Oh dear. Where even to start?
Dave King has published an open letter “update” to the Sevco supporters today which reads very much like a letter mailed out from a paranoid ward. He plays the victim card to perfection; he and his club are the most maligned in world football. His enemies are determined to halt their progress no matter what, and those enemies have “failed.”
The Sports Direct dispute is Ashley’s fault. The SFA has refused to give Alastair Johnston fit and proper person status because they are biased against the club. It was “supporters of other clubs” who raised the issues with the Takeover Panel in the first place. He is willing to fight the global conspiracy to stand with the club.
To some it will reads like self-aggrandising nonsense. I see self-pity in it, and an appeal for love and understanding before Friday’s hearing, which might put him and his regime on their final notice. It is a naked appeal to the Sevco fans begging for understanding.
In King’s world, all the problems with the club came from the outside. None of them could possibly have been caused by he and his board. And it is necessary for their fans to believe that, to buy into it completely, the Grand Conspiracy, the story of the Unseen Hand, forever trying to slap them down. Because otherwise what are you left with?
Why, the idea that the club is a basket case run by incompetent fools and with King the most foolish of them all. Honestly, go and check out this statement; it is a series of brazen lies and distortions of reality one after the other, and the best is the central concept, that the club’s external enemies have “failed” to stop their club growing strong.
They have finished third in the league two years in a row.
They are on their fourth manager in three years, and no matter the honey the statement pours on Gerrard in the paragraphs devoted to the global managerial hunt that ended up with the boss at Liverpool Under 18’s, the guy has no experience as a first team manager but for two highly unimpressive games against the team who finished fourth in Macedonia last year.
They are a financial basket-case borrowing from directors to survive. They haven’t managed a shirt launch in the whole three years he’s been there. Their conduct has been a disgrace throughout. King’s board has been a failure by every single measure.
King has sworn that Gerrard will get time. A matter of months would be my bet, which may well be more time than King himself has left. His statement tonight is ridiculous, and parts of it are even scandalous. I don’t expect either proper media scrutiny of it or for the SFA to open disrepute charges for it although it has certainly earned both.
It is another embarrassment to their club, reeking of madness, stoking the worst paranoid fantasises of idiot supporters who still cling to the idea that this guy has made things better at their club. He has not, and with perhaps just days to go before a warrant is issued for his arrest he’s been reduced to pleading for love and understanding.
It is pathetic, and so is he.