WELL done the Hampden blazers. After years of being above all criticism, of acting like the Masters of the Universe - answerable to no one, able to do as they pleased, the Bankers of the City of London have been usurped - by the blazers. All hail.
The Chairman and CEO of Barclay's are forced from office - but still, Campbell Ogilvie is in situ, despite being implicated heavily in the causes of the downfall of Rangers. Illegal deals are not so much suspected, as known to being put together - yet still, like Hitler and his loyal acolytes, in their Berlin bunker, planning the survival of the Thousand Year Reich, the blazers plot to keep "Rangers" alive - incredible.
The biggest scandal of the entire Rangersgate hasn't been all the illegalities - proven or merely assumed - it has been the total absence of leadership from within the corridors of power in the National Stadium. How ironic, that men based in a stadium named after John Hampden, the great champion of the common man and of the House of Commons, should show such a lack of leadership, be so unprepared to stand-up for the common good and to so blatantly favour a club, around which there is almost a divine right to rule.
Let us leave aside the unproven charges against Sir David Murray, during his tenure as owner of Rangers. There may well be a prime facea case, seemingly demonstrating wrong-doing in the matter of illegal payments and contracts - but there is a chasm between showing there is a case to answer and proving that case. I think we can all take it as read that the Rangers' management model under Murray was flawed - the actions of Lloyd's Baning Group proves as much fairly conclusively.
Rangers were for sale for years; it was obvious something was badly awry at Scotland's biggest club - did the SFA or the SPL, at any time, offer help or advice? Did they ascertain that Rangers remained viable? There have been claims that the depths of Rangers' problems were known to a select few iside Hampden, that deals were done to allow Rangers to continue, when, under the rules, they should not have been able to - did these deals breach the rules?
Then there was the manner of Craig Whyte's "fakeover" of the club. Ewing Graham, a self-employed freelance journalist: ie an individual, working from home, without the back office back-up of the major national newspaper groups, by simply doing some digging on Google, was able, the day after Whyte was first revealed as the man who was buying Rangers, to sell a story to a major national newspaper, which showed Whyte was a "wrong un". Did nobody inside Hampden see that story and say: "Whoa there, let's have a close look at this guy Whyte"?
Had they done so, Whyte would never have passed their now discredited "fit and proper person" test and we'd all have been saved a great deal of grief. We must presume the rest of the media read Ewing's piece - did no Sports Editor, far less Editor, think: "Let's check this out and do a follow-up - THIS IS A STORY". Like most old hands, I have little time for the whipper-snappers currently running mos of Scotland's sports desks, but is there nobody still in-harness who can smell a story?
It is Whyte's malevalent regime which got Rangers where the club is today - on life-support, which will be switched-off as soon as Duff & Phelps hands over to BDO for the formal liquidation - and that event will open another rancid can of worms. Has nobody within Hampden been brought up to speed on what will transpire. Just about everyone else knows that, once BDO goes in, the shit will really hit the fan - has that thought ocurred to the great brains inside Hampden.
The SFA has shown itself not fit for purpose. I ignore the SPL, that league was formed out of pure greed, the member clubs are only interested in themselves, in their offices, it is all about keeping as large a share of the Scottish football cake as they can hoard - it hasn't yet got through to them that the public have gone off their cosy little cabal and their behind closed doors deals. I still detect some honour in the ranks of the SFL; they have been stuffed so often, they will roll with the punches and survive, and, in David Longmuir, they have the one of the two most-impressive legislators inside Hampden. They will survive.
But, given the lack of leadership and thought inside Hampden, it is surely time UEFA, FIFA and the Scottish Government got together to sort-out the mess. My God, if a bunch of Old Etonian toffs in the Conservative Party could see that was necessary with a corrupt banking sector to find out the what, why, where, when and who of the corruption- how has it by-passed a bunch of Scottish football legislators that they have to do the same?
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