KING IS DRINKING IN LAST CHANCE SALOON WITH BOLD MOVE

STEVEN GERRARD has little to lose from embarking upon this crazy, exciting jump into the unknown at Ibrox. He will still have options even if it all goes belly-up. For Rangers, the same can hardly be said. This, surely, is it for them. The one remaining chance to pull something out of the fire, the flames and the carnage of the past six years or more.

The one remaining chance to stop Celtic’s seemingly inexorable drive towards Ten In A Row.

If it doesn’t work out — and that has to be a real possibility considering Gerrard has no managerial pedigree and a support network of senior management people who have turned making bad calls into an art form — it is hard to see where else they will have left to turn.

They are all-in with this guy. Like sticking the entire wedge on your nap in the Champion Hurdle and trying not to think of what life will be like during the other three days of the Cheltenham Festival with barely the train fare home to rub together.

That is a decision that can make or break a week. This one Rangers have taken, on a novice with no appreciable form but an outstanding reputation, has the potential to make or break a generation.

And that is all rather thrilling, of course. But so is feeling the tingle of tetrodotoxin on your tongue whilst hoping the sashimi chef who sliced up that blowfish really knew what he was doing.

Whether Rangers or Gerrard know what they are doing remains to be seen. Certainly, the former England captain’s fizzog on the front of the prospectus makes selling shares in Rangers a workable project again when, two weeks ago, you were looking at managing director Stewart Robertson, hardly a natural salesman, trying to punt an idea about as appealing as dooking for apples in the crocodile enclosure.

Yet, while Gerrard is central to raising money, he is, having confirmed he has the final say on signings, going to be central in spending it, too. It is unthinkable that he would take on the role of Rangers manager to scuffle around in the loan market and try to make Eduardo Herrera into a player. He must have been told he is getting the funds to have a decent shot at this.

There is talk in the wind of investment. Of that most marvellous of terms, a war chest.

Whether there really is a Joe Lewis for the modern age on the horizon, the financier who put up £40million in 1997, this has the feeling of King having his real, big crack at ‘being Rangers’ again. The bullish, swaggering institution that stunned everyone with the scale of its ambition in the ’80s and ’90s before falling apart.

All suggestions of rebuilding the club slowly from the base are fading into the mists of time. This, instead, is starting to feel a bit like the old days, of chasing, as King put it recently, ‘immediate success’.

He was part of the directorship that chased it before and, amid his grandstanding and his scattergun statements, has always given the impression he hankers to lead the charge again. But that could be seen as worrying, too. If ever a club needed to heed some lessons from history, it is Rangers.

It is why, fascinating as Gerrard’s unveiling on Friday was, King’s planned media activities tomorrow carry even more intrigue.

King has never been shy of dealing in figures in the past. The £20m he claims he lost in the Oldco fiasco. The £30m of his own cash he was going to put in this time round.

He needs to spell out where the money is coming from to fund Gerrard’s rebuilding of a team on its knees. He needs to offer detail on the rights issue he has desired since taking over three years ago.

This will be his sales pitch. And he needs to deliver it well. Despite the chaos and failure of his reign so far, the capture of Gerrard, epitomised by those 7,000 punters inside Ibrox the other day, seems to have galvanised the fanbase.

But their loyalty and patience, surely still close to breaking point in the wake of a truly disastrous season, can only be tested so far.

They should respond to a share issue, providing King can iron out his little misunderstanding with the Takeover Panel, but the proceeds of it have to be used effectively this time.

It is just over four years, after all, since supporters coughed up more than £5m of the £23m raised from a share issue run by Charles Green. A fat lot of good that did.

The time before that, in 2004, was a different story. Of £51m raised, £50m of it was underwritten by Sir David Murray’s company. It went towards helping deal with over £70m of debt that existed at the time.

It was a car crash in the making that no one within the club, King included, made much of until Lloyds TSB, still painted as the bad guys, finally decided they wanted their money back off the former chairman.

Rangers currently exist on loans from shareholders. It is an unsustainable model and it is why they find themselves at such a crossroads.

They need to make something big happen — and then maximise its effect. There is no way the board can go back to the well if they make a hash of this.

There has been much talk of gambling at Ibrox of late. Gerrard does come with considerable risk, and cost, but Rangers are a club in the last chance saloon in terms of closing the gap on Celtic.

And tomorrow is shaping up to be the day King, this poker-faced man with his back against the wall, places the last of his cards on the table.