Alan Pattullo: Only Calum Melville can bring Dundee back from brink

Published on Sunday 3 October 2010 16:49

A win, if a tight, perhaps undeserved one, for Dundee over Morton on Saturday at an emotionally-charged Dens Park, but the principal challenge is the one facing the club in the coming week.

Away from the tax bill figure, who owes what to whom, the confidentiality clauses and who is in fact to blame for another financial meltdown, it actually all boils down to one fairly obvious task: to get Calum Melville to engage again with agreed responsibilities, outlined in the club's financial statement for the year ended 31 July, 2009.

"If the club is unsuccessful in securing promotion to the SPL, then budgets have been prepared showing a significant operating deficit which could only be funded with the support of one of the directors," reads the report, published in March and just days after the appointment of a new managerial team in Gordon Chisholm and Billy Dodds. "This support has been confirmed for at least the period until the end of the 2010/2011 season."

But the glitch is that Melville is not writing out the cheques quite as willingly as he intimated he would, and the impasse highlights the danger of becoming dependent on a benefactor who has limited emotional ties to the the team. He has not spoken face to face with Bob Brannan, who brought him onto the board, since a meeting of directors at Dens Park prior to the win over Falkirk at the end of August.

Melville, an Aberdonian, once inferred that he was attracted to Dundee because they were not Dundee United, the side who jousted with Aberdeen throughout the Eighties. But Melville's withdrawal from the front-line scene at Dens Park is possibly more to do with his own business worries than a sudden loss of appetite for the fray. If he doesn't have the money, then he doesn't have it.

This is something Blair Nimmo, the head of restructuring at KPMG, will have to try and establish in the early part of this week, as staff at the club wait to hear when they can expect their delayed wages.

"Blair has been very clear - if Calum is prepared to fulfil his commitments then there should be no problem," one source at Dens Park told The Scotsman yesterday.

If not, then Dundee will almost certainly seek to enter administration, something which would be the consequence of placing too much store in the pledges of a seemingly enthusiastic white knight. Melville, however, has proved an inconsistent backer, and has so far taken little interest in dealing with the build-up of debt to HR Revenue & Customs. This laissez faire attitude has already cost the club the services of one director, Ian Bodie. Even as recently as March this year, when Dundee submitted the financial statement requested by the Scottish Premier League in anticipation of league reconstruction, their debt to the taxman stood at just 37,000.

It is, of course, a cautionary tale, but then a few of these have been heard over the years on Sandeman Street.Don't get involved with Canadians intent on building dog tracks was one, while the wisdom of bringing in players from abroad on top wages in the hope they can be sold on again was exposed for its folly on the way to the club's last brush with death, in 2003. Even the club's most ardent fans would admit that Dundee have flirted with disaster too often. Scottish football doesn't owe the club a living, and nor can these supporters be expected to keep on bailing Dundee out.

But the mess does expose the pressure which exists on middle-ranking clubs such as Dundee, whose desperation for income to fund an operation which satisfied the expectations of the fans led them back to the precipice. With no overdraft facility, Dundee went with Melville, after he answered a newspaper advert looking for someone to help re-build a "famous brand". Dundee needed what clubs such as Ross County, Inverness Caledonian Thistle and St Johnstone have - a committed, benevolent backer.

The alternative, a spell of lower division obscurity, might have been preferrable to this present fight for survival. "We would not have gotten away with it (part-time football], not with the expectations of our fans," argued a Dundee insider. "For all that they are great fans, gates would dwindle to between 2,000 and 2,500. On those crowds we would have struggled to sustain part-time football. Then you are looking at amateur football. It's a death spiral."

Dundee might be helpless to avoid spinning into one now. Some local businesses have made pledges to help, but the sums are comparitively paltry when measured against the 365,000 needed to pay HMRC.

"The reality is we should have been bust a long time ago," said Melville in an interview last October, when he commented on the irony of Dundee being able to outspend Rangers. "Dundee could have been a Third Lanark or Clydebank." His input is now required to stop them becoming one.

The rattle of money being tossed into buckets - an admirable 7,000 was collected on Saturday - will have a hollow sound for many who have been in this film before. They can only look to Melville - and wait.