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No Moonbeams For Gerrard. King’s Press Conference Shatters The Peepul’s Delusions.

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After a week of intense speculation – most of it absolutely nuts – Dave King held his much heralded “press conference” at Ibrox today. And the result was … not much. The club is going to raise £6 million through a bit of internal jiggery-pokery … if the takeover panel lets them do it. There will be no external investment.

To put it in Glasgow terms “the baw is burst.”

The first sign that this wasn’t what speculation has been rife about came this morning when Keith Jackson announced that the “press conference” would actually consist of King and a group of hand-picked toadies having a wee cosy chat.

At that point – although the fevered nonsense continued – it was obvious nothing major was coming out of that meeting. You don’t exclude most of the press if you’re presenting glad tidings and a complete changing of the landscape.

You do it if you want to avoid hard questions and real scrutiny.

Listen, I am not laughing on this end.

All of us in the blogosphere have endured a full week of constant nonsense chatter out of Sevconia about Chinese investors, Red Bull, Far East consortiums, even Donald Trump. It’s been embarrassing. It’s been ludicrous. It’s difficult to try to keep a cool head in the midst of such swirling insanity.

But some of us have tried and we’ve kept repeating the same thing over and over and over again; do not assume that Gerrard’s unveiling means anything more than the Ibrox board chucking the dice one last time. We keep on hearing how this “has to mean something”; actually, it doesn’t. It only has to be Sevco lurching on as they have this whole time, without a plan, without a strategy. Those of us who have urged calm are thereby feeling pretty good.

All the talk that Gerrard has been made “promises”; I daresay he has but the giveaway is the man who made those promises to him. King took a very personal, very public, lead in the negotiations and that means much of what Gerrard heard came out of his mouth. Those who think Gerrard couldn’t possibly have accepted that aren’t seeing the big picture; the big picture was the four-year deal, all on Gerrard’s terms. He’s covered.

I could speculate on what Gerrard thinks; I reckon, like Warburton, he’s bought into the nonsense that Scottish football is an easy environment and that fixing the Ibrox basket case can be done quickly and without spending tens of millions.

Beyond that, and his four year deal, what else do you have to know?

If he’s accepted the “Sevco are a big club” narrative it looks like a great job and especially from the perspective of a first time boss, and he has a fireproof contract and will be assured a sympathetic ear from the English media when it all goes wrong. He probably sees it as a no-lose.

He’s wrong. I think the Ibrox job can wreck his reputation. I think it will.

But at the moment it’s quite possible that the prospect of that seems a long way off to him.

Today was supposed to be the day that Celtic fans were supposed to have been living in fear of. I never was, because the notion that Sevco were all of a sudden going to produce tens of millions out of nowhere is patently absurd.

Nobody is going to invest in that club. It has never turned a profit. It has never embraced sanity. It has no obvious means of growing its commercial potential. It has a toxic history. It is has unreasonable demands on it and it is dwarfed by a local rival who puts it to shame time and time and time again.

I cannot stress this enough times; nobody is coming to save them.

The last few days have seen their fans serve each other a banquet of bullshit, speculation that’s off the charts nuts, an embrace of psychosis. King has had a full week to flog season tickets to the gullible, and even now some of his people are trawling the forums and telling fans to keep their heads up, that £6 million is a decent sum, that it will be joined with the cash from season ticket sales and the whopping massive merchandising deal which none of them appears to understand … and Gerrard will still get his warchest.

Even at the point of the greatest humiliation, they still aren’t seeing it. Here’s the reality; there’s no good news here. £6 million is nothing.

It won’t even cover next year’s funding shortfall.

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