Rangers are family at war with bad blood everywhere and street fighter Dave King is back in the brawl - Hugh Keevins

Our man has his say on the current situation at Ibrox and reckons it could be about to get ugly in the boardroom

Ally McCoist wasn’t trying to scientifically calculate the depth of Rangers’ difficulties when he spoke about the club’s various predicaments.

He went for the non-scientific, words-of-one-syllable approach when he simply but emphatically declared his old club were “in a state”. And as one who was Ibrox manager when liquidation followed administration, along with subsequent demotion and commotion, Ally’s assessment of the current situation is not to be dismissed lightly.

Likewise, former chairman Dave King’s call for an extraordinary general meeting, to put to the vote who Rangers fans want to lead the club through currently turbulent waters, is not to be overlooked as an irrelevance. This is, to use the only appropriate description, the definition of a family at war. And there’s bad blood everywhere.

King is a street fighter who learned to be combative while, like a large proportion of the Rangers support, being brought up in a Glasgow housing scheme. That’s why the main thrust of his astonishing attack on the current board at Ibrox pressed all their buttons concerning Celtic and the possibility of history being rewritten by them, in terms of trophy winning, in the years to come.

It is a form of language and sentiments expressed that the Gers support understand and readily associate with. And if they suspect there are people presently in positions of influence within Ibrox who don’t have King’s grasp on the club’s priorities then they will want them removed and replaced by the man who first swept to power by expressing fears about Celtic winning 10-in-a-row.

King has his finger on the pulse, even while living on another continent. It’s enough for him to assert in his outburst that the club’s true owners are the supporters. It is the rhetoric of the masses that cannot, in their eyes, be refuted by the ones King calls “faceless names who will go down in infamy in the club’s history”. If there was, as King wants, a vote taken tomorrow, he’d win by a landslide.

Some will say the language he uses is inflammatory, referring to the concept of a head-hunted chairman as being likely to lead to the installation of a “puppet” at Ibrox. But that’s exactly how the rank-and-file among the support will feel as well.

They see a revitalised Celtic, cash rich and pre-eminent, as taking advantage of Rangers’ inability to be commercial rivals off the park or viable challengers to them on the field. Rangers announce a shirt sponsorship deal worth £3million per annum. Celtic make that sum in one night while scoring five times against Slovan Bratislava in the Champions League.

King smells trouble, in the form of that gap between the clubs becoming a yawning chasm, and wants to inject life into what he alleges to be an inert boardroom. If Celtic are presently an example of how money talks in a positive sense where advancement as a football club is concerned, Rangers are the exact opposite.

How many millions of pounds can be lost on a sustained basis while a catalogue of failure is recorded on the park at the same time? Internal differences are obvious and past scores are clearly being settled by King’s observation that the fans won’t stand for directors of the club who are in it for the “jacket and the tie”.

But, once again, the man who would be king is only being true to the values he was brought up with in the post-war era. If somebody hits you, hit them back. I spent my own teenage years in another Glasgow scheme. I know the script off by heart. And I instinctively know the Rangers support will share King’s view of an apocalyptic future unless he gets inside the club again and takes control of the steering wheel.

I feel sorry for John Bennett who invested a fortune in the club, only to have his health seriously damaged in the process.

And manager Philippe Clement must wonder what the hell is going on while he tries to avoid drawing attention to himself by making matters any worse because of poor performances on the park. Family disputes rarely end well and what a public airing of dirty linen does for the process of trying to attract external investors is hard to see.

Rangers have lost 12 of the last 13 league titles to the team across the road on the other side of the city. Celtic have cash reserves on an unprecedented scale to guard against a rainy day, as well as the costliest squad of players ever assembled under their roof.

What am I bid? Not a lot in King’s estimation. He’s back in the fight and there will clearly be no-holds barred if his opening salvo against the existing board is any indication of what is to come. Doors to manual. We have lift-off.

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