular should want him to stick around and answer some questions; when they point the finger of blame at Craig Whyte for liquidating Rangers they are still largely ignorant, or appear to be, of the role others played and one of those others was Ralph Topping.
He knew what Whyte was going to do months before he did it.
Topping has joined Regan and Doncaster in saying nothing will be done in light of the Big Tax Case verdict.
As if that was their right.
These men can’t make that kind of decision; the clubs will make that decision.
They are circling the wagons and it isn’t to protect tainted titles. It’s about protecting themselves. The perverse consequence of that is in doing so they are standing up for cheats and for cheating. That will haunt them until they change direction.
In terms of public perception, it no longer matters what these people are trying to hide.
Even if you don’t do conspiracy theories and you’re not particularly interested in what the role of the governing bodies was in all this, even if you don’t care about the lies on top of the lies and of the way Lord Nimmo Smith was misled you’re still faced, this morning, with the appalling picture of our game’s so called leaders basically saying “we’re not interested in investigating cheating.”
And that’s where there’s just no defence for them.
That’s where their position is utterly unsustainable.
Imagine thinking you can have real football governance and oversight if ten years of blatant corruption is allowed to go unpunished?
Who’s kidding who he here?
That just won’t wash. That’s what they’re just not getting. That position can’t be sustained. Or they are condemning this game to death.
Other clubs are awake, at last, and thank you to the fans of Aberdeen, Dundee Utd and others who have already stepped up to the plate.
Thanks to individual, but influential, fans like Matt Leslie who have called on their boards to consider their own position.
There is a groundswell of opinion that this isn’t something that can be ignored.
Supporters are awake to what Rangers did, and what they were allowed to do, and they are waking up to the simple fact that if they’re not dealt with it makes a mockery of the laws of our sport … and if that happens you just know people like King will chance their arm and see what else they can get away with.
See, those who think this about the past are kidding themselves. The failure to punish Rangers extended into the kid gloves treated for Green and all and onward through to King, where a club is spending money it doesn’t have just like in the grand old days of yore. The SFA’s complete failure to get a grip on the worst excesses over there is creating the perfect conditions for a fresh crisis, and that’s not about the past, that’s about the future.
To allow historic cheating to go unpunished encourages those who might fancy gaining an unsporting advantage in the present day.
Who knows where that ends?
So these guys can circle the wagons as they please. They can stand in front of the bullets here if they see fit, and I do believe they’re doing so in part because they are up to their necks in it. But for today let’s concentrate on Doncaster, Topping and Regan going to the lawyers and saying “clubs will ask us to do something about this. How do we justify saying no?”
Think of that for a moment.
It reeks.
These are the men running the game here.
But maybe not for much longer.