'110%' Mac departs as club fail to match his ambitions

MAC GALLIENNE wants it known he has no great axe to grind with Rangers.

But, yes, he has left the club and all involved with football who want to see seven strong and healthy GFA clubs operating, should be saddened by his departure created through frustration at the club's inability to keep up to speed with his own ambitious plans.

Rangers had come along way under the man.

Lest we forget, when he took over first-team affairs five years ago they had not won a first-team game for two years and were rock bottom of the Priaulx.

Should the current side jointly run by Shaun Lihou and Paul Ockleford hold onto third place, it will be the second time in three seasons they have qualified for the Wheway Cup, not a bad effort for a club which had so little going for them so relatively recently.

So what was such a big problem that Gallienne felt impelled to go?

Gallienne has confirmed it was largely due to the club's failure to keep up with his agenda to provide all Rangers players with the best modern-day facilities.

The proposed move to Les Vauxbelets had ground to a halt with no sign of it taking off in the short-term and an alternative push to create a bigger, brighter more impressive St Andrew's with the proceeds of the sale of their share of the Track, was going well until the Rangers executive dithered on a crucial decision and a chance to press ahead with the development then became entangled with the credit crunch.

And with Gallienne forever up to his eyes in running his own building buisiness, he clearly felt that why bother expending so much personal time and mental energy into a project when the vision is not shared by others.

Basically, the club lacks his commitment.

One prominent voice behind the scenes at Rangers described the situation as 'desperately sad'.

"Mac was 110% enthusiastically devoted to the club. He saw that better facilities were massively important.'

On the good news front, inter-island boxing seems about to resume after a crazily long absence.

Whether we will ever return to the days of Channel Islands area championship belts sanctioned by the ABA is a matter of serious conjecture, but even if that proves impossible in the rightly fussy modern times of fight matching, it should be perfectly acceptable to stage manage unofficial title bouts across all the main weights.

In fact I see the return of individual championships of far more importance than the reintroduction of a straightforward Guernsey v. Jersey team match which would never be a fair contest for the very reason that should one or the other island produce a high-class boxer or string of boxers, it is very likely they will not be able to be matched in the sister isle.

Representative teams would then be unfairly handicapped by not being able to call on their best boxer(s).