“Rangers don’t need any of King’s grandstanding
ALMOST a full week on and still not a peep out of the Rangers boardroom.
When Dave King suddenly resurfaced as the Pied Piper on Tuesday it’s fair to say the directors he left behind were far from amused by the former chairman’s latest bull in a china shop cameo.
In fact, it’s closer to the truth to say that they were utterly bemused by it.
Tel lingly, they were also completely blind-sided by it.
It’s a sign of the state of relationships between the Ibrox command room and the Johannesburg bunker that King only informed them of his intentions 15 minutes before logging on to a Zoom call to announce them to the national media.
But the overwhelming proof that King has gone brogue here is the sound of silence which has greeted this grand plan to sell his shareholding to the club’s supporters for £13million.
Not a single public utterance from chairman Douglas Park never mind an official endorsement.
Be in no doubt, if the men currently in charge of the club, those who have been stumping up million after million in order to fund its recovery, approved of King’s grandstanding then they would have come out and said so.
If this was coordinated and seen to be in the best interests of Rangers then Park himself would have been leading the calls for fans to step up and pay.
At the very least he would have added his voice to King’s proposal with some quotes to officially support it.
In s t ead , the Rangers hierarchy have said nothing of the sort and are unlikely to make any comment at all until they are asked about it at next week’s AGM.
Given the enormous amounts of money some of these directors have shelled out over the last few years they would be entitled to suggest that, if the fans can raise as much as £ 13m during a pandemic and at the start of a recession, then perhaps they might think about handing it over to the club itself rather than stuffing King’s pockets with it. It was only a couple of weeks ago after all that Park revealed the absence of fans as a result of the coronavirus lockdown will blow a £10m hole in this season’s income. It is Park and his co- investors who are repeatedly covering these enormous sums while bankrolling Steven Gerrard’s spectacular rebuild on the pitch. Yet, if King’s idea of handing Club 1872 a 25 per cent holding was to come to fruition then Park and Co wouldn’t even have the loudest voice at their own boardroom table. No wonder then they have kept their own counsel. If they were to feel sufficiently affronted by what King has put forward they could even decide to keep their hands inside their pockets in the future and ask the biggest shareholder to pay to keep the lights on from now on.
That would leave the fans holding the baby but unable to afford the price of a nappy given that everything they cobbled together would be sitting gathering dust in a South African bank account.
It’s just as well then that their noses have not been put out of joint by King’s sudden reappearance.
They are more bewildered by his intervention than they are bothered by it and not least because the potential sums involved in making it work are way beyond ambitious.
That’s in no way to question the unflinching loyalty of the Rangers support either. Time and again these fans have handed over their hard earned and, even although Ibrox remains padlocked for the foreseeable future, almost every seat in the house has been bought and paid for.
To ask them to find even more money at this time, of this particular year of all years, seems incredibly vulgar but then that’s so typically King.
It also appears to be disingenuous in the extreme as, in order for the fans to own 25 per cent of the club, there would have to be no more shares issued between now and the completion of the transaction.
Given that the current funding model relies upon doing exactly that, there seems little or no chance that King’s holding will be enough to tip them over that magic number, which would empower the fans to block any boardroom decisions not to their liking.
Yet, curiously, this point was lost among of all King’s noise.
Had he stopped for even a moment to think what Gerrard might make of this unnecessary distraction then perhaps he’d have kept his powder dry at least until the end of the current campaign.
Gerrard has spent the season so far preaching humility and telling his players to remain humble as the numbers stack up behind them. Then, just when they look like a side on the verge of achieving something special, King comes clattering into focus hurling his hubris around as if no lessons have been learned from all his many previous misadventures. Not only has King poked Celtic in the ribs by questioning what Dermot Desmond might do next about what he described as the Rangers ‘resurgence’ but he even suggested that what we are witnessing right now might be the start of a decade of dominance on the other side of Glasgow’s divide.
Ten in a row? Right now all Gerrard can concentrate on is the safe delivery of one in a row and it’s again to the manager’s credit that he was able to maintain business as usual yesterday in Dingwall on a skid-pan of a playing surface.
Another four goals and another three points without a car crash in sight. Gerrard’s Rangers have learned to do their talking on the pitch. Maybe King should pipe down and let them get on with it.
Gerrard’s side do their talking on the pitch. King should let them get on with it