Today Keith Jackson published an article which went full-tilt negative against Dodgy Dave King. As remarkable as it is to read such a missive from a mainstream media source, you have to take into account Jackson’s current circumstances … and that casts a very different light on the piece.
Jackson is a desperado of the most obvious kind. A cheerleader for the King regime, and for all the other rag-bag mobs which have trooped through Ibrox, he is the kind of guy that every despot wants in his corner when taking power. Someone who’ll toe the party line and ask no real questions about intent or means. He wrote the notorious article calling Whyte a billionaire. He loved Charles Green. He wrote about how Ashley was ready to sink millions into Sevco … and he led the parade and the crusade to get King’s revolution over the line.
He turned against all of them, in the end, of course and has the brass ones to claim wisdom after the fact. It was only when failure loomed, so large and obvious that it could no longer be denied, that he flipped and switched sides. You could feel bad for him here because he doesn’t even have an opposition party to join right now, but it’s perfectly obvious that his change of tac has come because even he can now see the writing on the wall.
For King, it’s over. Even Jackson knows it. The Takeover Panel verdict and the subsequent court cases have made it virtually impossible for the Glib and Shameless one to hang on. But what galls Jackson most is the dawning realisation that King lied. To everyone. About everything. Not exactly a great shock to those of us who said it would happen … but imagine the embarrassment and feelings of anger for those who were gullible enough to believe him.
Jackson pretends that he and his colleagues have been all over these stories, and to the nature of the mistakes King has made. Any regular reader knows that is nonsense. Jackson and his paper supported every decision the King board has made, including the appointment they are slamming today, the appointment of Graeme Murty for the season.
Only nine days ago they were all talking about what a great job he had done. Nine days ago, folks. Isn’t that incredible? I know these people think we’re stupid, but this surely takes the piss. This surely insults not only our intelligence but our memory’s too.
The trouble with Jackson and his paper’s sudden realisation that King is a cancer to the club is that it has come too late. He writes today about “rumours” of other interested parties; I chortled reading that because I know exactly what rumours he’s talking about and they’ve been doing the rounds for years. The fabled “Rangers minded” investors … how many times have we heard this? How many chances have they had to come forward?
They don’t exist. They are a product of wishful thinking.
What Jackson and his cohort haven’t realised is just how thoroughly the King takeover has poisoned the well. The club is now the focus of City of London investigations, the scrutiny of UEFA, assets are securitised to a Wonga style company and the name has been dragged through the mud of legal disputes, fall outs with their sponsors and kit manufacturers and a reputation that is so thoroughly scotched by the appalling treatment of coaches, players and managers that even someone like Derek McInnes wouldn’t want to work there.
Jackson hilariously blames King for this; funny, because his newspaper swallowed whole Sevco’s line about McInnes being a coward who knew he’d wilt under the pressure. To suddenly create reasons why McInnes didn’t want the job, reasons related to Dave King, is absurd. I know McInnes and his people met with Robertson and others on the Sevco board but my information is that King took nothing to do with it, as he took nothing to do with the Caixinha appointment.
The fact is, King’s time at Ibrox has finished Sevco off as a reputable club. His board has appointed four different men to the manager’s office in a mere three years – starting with Stuart McCall – and Murty will make it a clean sweep of four out of four if he is sacked at the end of this campaign. That’s failure by anybody’s standards.
There have been other failures. In fact, here’s what it comes down to; the Celtic sites, who have been way ahead of our shockingly bad media, postulate that it is harder to find an example of a King Sevco success than it is to identify a failure. Where are the great forward strides here? Where are the proofs that these people have done the smallest shred of good?
And that’s what Jackson is finding so tough to face. He and his profession have been covering this unfolding catastrophe for Sevco with the gloriously backward spin that what we’ve been watching is an untrammelled series of victories instead. They never once openly criticised any of the mistakes this board has made when these courses were embarked on, although all of them, and especially the appointments of Caixinha and Murty, were obvious calamities right at the outset.
Their realisation that it’s all gone wrong has come, as all their others did, near enough the end that the final outcome could no longer be doubted.
As per usual, they have arrived here too late. Too late to prevent further damage. Too late to rally the fans and affect a change of course. It is typical of them, and all the more that they are claiming to have been wise all along. Fools, but worse is that they think we are too.
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