Have you seen the Waghorn video? You can see it here.
That video is astonishing without necessarily showing anything extraordinary.
If the person at the centre of it wasn’t a professional footballer it would be barely be worth a footnote. But for just a moment Martyn Waghorn, of Sevco, looks like he’s going to clock a young kid in a school blazer. That’s pretty amazing, even if he never does.
Waghorn gets a grip on himself, perhaps realising he’s being filmed or because it dawned on him that he was behaving like a clown, but that he marched up to the kid in the first place is unbelievable. For a split second all the circuits in his head overloaded and his career, his livelihood, perhaps even his freedom teetered on the brink.
The very act of walking up to that kid, with the camera on you, is laden with consequences.
What if the kid repeats the insult? Gets in your face? Calls you out? Do you walk away and look like a fool?
That he never even thought that through is telling. Damning.
And watching it I realised how much pressure he feels.
Warburton was talking to the press today, and he described stories of a fall-out between him and the player as “ludicrous.” The only thing that’s ludicrous is that he expects a living soul to believe that. The stories are everywhere, and have been building for months.
He says the player needs to “work harder” and stay in shape. Yes, that’s working out well when he’s out at the chippy on a week day.
Like Barton, Waghorn has clearly done something that’s fallen foul of the Great Warbo and been banished to the reserves temporarily. But incredibly, unlike Jailbird Joey, who sucked it up and let his agent negotiate his exit, Waghorn seems to have snapped. The fact he’s carrying a bag from the chip shop in the video should tell you enough about how his discipline is holding up under the strain … this is a guy coming apart.
What in God’s name is going out at Ibrox and Auchinehowie?
The entire club is in an indisciplined shambles, from directors issuing foaming at the mouth statements to PR people shouting at the media to players confronting kids in the street. Is it something in the water, something that turns everyone connected to the place into a lunatic?
When Barton left that was supposed to repair the rents and fissures in the squad; if anything it has amplified them. That guy walked away with a £1 million payoff; players who have been there all this time and who didn’t get a fraction of that salary are right to wonder why not.
Waghorn thinks he’s entitled to something, alright. He has steadfastly refused to sign a new contract, clearly believing the terms aren’t satisfactory. He’s probably kidding himself, to be honest; I don’t think he would command the kind of salary elsewhere that he thinks he would, and he’s no longer going to get it at Ibrox.
There are rumours of other issues in the dressing room; Forrester and Tavernier are said to be so enraged at each other they can’t sit together. Players are said to have no respect for the manager – which explains, perhaps, the draconian lenghts he goes to in order to enforce discipline and order.
There’s no getting away from this; chaos reigns at Sevco.
Anybody who thought trouble left Ibrox with Barton ought to think again.