If you’ve not heard already, Sevco’s “glamour friendly” with Benfica has been cancelled, just prior to the team “jetting off” – minus Kenny Miller – for some rest and recuperation after their enormously punishing schedule wherein they have few international call-ups and they went out of Europe in the first qualifying round.
Clearly, they are in need of it.
But as his become typical with their club, the descent into farce would not be complete without an artless, classless response and that, of course, is exactly what they offered. They released one of their notorious “official statements” and as per usual it was coached in the kind of language you might expect from a teenager who’s just been dumped.
This is a club entirely without grace, without an ounce of recognition that it damages itself and its reputation almost on a daily basis at the moment.
Here, instead of expressing regret and seeking to find out what happened, they threatened legal action before they were in possession of a single fact.
They blamed the club automatically, without a shred of evidence that Benfica was responsible – guess what? They weren’t – and just for the sheer Hell of it threw a spiteful dig in for good measure, drawing attention, for no reason other than to score a cheap point, to the Portuguese club’s Champions League mauling at Basle in midweek.
Why do that?
What was the point to it?
Who are the colossally ignorant people in the Ibrox press office who actually thought this was the way to do things?
I keep on hearing that CEO Stewart Robertson is a good man, a smart guy, the sort of person who takes his job seriously. A professional. What does he think when he reads missives like this? Can he really be happy with the way the club comes off here?
The fixture in Toronto was not even close to being a sell-out.
The club probably knew that.
The organisers didn’t even believe they could break even, and their potential losses were enough that they were, and are, willing to risk litigation than go through with it … what does that tell you? Benfica would not, presumably, have been a huge draw in Canada unless the Portuguese diaspora is bigger there than any of us knew … this was an effort to tap the famous “Global Sevco family” vein all over again.
And once more, that has been revealed to be a joke.
The notion that Sevco has a support base outside of Scotland is ludicrous.
They will not build one with trash-talking bigger clubs.
They are pathetic.