So Malky Mackay it is then.
It must be nice to have friends. Friends at Celtic. Friends at Sevco. Friends in the media. Friends who are willing to overlook your past misdeeds, and give you a good gig, and particularly at a time when you’re on the bones of your arse.
So the man who was once cast into the football darkness because of a series of appalling comments, tweets and messages is now Performance Director at the SFA. Wow. His appointment has been supported by Brendan Rodgers, Mark Warburton and a host of other luminaries, which proves again that nothing in football is stronger than the “mate’s network” and nothing is more toxic either.
I voiced my utter disgust at this suggestion before it became official, before speculation became a job offer, and I’m no less horrified by it now that it has. Much has been made of MacKay’s “rehabilitation” but I’m nowhere near as forgiving.
Leigh Griffiths had some issues, by the way, and the collective whole of this family has forgiven them even if some haven’t forgotten. But he was a daft young boy when he stood in a pub and sang a daft song that essentially took the piss out of a rival player. Malky Mackay was a mature man, in charge of a dressing room, when engaged in a barrage of racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-semitism. An equal opportunity bigot if ever there was one.
So he’s gone to “counselling.” Wow. You need counselling to know those things are plain wrong? You can be educated out of that kind of bigotry, can you? All I can say is thank God the SFA never proposed it for Hugh Dallas; we’d have burned down Hampden.
If rehabilitation isn’t on the table for him then it’s not the table for this guy either. If Stewart Regan was willing to sack Dallas he has no excuse for being willing to employ Mackay. That’s as it should be. That’s the standard the governing body should have.
John Kennedy says he needs to be given time.
Yeah, time to line up his next career move, prior to pissing off for a better option elsewhere, which will derail whatever plans he’s able to put in place and put us back to scratch all over again. No-one really believes this is his dream job, but there’s no other on offer. At the moment. When something presents itself, my bet is that he’s off … career rehabilitation done. Hired by a national association. Rubber stamped. No longer tainted.
It’s nice that we can help out, right? Although where it leaves Scottish football when he takes the inevitable decision to leave for his next job in England I don’t know. That we continually do this stuff, taking aim at our own feet, in this way is astounding.
As Paul67 over on CQN has pointed out, his troubles don’t stop at simply being unable to get a job in England either due to his failures as a boss or the scandal that surrounds him, but he’s also being sued by Vincent Tan in relation to a scam involving transfers. So he starts the job under a poisonous fume. If it engulfs him, this appointment will look even worse.
I simply cannot believe that these people are this stupid. There were good candidates out there and they’ve gone for a guy whose one qualification seems to be the number of his pals who’ve put his case forward, although quite what that case is I don’t know. He has virtually no history of developing players; in England he was the worst kind of chequebook boss, wholly without a clue when not connected to the umbilical cord of agents, scouts and reporters who were forever feeding him tips about players to watch. He has never done this sort of work in his life.
This isn’t the first time the SFA has hired someone wholly unqualified of course, but it is the first time someone has arrived for work at Hampden with a record for bigotry. More often that’s the way they leave the place. At least in that, Mackay has made history.
Is that we’re calling progress now, is it?