The news broke of Castore’s impending link-up with Newcastle just the other day, and it went so unremarked upon in the media that you just know something stinks.
The Ibrox fan sites are kidding themselves on that they don’t know what it means. Castore has denied, again, what is plainly obvious; no matter how much the fans over there pretend otherwise, the Sports Direct magnate still has a hand in their pockets.
They are superb are shutting out reality.
Right from the start, from the moment Castore emerged from the undergrowth as the Ibrox club was scrambling for a kit manufacturer, the Celtic sites have been telling their supporters that Mike Ashley was one of the men behind the operation. Far from being “gone” he was very much still on the scene, only with more control than ever.
He had “walked away” or been chased away depending on which pro-Ibrox hack you were reading. Yet there was no announcement from the club to that end, although it should have been a big PR win for them. There was no declaration that the matter was at an end, although the hacks all went out of their way to tell us that it was.
Yet there have been signs, and not just a few of them. The club and Castore were finally forced to concede that, yes, Ashley had still held a lot of legal rights over their contract and that he had been granted a piece of the action. Surprise, surprise.
The court cases which were allegedly settled continue to march towards their inevitable conclusion. The list of rip-offs which the fans have had to put up with is breath-taking and would have made Ashley himself blush if his name was publicly associated with them.
Shortly before Castore “got the gig” they did some outside funding raising and it’s never been made clear who pumped in the money and enabled their advance. But it stands to reason that Ashley is in there somewhere, and so the news that Newcastle has become the second club to take on Castore as a shirt maker is not even slightly surprising.
What’s remarkable is that the Ibrox fan-base is kidding itself on that it doesn’t know what this means. Castore is denying it, but they denied that Ashley and Sports Direct were involved at all at some point and then had to backtrack on it.
But first Ibrox and then St James’ Park … that’s not a coincidence, no matter how much they might kid themselves on that it is. Ashley’s grubby fingers are still jammed in the pie over there and he’s probably never done better out of the deal.