Today The Daily Record is promoting a big give-away, an incentive for fans to pay for their brand of decorative bog roll.
It’s an eight page pull out called Top Marks. It’s the Mark Warburton story, sub-headed “Rangers manager’s journey from non-league to big league and the marble staircase of Ibrox.” You can imagine how vomit inducing it will be, right?
There is literally no offer or giveaway out there which could entice me to buy a Daily Record, and I can safely say most Celtic supporters feel exactly the same way. The readership figures bear that out; they’ve been dropping like a “glamour model’s” knickers for years. Sooner or later that paper is going to go out of business, and amidst the Thugs and Thieves memories along the way it’s going to be days like today which do it.
Pandering to the core audience only works as long as there is a core audience. If you accept, as most demographic studies prove, that Sevco is a dying institution because its core audience is dwindling, then you can see how The Record will follow down the same road.
If I were Mark Warburton I’d make the most of the good press, and I’d put that 8 page pull out somewhere safe, because that’s as good as it gets for him and it’s never going to get that good again. As I said here earlier in the week, for the first time since arriving at the club he’s faced up to the inconvenient truth that everything he came to Sevco expecting to find was an illusion. King will not keep the promises he made; he never intended to, partly because he can’t. The money was never there and it’s not going to be.
Warburton is lucky he’s at Ibrox, in the same way McCoist always was. When you look at last season, and his manager of the year award, it was an embarrassment. His team won the second tier title and the third tier cup competition. For all he was lauded as a managerial visionary, his team dropped points in eleven league games … which is only one less than Ronny Deila, who’s Celtic side played two games more. He was one of the most pilloried manager’s in the history of the SPL, and certainly the only one ever to be moved on after winning the title.
Not a single journalist mounted a defence of Ronny, and it’s hard to suggest one for him.
He didn’t cut it, and that’s why he’s gone.
Warburton has been cruising along, largely immune from negative reporting. That will last only so long. Few people in the history of Scottish football had such a good relationship with the press as McCoist, and although he got an easier ride than another manager might have he found out the hard way that whilst a successful manager at Ibrox gets praise as if he’d discovered a non-carbon fuel source that all changes the minute he endangers Project Stop Celtic.
McCoist didn’t survive that. Neither will Warburton. Before this season is over, those who are lauding him now won’t want to use his magic hat to wipe their arses. The second it becomes unavoidably clear that he’s not going to be able to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat they will turn on him like a pack of wolves, and as sure as anything can be the chorus of calls for a “real Rangers man” in the dugout will start anew.
Tomorrow will be telling, and should the expected happen and Celtic open up that gap the pressure cooker will be bubbling away nicely. I don’t expect the criticism he gets to be too dreadful, unless the beating is one of those generational ones that leaves supporters psychologically scarred for life. In the main, I expect the anger to be focussed on individual players; if Barton doesn’t show up (and he hasn’t so far, let’s face it) he’ll be a prime candidate.
But that gap will exist whether the media turns the guns on him or not, and if second place starts to slip away – the least they will tolerate – he can start packing his bags. By the time McCoist’s Waterloo season ended the team had finished third in the Championship, don’t forget, but the knives were out the moment the hacks realised automatic promotion was in peril. Warburton will feel the heat if they drop to third or lower.
The Daily Record and other outlets love this guy, and I’ve never fully understood the rationale behind it. He’s accomplished no more so far than would be expected of a guy with vastly greater resources than the managers around him, and I didn’t think they were all that impressive for much of the time. Even now, he’s got a team whose wage bill outstrips every other side in the league bar one, and so far they’ve been dreadful to watch.
Hard times are coming. SPL sides might not have their resources, but they will punish every mistake this guy makes.
Last week, the BBC documentary on Scottish football highlighted the crazy spending era at Dundee; I found that amazing to look back on, but I wondered at the time that nobody in the media, or even the blogosphere, pointed out the obvious; Sevco’s signing guys like Barton, like Kranjcar and Senderos is pretty much the same thing. Dundee’s best season during that spell was the first one, where they reached a Scottish Cup Final and finished sixth.
Warburton would be gone long before completing a season as bad as that.
Sooner or later, the tide will turn against him.
He best enjoy the honeymoon whilst it lasts.
As of this weekend, I suspect he’ll be on the downward spiral.