Articles

A Message To The Celtic Board: King And His Club Are Now Openly Laughing At You.

|
Image for A Message To The Celtic Board: King And His Club Are Now Openly Laughing At You.

Not for years, since he first breezed into Ibrox under David Murray, has the South African swindler, the glib and shameless tax-cheat Dave King, sounded quite so smug and confident about the future.

This guy is a blowhard and we all know it well, a guy who loves the sound of his own voice, so we should have expected his ego to explode round about now, when nothing has been won, when the future is still unclear, but it is nauseating just the same.

What we, Celtic fans, have to hope is that it induced something more powerful than mere nausea in those who inhabit the Celtic Park boardroom.

If nothing else shakes you people out of your lethargy, complacency and stasis it should be watching that man roam through the press corps like a swaggering conqueror.

Does it make you sick to your stomachs?

Because it damned well should.

So come on Dermott, come on Peter, own up.

Does it make you proud to see him like this, strutting and preening as we descend into chaos?

Do you look at it and still think we can afford to wait before we act?

Do you reckon that the risk is worth taking, or do you want to shut this man up as much as the Celtic support would love to see you do it?

How long are we going to spend waiting for your balls to drop?

Until your pride kicks in?

Until you climb out from under the table, way down in the bunker, and start to man up and take this thing seriously?

Do you guys really want to watch this joker unfurl a championship flag whilst Parkhead sits half empty and our fans turn their focus towards running you all out of town on a rail?

That’s what we’re heading for. That’s what you will be remembered for.

The last time an Ibrox board was so self-assured and arrogant, you, Dermot, acted and a few months later Brendan Rodgers swept into town.

Does this board have the ambition for such an appointment again?

Do you have the muscle to pull it off? Is King right?

Are we just one bad season away from collapse, from spending years in their shadow?

I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that they are anything special or that our club is so structurally unsound. The circumstances we’re in right now are because of self-inflicted wounds; we aren’t here because of some stunning blow struck from elsewhere.

We did this to ourselves, and we can still pull ourselves out if it.

Undoubtedly, though, King has a point. If they get their hands on Champions League income in the same year as we continue to self-flagellate they will, temporarily, close the finance gap and they might, for a year or two, move in front of us in overall income.

Whilst I don’t believe we’ll wind up in the death spiral King seems to think, it could be bad.

I cannot believe that men who take pride in what this club has achieved will permit that. King has spent this week laughing at you, and I have to believe that hurts, that it gets through in a way that the fan protests didn’t.

I have to believe that sticks in your craw.

How long since you were mocked like this, guys?

How long since you were bested?

How long since someone – anyone – had your number?

Dermot, you are a bona fide billionaire, a self-made man, one of the most talented businessmen these islands have ever seen. Are you really going to let some backstreet pocket-picker snatch away your legacy? Your crowning glory at Celtic Park?

Peter, you’ve enjoyed your reputation as the smartest guy in every room you’ve been in these past ten years or so, and when you look at the paucity of brainpower that surrounds you at the SFA and the SPFL I can wholly understand how you’ve come to believe it.

I know how you feel about the yokels, rednecks and trailer park intellects at Ibrox. I know you feel they’re way beneath your level. Indeed, you’ve intimated that you view them as beneath the amateurs who run Junior Football.

Well, these Peepul are pissing all over you right now.

What are you going to do about it?

Smile, and lick it up?

Or are you going to fight?

Are you going do what you have to do and wipe that glib and shameless smile off King’s face?

I am hard on this board at times.

I have written negative things about you both.

I have doubted your passion and your commitment to this club.

Peter, at times I’ve honestly wished you’d packed your bags when Rangers went out of business. In all honesty, I believe it would have been better for this club if you had.

Dermot, I’ve called you the Absentee Landlord.

Some think of you both as parasitic forces, feeding off our club whilst giving nothing in return. I know that’s untrue.

I know you, Peter, genuinely do want this club to be at its best … but you have way too high an opinion of your own role in that and no sense of where it should stop. I know, Dermot, that you do have an emotional connection to Celtic, but too often you treat it as a mere plaything and you, too, have way too high an opinion of your abilities as a football talent spotter.

If you guys ran the club better and let the football department handle its own business, if you left it in the hands of football people, we wouldn’t be struggling right now, because our advantages over the rest, including those at Ibrox are enormous.

I have my doubts about both of you. I think Celtic will only truly move forward into the next great era when both of you are gone.

But I never thought of either of you as weak or stupid or lacking in bottle.

I never thought you would surrender our position so meekly, not when it took so much time and trouble to build it. I never believed you would surrender it almost without a fight, and certainly not to Peepul who don’t have the professionalism or acumen to run a corner shop.

What the Hell are you waiting for? Are you both too old now, both past it? Has the hunger gone? Does the blood no longer pump through the veins as it once did? Are the old driving forces no longer so strong in you? Is winning no longer important?

Even if that’s true … there’s losing and then there’s being embarrassed by a cowboy outfit who run their own club like a giant casino and have bet everything they have on one big hand. An untested manager. A squad cobbled together at random, but which they’ve somehow knitted into a better unit than ours, and with a coherent system?

Have you conceded? Have you chucked it? Have you thrown in the towel?

That has to be a first for both of you; how does that feel?

How does it feel to even be asked that? Lousy?

It should. It better.

I’ll tell you what I believe; I believe you two could put a man like King in your pockets. Dermot, you could buy and sell this guy and his paltry club with your loose change. Peter, if you were facing this bluff and bullshit artist at the poker table, I think you would take his whole bankroll and what meagre scraps he has left of his crooked South African fortune.

I believe with the right man at the helm we’d start winning games again. I believe once we did that Gerrard and his band of happy wanderers would fold like a cheap suit under the weight of watching a resurgent Celtic do more than go through the motions.

I believe we have a better squad than they do, and I think the right man wouldn’t take too many days, far less weeks, far less months, to put right enough of what’s gone wrong to start putting points on the board and turning the pressure dial in the other direction.

I believe that not only can we still win ten in a row but that if we ante up and start fighting back with everything we’ve got that we will win it, and not only wash King’s face for him but put his club on the brink of another administration, and put the next decade of dominance in the bank with the last one. The next Ibrox chairman would know his club’s place without our having to rub it in; one permanently on our margins, but forever scrabbling in our shadow.

Be remembered with the White’s and the Kelly’s, or rise above all your predecessors, all those who came before you, in this hour, this moment, the finest you’ll ever have. This is in your hands. King might talk the talk, but this guy has never walked the walk in his life.

His entire career has been one defeat, one reversal, one climb down after another.

Make this the most humiliating yet, the one he’s remembered for.

Let that be his lasting legacy, his place in Scottish football history; the King of the Ibrox ashes.

What are you waiting for?

Don’t you two have a job to do?

So, get on with it.

Please read our article on our new Facebook strategy, and bookmark the sites mentioned in it.

Share this article