'Astonishing' - King rages to Chris Jack over Rangers botch which heaped pressure on Bennett

Dave King slammed the Rangers board for the “astonishing” failure of allowing the Ibrox redevelopment project to go ahead without everything in place to complete.

The Gers shareholder told Chris Jack for the Rangers Review website on 16 September that he rated the decision zero out of 100 from a management perspective after delayed materials for the Copland Road Stand work forced Philippe Clement’s side to play home games at Hampden Park.

The South Africa-based businessman has touted himself for a return to the chairman position [Rangers Review, 15 September], and railed against what Jack termed the “saga” which piled the most pressure onto John Bennett before his resignation on health grounds over the weekend.

King said: “I find it astonishing, I mean on a scale of one to a hundred I’m going to zero, that we could possibly have started a project if we did not have all of the equipment. Just from a management point of view, I don’t care if you’re managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a fish and chip shop or you’re managing British Petroleum, there are certain management principles in place. We should never have started the renovations. 

“The management from the board to the operations manager and there should have been supervision of this, there should be compliance, control environment around it, you don’t start a project like that unless, when we finished the first game of last season, mid-May whenever it was at home, within a minute or the next morning that team should have been in.

“Because being at home at Ibrox with our atmosphere, where we are formidable, even against the biggest teams, we are formidable at Ibrox, we needed the Champions League money, we needed to be playing at Ibrox.

“Hampden Park is soulless. I’m sorry, it’s our national stadium, but it’s soulless. And if that material wasn’t there, the chairman of the board or whoever should have turned around to the poor and said we’re sorry, it didn’t happen, the stuff is not here, we cannot start this project knowing the key steel is still in China.”

Rangers return to Ibrox for Dundee cup game

The Light Blues’ tenancy at the national stadium is finally over with the League Cup quarterfinal against Dundee on 21 September set to be the first back at Ibrox.

It is impossible to quantify how much of a tangible effect the disruption had on results but it surely hasn’t been a positive, and certainly played a part in the overall disarray around the club.

Bennett’s search for a replacement to James Bisgrove as CEO was sidetracked while he had to focus on navigating the building problems, extending his time trying to cover both roles and possibly contributing to Jim Gillespie pulling out late in the process [Daily Mail, 10 September].

A member of staff was sacked in the summer when the Copland Road Stand debacle first came to light [Andy Newport, 20 June] but the absence of a proper governance structure, with Bennett stretched across multiple key positions, may well have been a factor.

Whether King is the man to return and help address the leadership vacuum at Ibrox remains to be seen, and he is expected to face opposition from his own successor in Douglas Park [Daily Record, 16 September].

But the building work saga has been representative of so many issues around the club in recent seasons, so now it’s finally set to end proper work must go into ensuring people are in place to avoid such mistakes being made again.

In other Rangers news, an “important” update on whether Bennett is due to take his money out of the club has come out after his resignation.

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