Wasn’t it amusing, today, to see Alex McLeish salivating at the prospect of getting the Sevco job, and then just minutes later drawing them out of the hat – at home; there’s a shock – for the quarter finals of the Scottish Cup?
Whenever he was asked about the job he salivated so much you feared Neil McCann might need water wings.
Be careful Alex. There are worse things than being unemployed.
Know what else was amusing?
To read the papers and their hopeless fawning over Dodgy Dave King.
Not to mention their sterling efforts, on his behalf, to burn down everything they’ve spent eighteen months building; the myth of the Man with the Magic Hat.
I didn’t like the guy, in the same way I didn’t like Barton, but there’s only so much you can stomach from the media when they are in full-on rewrite mode like this. When the neddish footballer checked out of Ibrox it was with the press howling derision at him; he was washed up, a has-been, a guy with too big a mouth, a loose cannon, his signing a ridiculous one which the manager had to carry the can for.
But this was the same player who had the same people wetting their pants.
Then, at the start, he was box office. The man the team needed. He would put us in our places. When he mouthed off about Brown and Brendan they loved it. “Midlife crisis! Isn’t he hilarious?” Yeah, you could die laughing, right? Especially in hindsight.
With Warburton, the hype that surrounded him was unbelievable.
I was not in the least bit surprised to read utter claptrap this morning saying the job was “too big for him” and had been from the start. How inexperienced he was. How little actual time he’s spent in the dugout. None of which has been a secret these past eighteen months, and all of which this website and others were saying at the time. Of the hacks, only Graham Spiers said at the time that it was a risk, as Warburton had done nothing of substance in the game.
I predicted at around this time last year that Warburton would find himself in the same position as Deila when the wheels came off the wagon. The media now pretends they understood that right from the start, when 12 months ago he was a genius and the guy who was going to take a title challenge right to the wire.
This is what our media is best known for; being experts after the fact. It was the bloggers who called this one right, months ago, as we did when King breezed into town and the media collapsed in a heap of frenzied excitement. “Don’t trust a thing this guy says,” we told them and even after this multi-layered fiasco they still couldn’t wait to acclaim his statement of the other day as it were straightforward and not a tissue of lies.
Look, it’s a Sunday and I don’t feel like wading through it all – I’ll leave that for later in the week – but for now let me point out some of the more obviously ridiculous parts.
First, the £18 million claim, which if you’ve watched them and stood in the crumbling relic that’s Ibrox you’ll know is cobblers. The cash isn’t out on the pitch and it’s not been sunk into the stadium. Have you seen where their “Development side” is in the league? They are 10th. So it’s not gone on youth football. McParland’s scouting “network” appears not to travel further than England, so the money isn’t there. So what happened to it?
King says that the club “at short notice” appointed an “inexperienced management team.” Let’s split that statement in two as I’ve done here. Start with “short notice.” They appointed him on 15 June. That was a fortnight after Motherwell had assured the club would spend another year in the Championship. Of course, season ticket renewals were going out soon … so in that regard, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt as to “short notice.”
Except … except we appointed Brendan Rodgers manager in May last year. That’s a day before the Scottish Cup final, whilst the season was still ongoing. Ronny managed his final game on 15 May. We unveiled Brendan just five days later. Of course, we had been chasing him a lot longer than that; Ronny had announced his departure in advance (more on that tomorrow) and the club had a little lead-time. But we used it wisely.
Why wasn’t the hunt for a new Ibrox boss on when McCoist was bagged? Did they really want to give McCall a chance? Seriously? And then changed their minds at the last second, when it was clear he wasn’t up to it? King is asking us to accept that the whole club is run on a panic-buy basis, making it up as they go along without an over-arching plan. McCoist was sacked and a new boss was appointed as a stop-gap. But they never planned past him …
And you know what?
Unusually, I actually believe King here …
That rings true, with everything we’ve seen since he took over up there.
But this thing with the “inexperienced management team” … that smells fishy to me. Oh it’s unquestionably a fact, but neither King nor his board were saying so at the time. In fact, this is what their official website said on the day he was appointed.
“He has spent the last two seasons at London side Brentford, taking them from League One to the Championship in his first season, and then to fifth place and the play-offs in his second season in England’s second tier … Before his two year stint as a manager, Mark held the positions of first team coach and sporting director at Brentford having previously worked with a number of different youth teams at Watford. He was also instrumental in the creation of the NextGen pan-European under-19 cup competition, where the top European sides entered their teams prior to the UEFA Youth League being inaugurated ….”
Nowhere was there any acknowledgment of this “inexperience.”
In fact, as we all recall the media was encouraged to view Warburton as a visionary, someone who’s banking background and knowledge of stats and numbers was a positive. (Oh yes, those same traits that were being so mocked this past week. Unreal, isn’t it?)
If these guys were so “inexperienced” and the chairman realised it was a risk, why did they offer him a three year deal? Why not put him on a 12 month rolling contract? Does any of this make sense? Not a bit of it, of course.
On top of that, the idea that Warburton showed disloyalty from the first, by expressing an intention to manage in the EPL one day is equally bizarre. When a player does it that’s ambition. When a manager does it he’s not showed sufficient commitment to the cause? Since when? Warburton will have known – as King would have – that the only way to go from Ibrox to an EPL club would have been to do something substantial; it should have been a positive.
There is plenty more, of course; what I’ve offered is a flavour of the nonsense this guy put out under his own name the other night. I will do a full perusal of the statement in a day or two when I’ve had some time to relax for once!
For now, I can only reiterate that this club is a basket case, run by a congenital liar, and that if their fans are to experience a change of pace it might be nice if someone at Ibrox actually came out and levelled with them instead of feeding them this constant diet of unadulterated bull.
The media, well there’s no hope for them at all.
Corrupt, useless, scared to death or incompetent … who cares what the reason are?
They are a joke, and we all know it.