Tom English: So what if Smith can't sign players - his side cost £20m

Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009 21:05

It started with a miss, never thought it would come to this...

IT'S all Steven Davis's fault. Well, kind of. Imagine if he'd not missed that pen-alty against Unirea last Tuesday night. Imagine if he'd stuck it away in the corner and put his team 2-1 ahead at a tumultuous Ibrox. Ah yes, victory surely would have been theirs. Three points and the dream of the last 16 reborn. Happy faces and high fives and any amount of Simply The Bests.

A win last week and Walter Smith wouldn't have been so frustrated, so mortified, so willing to talk about the financial plight of the club and the way it's preventing him from doing business. That's my guess. Had Unirea been put away on Tuesday, Watty would have kept schtum on Saturday. I don't doubt it for a second.

So it all goes back to Davis, who cost 3m. And Kevin Thomson, who cost 2m. And Kenny Miller, Steven Naismith, Steven Whittaker, Lee McCulloch and Kyle Lafferty, who cost another 12m between them, not to mind the absent ones, Pedro Mendes and Maurice Edu – 5.5m the pair.

Smith comes out and says he hasn't signed a player in a year. So what? The team that got humiliated last Tuesday night cost ten times more than Unirea's side. The team that could do no better than a draw at home to Hibs on Saturday cost about 20 times more. Did your heart bleed for Smith's lack of muscle in the transfer market? Did all you Hibs and Hearts fans who have, in relative terms, spent the square root of sod-all in transfer fees over the past few years shake your head and sigh in sympathy at Smith's plight? Did all you Dons rise as one and say, 'Yes, Walter, you can't be expected to go to war against Uni-wotsit with a team costing just twenty million quid'?

Wild guess here, but I think not.

The bleating about the lack of new players at Ibrox is a bit tiresome. In the last two years, Smith has spent pretty much the same amount of money on transfers as they have done at Celtic. Add them all up and there isn't a lot of difference between them. Apart from one, that is. Celtic spent what they could afford (just about) whereas Rangers spent what they did not have.

Lets's be clear about this. Rangers are in a mess and it is their own fault. It's not the bank that has done this. It is the club. They borrowed in order to give chase. Some of it, as we now know, was reckless. It was financial management not dissimilar to some of the kamikaze stuff that went on with the big banks of Scotland and wider Europe.

It was Sir David Murray's doing. He did it out of love, no doubt. Out of pride and ego, too. He cared too much. Dermot Desmond hasn't made the same mistake. Emotion has brought Rangers to this point. Murray ramped up the debt to beef-up the squad to deny Celtic further domestic dominance. Watching Celtic win one, two and three titles on the bounce must have hurt him. The thought of them going on to win four, five and six titles clearly galvanised him.

So he rolled the dice and cavalry arrived in the shape of Lafferty and Mendes and Davis and Edu and Bougherra. He plunged in the transfer market at the behest of his manager and with the full support of the faithful at Ibrox who were bitter about the sales of Alan Hutton and Carlos Cuellar – that money, by rights, should have gone to the bank – and who continue to walk this bizarre line of being scandalised by the scale of the debt but also wanting to increase it by signing new players. Rangers won the title but along came the recession. Bad luck, boys. You got caught.

It's humiliating for the lot of them. Rangers was always the apple of Murray's eye, the most beloved plank in his empire. It's now in a pitiful state, looking for a new owner with an increasing desperation. Look at what's happening. Smith says on Saturday that the bank now runs the club only for the bank to completely contradict the manager, thereby making him look even more of a fool than he did after Unirea.

A report on Monday then claims wrongly that Murray was forced out of his position as chairman by the bank and that they threatened to put the club into administration. Yesterday, the newspaper apologised for the 'forced out' line but did not retract their story about the club being close to administration, although the 'a' word was not mentioned again in any reports.

In days gone by, Murray would have been all over this like a Tsunami. He would have been on the radio and television, he'd have issued statements, he'd have blasted the allegations to kingdom come, but he can't do that now, because he's not The Man any more. The bank is calling the shots now. The only public comment we've had from Murray was from Murray Jnr, defending his old man. Sir David's silence through all of this is the biggest indication that things have changed dramatically at Ibrox. His pride and joy is getting pilloried left, right and centre and he can do little to fight the flak.

It's a mortifying period for Murray and Smith and for the wider Rangers community. Smith may survive to shape his legacy if Dave King truly is The Messiah that all of Ibrox is praying for. But Murray? Given the drama of his 20 years at Ibrox it seems a dismal end to his reign, brought on in part by a shattered economy, unbridled hubris and a love of the club that has ultimately brought it to a pretty dark place.

Haye needs to let his gloves do the talking

THERE is no arguing with David Haye's intelligence, but it's his class that we should doubt. The Hayemaker has said some cruel things about Nikolay Valuev, the 7ft Russian he is due to fight in Nuremberg for the WBA world heavyweight title on Saturday week. In a bitter preamble, Haye has described Valuev as the ugliest man he has ever seen. Not stopping there, Bermondsey's finest states that the stench of body odour from Valuev is almost overpowering.

Haye says lots of things, but it's what he does in the ring that counts. And so far he has done next to nothing. His only fight at heavyweight was a victory over the plodding 37-year- old American, Monte Barrett, a journeyman who'd been beaten in three of his previous six fights. One of Barrett's losses was to the terminally hopeless, Clive Couser, who sports a record of 20 losses in 50 fights and ten defeats in his last 11. That one victory was against Barrett, whose destruction by Haye is supposed to serve as some kind of message to the boxing world.

Valuev might not be much use, but we know he can bang. And, if he catches Haye flush and dumps him on his ass, then we're going to find out about the character of the guy. Haye has quality, but has he got heart?