Tonight I’ve tuned into Clyde for the first time in ages.
I had heard it’s been tremendously funny of late, and tonight has been no disappointment in that regard.
The first part was full of Sevco fans discussing a “potential transfer war” with Celtic and how they wanted no part of it, to “maintain the club’s financial position”, which last time I looked was represented by burgeoning debts and soft loans.
Honestly, I was pissing myself. It’s easy to decry something you’ll never be able to have; a lot of the less confident kids who are knocked back by the classroom beauty take the same position. That stuff is as common as Hallmark sentiment and just as cheap.
Where I did do a double take was when Keevins said that Warburton has been “unlucky” with some of his signings; he specified Barton, Kranjcar and Rossiter. Unbelievable. A little internet research was all Warburton – and Keevins – needed to do about those three.
Barton was a bomb waiting to go off, and has been his whole career. Kranjcar played a total of seven minutes in two years and was nothing more than a name. Rossiter has had injury problems his whole career so far, and that’s sad but it was also available information to anyone who wanted to look.
As to the rest of his signings, it’s no wonder Keevins glossed over those. They are almost uniformly awful; it’s amazing that he’s considering giving a new deal to Clint Hill. That boy is not going to improve with age. But that news is instructive. It reveals the depth of Warburton’s arrogance towards Scottish football, which lies at the heart of his signings.
Warburton thinks the game here is a joke and he really did believe average footballers from the English lower leagues could beat our best sides. His attitude is a sneering insult to our game. He himself is little more than a bog standard manager of limited imagination, and absolutely Anglo-centric. The idea that our teams might be up to the job never dawned on him for one minute. It still hasn’t fully sunk in, and it won’t until after he’s gone.
There is nothing unlucky about that. No “element of bad luck” at all.
He grossly overestimated his own abilities and underestimated the talents of Scottish players and he has learned nothing. This is why he’s ready to give Clint Hill a brand new deal; that he would even consider fielding a 39 year old defender in any other environment is ridiculous. If Sevco qualifies for Europe and the SFA and UEFA allow them a license there is no chance in Hell that he will play against even the most limited continental opposition. Warburton would not dare.
But he does believe he can meet the standards of the SPL and it says a lot for the way some of the other teams have approached games against his side this season that Hill has not yet been exposed in the most brutal fashion, as Kiernan already has.
Warburton too has been found out. A handful of hacks continue to defend him, mostly those who came out with the most stupid nonsense at the start of the season about us being challenged and even tipped Sevco to win the title. (Aye Keevins, you halfwit, I’m looking at you and your pal Johnstone; Gerry McCulloch must be mortified at the low IQ of the people he sits in a studio with every single week, cause he’s no mug.) The rest of the press knows the man with the magic hat is a busted flush and are marking time for the end.
Some of them are even lobbying for it.
In the end, luck will not save him.
Nothing will.
His small band of media acolytes will turn soon enough, when it becomes clear that the Ibrox regime considers him flotsam and gets shot.
Will they say he was unlucky then? No, just that he was bad.
But they will not say he was arrogant and dismissive of Scotland, because that might reflect badly on his current employers who have been arrogant and dismissive of Scotland for four years and were, at Rangers, contemptuous of the rest of the game here long before that.