This last 10 days has been a pretty sorry state of affairs with former director Alan Wardrop playing out a very public battle with the Kibble directors on the club board.
This all came to a head last night with Wardrop being banned from the stadium "with immediate effect and until further notice".
With Wardrop currently running for election to the SMiSA board, on an election manifesto to "remove the current Kibble directors serving on the board of St.Mirren FC" it's all becoming more than a bit messy.
The support seems to becoming polarised into a pro-Kibble or anti-Kibble stance, and none of this healthy, either for the future of fan ownership at the club, or for the future of SMiSA.
There's a lot of hot air around exactly what has happened with this latest #KibbleGate issue but let's burn it down to the two main issues.
Application Without Consultation
The club statement confirms that Kibble submitted a first round funding application which named the clubs Charitable Foundation as s stakeholder without telling them.
That doesn't sound a particuarly normal way to go about things IMHO, but the Kibble defence that the wider re-gen project had been discussed at board level and that it was a very early stage application perhaps carries some weight.
Either way this isn't really the big bone of contention IMHO.
The Use of St.Mirren Land
The major falling out here is about the proposed use of St.Mirren owned land in the project.
This is where it all becomes a bit more murky.
The club statement says "To reiterate the information outlined above regarding the RCGF application, no St Mirren Football Club land was ever part of the application".
Well, that simply isn't true because subsequent drawings that have been published in the press show that a proposed site for the re-generation WAS marked on St.Mirren owned land, a fact that has subsequently been acknowledged by Kibble who claim it was some sort of mistake made by Renfrewshire Council.
I'm not massively sure that stacks up to be honest, but here's how it's all played out:
Alan Wardrop goes all guns blazing because he finds the proposal was including land owned by the club.
The club say this is nonsense, the application didn't mention land owned by the club.
Wardrop then repeats his claims in the press - providing documented evidence that the land WAS included in the proposal.
Kibble then admit the land was included - but say it was a mistake by the council.
Wardrop is then banned by the club.
It's like a playground fight, and there are no winners here.
For Kibble, it's another erosion of trust and that is one thing they could really do without.
There has been a deep rooted lack of trust in the Kibble from certain elements in the support ever since they got involved with the club. The "what's in it for them" suspicion has always been there and this sort of tawdry episode just gives fuel to those who love a bit of scaremongering.
Banning Wardrop from the club seems draconian and completely un-necessary given it's been proven that his claims regarding St.Mirren land being earmarked in the proposal was proven to be completely true.
For Alan, playing the issue out so publically does not seem like a particuarly wise move. Why this couldn't all have been discussed and sorted in the inner sactum of the boardroom(s) is absolutely beyond me. I've no idea why he's resigned from the club board then launched this grenade from the sidelines. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me and the adverse publicity around the club and our fan ownership model is deeply damaging.
There's certainly a feeling that the people running our club, and by that I mean Kibble AND SMiSA are not doing a terribly good job of it (see the most recent accounts as a prime example) and this sort of sordid episode does very little to dispell that notion.
St.Mirren fans should be concentrating on these last four games of the season, it's still all to play for and Europe is still a possibility, even it's a remote one. Instead we get this circus.
A mountain out of a molehill, with neither side covering themselves in glory.
A boring draw. Nil fucking Nil.