The John Bennett 'relief' felt by Rangers ally Dave King as he reveals heart to heart chats with outgoing chairman

Dave King has watched John Bennett pour his heart, his soul and his millions into Rangers.

But the former Ibrox chief reckons the outgoing chairman is entirely right to draw a line at throwing his health too into the seemingly endless cavern of doom currently threatening to swallow the club whole. King knows only too well the strain that comes when trying to rebuild a broken institution. After all he was the man who Mike Ashley tried to have locked up as the Castlemilk-born millionaire set about cutting the club free from the toxic tentacles that had wrapped their way around the Light Blues under its previous regime.

All the stress, hard work and toil in the end proved worthwhile as King helped put down the foundations upon which Steven Gerrard built his 2021 title-winning campaign. King had stepped down from his role 12 months previous to that Invisibles triumph in order to focus on his ensuring his businesses in South Africa survived Covid. He gave up control assured that with men like Bennett still on board, Rangers were in safe hands.

But under King’s predecessor Douglas Park, and then Bennett - who assumed the top job in April last year - all the progress made after King’s 2015 takeover has been squandered and Rangers once again find themselves firmly lodged in Celtic’s shadow. That, though, has done nothing to diminish the respect King has for a man he will always count as a friend first, and business associate second.

“I'm sad it's come to this, but I have mixed feelings,” he said as he spoke from his home in Johannesburg. “I've got, at a very personal base, a sense of relief because in speaking to John, who I've been in fairly regular contact with over the last couple of months, I’ve tried to offer him personal support because I know what he's going through. Being chairman of Rangers is an incredibly difficult task.

“I've sat on many boards, many public company boards, a lot bigger than Rangers and it's just a different thing completely. So I think John was going through, quite frankly, the legacy that he picked up. Because I think when John came in and took over as chairman, I don't think he expected to find the extent to which the club had been hollowed out, quite frankly.

“There was no management support, there was no operational support. John went into that situation because on a personal basis, he loves the club. You can't doubt that for a moment.

“He's invested very, very heavily into the club, I think way beyond his original intentions. So I had a huge amount of empathy for what he was going through on a personal basis. I know it was affecting his health and I understand that because the pressure is enormous and it does get to, it doesn't stay in your mind, it does translate to your body, that's just the reality of it.

“I was constantly saying to him, ‘John just be careful because you're not well and you've got to look after your health and your family as well’. So I think he's got it right because I think it does get to a point where, I think the current situation is really not fixable.

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“It's not as if one can sit there and say ‘well OK I'm going to tough it out, there is a plan and there is a way forward’. At this moment I don't think there is a way forward. So I think for John in his own personal interest to leave now, given he has been incapacitated with his health, in terms of having the energy, having the health to do what's got to be done, it was right that he steps down. And I'm pleased on a personal basis for him and his family that he's done that.

“I think it also protects his legacy because I think John's legacy is a good legacy. He came into the club at my invitation initially, he invested, he's been a passionate Ranger supporter, he was a great supporter to me during my time on the board when tough decisions had to be made.”

No-one can doubt Bennett’s commitment to the Ibrox cause. He’s sunk £23million of his own hard earned into the club. But it’s the questionable decision-making he and the people he has employed that has led to the spike in fan fury - and now ultimately the strain that has forced Bennett to walk away.

Chief of those is the construction cock-up which forced Philippe Clement’s team to vacate their own stadium for the first month of the season - and King can understand the anger. “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,” he said.

“Just from a management point of view, I don't care if you're managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken, 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 doesn’t happen ig the stuff is not here. We cannot start this project knowing the key steel is still in China. We've scored these own goals, we've got so much wrong and what this club has got to do right now is get back to basics.”

Rangers have fallen miles behind their biggest rivals. But King believes the bigger picture can be improved at Ibrox - by taking care of the small details. He said: “On a very general level, I think where we were in rebuilding the club, going back to, as you rightly say 10 years ago, we built the club up by a couple of things and they weren't clever things, they were actually very, very obvious things.

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“The first thing is to admit to your supporters, it's not really about the board, it's not about investors, it's about your supporters. I think the board more recently have put out too many platitudes lately.

“There's been interviews on Rangers TV which I couldn't get to the end of most of them because they were just platitudes. You need to be honest with supporters and say this is what we've done. I've opened the cupboard, this is what we've found, it's not good but this is what it is. But this is what we are going to try and do about it and these are the kind of timeframes we think might be possible if things go well and of course things don't go well.

“We had the situation where the roof was falling off so health and safety took over and you're trying to get this delicate balance between what we all want as supporters, which is the team winning, but you also have to have facilities that are safe for supporters.

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"We ended up with things that went wrong, but every time they went wrong, my view was just go and tell supporters, say this is what's happening, this is why it's happened, we take blame for this or this has happened, but just let everyone know what's going on, let them know what the timeframes are, but whatever happens, keep on going forward. If you get knocked backwards, pick yourself up but go forward again.”

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