So, I’m sure everyone has read Phil’s latest, about how Sevco are actually well short in terms of what they need, financially, to complete the season.
Do you think it’s bad? Bear with me for a second.
You ever seen the movie A Time To Kill? In it, Samuel L. Jackson murders two men who raped his ten-year-old daughter and goes on trial for it, facing up to KKK threats, an ambitious prosecutor and plots on all sides. The trial goes badly in so many ways, but even in a film which reels from one violent moment to another, Matthew McConaghy’s summing up in the court case is pretty shocking, as he tackles the racism of the jurors by asking them to consider little Tanya Haley and her plight with the words “Now, imagine she’s white.”
Not a bad strategy for dealing with a completely bolloxed up situation.
Forget this is Sevco. Imagine this was Celtic.
Imagine we were welcoming Sevco to Parkhead when they have a six-point league lead and a game in hand. They’ve already won a cup and are now setting up for a semi-final against us. They just posted multi-million pound profits and their cash-on-hand is more than our entire turnover for a year. In the meantime, our season is hanging by the thinnest thread. Now, on top of that imagine that we had a manager on a part-time contract, imagine our chairman had just been defeated in court, imagine our fan groups were bitterly divided, imagine our board was split, imagine we were depending on director’s handouts to survive the season and they had just ended, sending us to a Wonga company for £3 million in loans securitised against assets. Image that wasn’t even enough.
Imagine the headlines.
Would they be talking about a Celtic revival?
You bet they wouldn’t.
You know what they would be saying; if Celtic lose this game then it’s over.
Not the season, but the club. Meltdown. Disaster. Catastrophe.
Still think we’re paranoid? Still think we judge the press too harshly? Where have you read any of those kind of stories, about the situation at Ibrox?
It’s no wonder the media won’t cover their latest cash shortfall, although the story has been broken by a journalist with impeccable credentials. Instead, they play the man and not the ball, with one idiot hack the weekend past attacking him and the rest of the bloggers … you know, the people who do the job they are supposed to and write what they won’t.
Where’s Sevco getting over £2 million over the next couple of months? The transfer window is shut, the directors have turned the taps off, King is imperilled and rendered irrelevant by the share issue scam he was caught on and although Phil says Club 1872 are good for half of it, from what I understand, they were hoping to pay for it with a fund-raiser aimed at buying shares but which didn’t raise half of the money they were hoping for.
Of course, I’ll bow to the man’s knowledge on this matter … if he says they’re paying it then they are.
I wonder how their normal members feel about it though?
Think it’s a coincidence that Murray’s name was being thrown around today? An idea of his own? Or somebody at Ibrox taking a punt and hoping to reel the other Dodgy Dave in? Who knows? Who cares? I’ll cover Murray in an article later on, but the money isn’t coming from him.
So I ask again, where are they getting it from?
Ask their fans this and you’ll get nothing at all, nothing but ignorance and evasion in equal measure, but not actual answers. That’s because they have none, and have placed all their faith in a board that has no coherent strategy and has a convicted crook and congenital liar at the helm.
This is a club in big, big trouble and that will not change depending on the result on Sunday.
But if this was us, the newspapers would be right to be predicting meltdown in the event of a defeat for the home team. They are so deep in this they can’t see the sky anymore … what should scare them most is that this just goes on and on and on … and in spite of that they can’t yet see the bottom either.
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