He’s like a mugger, isn’t he?
If you can imagine someone his size hiding in the bushes and waiting for you to come past.
Mike Ashley is not a man I would ever want to have as an enemy, and today his people were back in court slamming the Ibrox board against every wall, rifling through their pockets, making menacing demands to see the money.
The Ashley-Ibrox war is going to drag on for ages yet.
At the end of it, the club which plays out of that decrepit stadium and which currently sits atop the SPL table because of calamitous failures at Celtic Park, may well find itself on the end of a multi-million-pound negative verdict.
Indeed, that’s virtually certain since they have lost every skirmish with Ashley along the way.
Don’t worry either if you feel ever so slightly confused and you are thinking to yourself, “Didn’t the media tell us all this was settled?”
Ahem, yes, because that’s what those inside Ibrox told them.
But then, those inside Ibrox also told the press that the club is in better financial nick than it has been in since it was founded, and we all know that to be cobblers.
The blogs do keep on hammering this message home; the media is gutless and Ibrox is a hall of mirrors.
Don’t believe what you see in front of you, it’s a warped version of reality.
As ever, we have Phil to thank for the best coverage of this latest instalment in the Ashley-Ibrox saga.
He has a couple of pieces on this which bear reading.
In the first, he talked us through what today’s case was in relation to.
It was a Sports Direct motion on the recovery of documents they say the Ibrox club has failed produce in this on-going legal battle.
(Yes, the same one we were told had been sorted out.)
Phil’s second piece was in relation to other discussions in the courtroom today; about costs so far, which the Ibrox club will have to meet should their silly gambits thus far prove fallible, which as I said is likely since all of them have so far.
This piece makes hilarious reading, with the Sports Direct lawyer calling the Ibrox club’s own estimate of the costs “divorced from reality.”
That’s one to remember the next time they release accounts and the press puts the usual spin on them.
Believe me, I’m banking it for future reference.
The really crushing part for the Ibrox briefs must have been at the end, when Ashley’s men in suits told the judge that the cost estimates were for an initial trial that was pegged to last 3-5 days, and that the projections for the new trial would be “three times as long.”
Ouch.
And especially when Ashley’s team is alleging new evidence and “serious allegations of deceit.”
This doesn’t sound like it has a happy ending in store for the Liquidation Deniers.
So well done to Phil for bringing us those articles, which you can read where I’ve linked them.
His assessment of the Ashley situation has been spot on all the way down the line, as have his constant entreaties to ignore the mainstream media on this and especially the spin out of Ibrox.
It should be pointed out that Phil does not pretend to be a legal expert or to have special knowledge of accounting practices or any of those other complex issues he sometimes writes about.
His approach to writing about these matter is not revolutionary, it’s what we used to call “good journalism.”
What expertise he doesn’t possess he’s happy to get from those who do.
Stuff like that, it’ll never catch on will it?
Can you imagine if every newspaper and every hack working on them operated like that? What do you think we’d have? Anarchy? My guess would be a better understanding of events.
What’s clear from today’s developments is that Ashley hasn’t vanished.
He hasn’t been defeated.
He hasn’t been either paid off or scared away.
He still has a very big role to play in the eventual fate of that club, which isn’t good news for those who support it.
This one has a long, long way to go, but only one winner at the end.