It didn’t take long for Sevco’s criminal chairman to offer his view on the Gary Hughes affair. And his comments make no effort to hide the broader agenda; in fact, I welcome his comments because they put this front and centre where everyone can see it.
He wants Hughes suspended. Par for the course. Sevco always wants blood. All the better to be up to their knees in it. But he says the club also wants an investigation into who else at Hampden knew about the comments before Hughes was appointed.
No such inquiry will ever be launched, but that’s beside the point; King’s not interested in finding actual proof of a conspiracy here, because he knows what we do that this whole thing is ridiculous, but that’s not the point either. The point is to start painting a picture of an organisation which continues to hate them.
Outside of Scotland this won’t matter … but they think they can bend wills.
And that’s the crux of this, as I said earlier. Why didn’t this issue arise when Regan was in the building? What’s different this week than a week ago? And the answer is Ian Maxwell and whatever change he represents. Whatever agenda he wants to pursue.
I’ll tell you right now, this has all the hallmarks of a smear campaign … but Level 5’s fat controller must have his head in his hands about now. Because as usual King has gone too far. He’s swung too hard at the target. Instead of playing it cool and releasing a semi-sane response he’s got out the blunderbuss, leaving nobody in the slightest doubt about the goal here or that this has very little to do with twelve year comments or the person who made them.
His bluster has blown it for them.
About a year or so back, I wrote an article wherein I pointed out that Dave King is now acknowledged to have purchased the Charlotte Fakeovers box of goodies, for use in his destabilisation campaign against the previous Ibrox board. I pointed out that those documents and whatever else was included also contained enough information to fatally compromise Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan, and perhaps even confirm them as accomplices and co-conspirators in fraud.
It gave him and his club all the tools they needed for blackmail.
Regan is gone now. Doncaster survives by some miracle but he appears to favour some of the reforms. Celtic has long considered him useful, although I cannot imagine why. But it’s clear that he survives at our pleasure, and that he’s good for something.
Change has come to Hampden, finally. And it might be the real kind. The disciplinary case that’s opened into the 2011 license issue is part of why this blood and thunder approach is being taken at Ibrox, but it’s not the only thing that’s up in the air.
King’s comments are a clear attempt to taint other members of the SFA board, and that includes Peter Lawwell and Ian Maxwell. It is a naked and brazen shout out to conspiracy theorists in his own support and his hand-picked tabloid is fully on board.
That club has shown its willingness to get down and dirty.
How do you think The Record obtained a twelve-year-old quote in the first place? Nobody stumbled across that by mistake; this is a concerted effort to smear people and paint a picture. Someone actively went digging for dirt and found some. There is undoubtedly more digging being done.
King has brass balls to be making such a demand.
His own affairs are murky at best, and the SFA is long overdue in taking a good look at whether or not the words “fit and proper” relate to him.
Now all of a sudden the people who’ve spent all this time telling us to “move on” want to dredge up something from twelve years ago.
The people who don’t have any interest in whether or not SFA officials were involved in covering up EBT’s believe this is worthy of a broad, sweeping inquiry.
The people who don’t want football’s money spent on investigations which according to them go nowhere now want one that will achieve nothing.
You couldn’t invent these people or the stinking, reeking, hypocrisy of that club.
Ask yourself this; what club with nothing to hide behaves like this? What club fears genuine reform, openness and transparency so much that they’d resort to these kind of tactics to blacken reputations and throw mud?
What are they so scared of?
I’ll tell you; everything.
And they should be.