One of the highlights of the last two weeks was reading the wailing comments from Nacho Novo about how he was denied even the chance at an interview for the “third coaching job” at Ibrox. I laughed reading that, I really did.
I still get a kick out of imagining his hurt, his pique, his clear lack of comprehension for how they could be so cruel.
This isn’t the first time Novo has been snubbed by the club like this. He offered to play for free a year or so ago, and they weren’t interested. He wailed about that too. He can’t understand why the club doesn’t want him. I know the answer, and it’s not hard to work out.
Nacho Novo is a loathsome man.
He’s a genuine horror of a human being.
Aside from a section of the Sevco support who worships him because he made it his business to be a Celtic baiter – more on that later – and because he embraces all the worst, and most despicable elements of their “culture”, wholeheartedly, even they hold something back … even they’re not fully with the program.
And the ones he worships so much and appear to worship him?
When the chips are down, they are the most wary, and less sure about him, of them all.
I said in the piece I wrote on Neil McCann the other day that there’s no zealot like a convert. That’s all well and good for a convert … but Novo wasn’t a convert. He was a turncoat first. And nobody believes otherwise, and nobody loves those guys.
Watching Novo scramble after a Sevco job like a beggar chasing a tenner down a public street, that has amused me tremendously. Doubtless there will be a media role somewhere down the line – his book is pretty unreadable; that qualifies him for a Daily Record job right away – but it’s not where he longs to be. He does want to be at Ibrox, where he can put his annual trips to Belfast for their “traditional” bigots beano on his expenses form.
Novo is a bigot of the worst sort. He was born a Spanish Catholic, but now wallows in the sectarian filth with the uber-Loyalists. The notorious Rangers team bus film clip showing him singing about being up to his knees in blood is about as clear-cut as you’ll get. He would be charged for that in this day and age, and whilst I don’t agree with that law it would certainly erase any veneer of respectability that still clings to this tosser.
The media has always loved him, for obvious reasons.
He’s given them enough copy over the years to paper the walls, like when he wrecked the marriage of one of his team-mates, the guy he shared a house with.
That episode was strangely absent from his book, and I had always thought an autobiography was supposed to be a true accounting – warts and all – of your life.
But as he gilds the lily from the very first page I won’t hold the sin of omission against him.
I understand why Nacho Novo’s entire life was defined by a decision to sign for that club.
They created a myth around him, which we never would have.
Some footballers accrue their own mythology; Lubo and Henrik were the notable examples of the time. They earned it.
Novo was a bog-standard player, and nothing more, an SPL grade footballer if ever there was one. Yet he got the chance to come and talk to Celtic, who decided, on reflection, not to bother offering him a deal. For years I’ve heard stories about why … the one I believe least is his.
Novo has always maintained that he travelled up to Celtic only as a courtesy; his book opens with an outline of the reasons why Ibrox was always his preferred destination. Something to do with liking the blue jersey and having a mate who used to take him to their games. It’s all nonsense after the fact, and the fact is he had no preference one way or another. He came to Parkhead for signing talks fully intending to join our club, but he and his agent decided to play a wee game of bluff with us.
They knew Rangers wanted him and they tried to leverage a better deal out of us because of that.
But he made three great misjudgements.
First, he misjudged how much we wanted him and what we thought he was worth.
Secondly, he misjudged the men he was negotiating with. Lawwell, in particular, was never going to pay anybody a penny more than he thought they were entitled to.
Third, and most important, he misjudged our reaction to dangling the possibility of his going to Rangers instead in front of us.
Neither Lawwell nor O’Neill gave a damn.
Even the title of the book – “I Said No Thanks” (what kind of editor allowed a book to go out with a honking name like that?) – is a lie.
The one accurate part of the story is when he admits it was Celtic who pulled out of the deal, so there was sod all to say no to, thanks or otherwise. The terms of the contract he wanted were ridiculous. Celtic simply didn’t rate him highly enough to give the arrogant git what he thought he was worth.
And so was born the Great Fiction, that he snubbed us.
But the truth is known inside both Ibrox and Celtic Park and a lot of the sports writers are equally aware of it.
Novo’s entire career, and his entire persona, was crafted by rejection.
His embrace of all that stuff, all that latent sectarianism, is so extreme and so overblown that it’s clearly the product of anger and an inferiority complex that goes very, very deep indeed.
And I feel no pity for him at all.
The title of this article is from another song by The Magnetic Fields, and the opening lines are “If you don’t mind, why don’t you mind? Where is your sense of indignation?” He’s never understood why Celtic, as a club, was so willing to let him walk out of Parkhead that day when they knew his likely destination would be Ibrox. He and his agent really believed that was a trump card, and we certainly knew how it would be portrayed.
We just didn’t care.
He was a nobody who only because a somebody because Rangers built that myth around him.
He’s Kris Boyd with pace, nothing more.
All the anger, all the bitterness, started on one side of this – his – and he’s defined his entire life by it. Celtic fans as a whole didn’t give a monkeys about him until he started all his nonsense, baiting us, slagging us, giving it large about how he chose Ibrox instead.
Let me put it this way, Dariusz Adamczuk made the journey from Dundee to Ibrox five years before Novo did, and we were linked with him as well. He picked Rangers and went there for more money. The difference is, he never denied that and he never gloated over it or tried to rub our faces in it.
As a result, nobody was bothered either way.
Not so with Novo, one of the most classless individuals on the planet, who sought to wind us up from the very first day he signed for them. The fact he also just happens to be a Spanish Catholic who wound up swimming in the filthy slipstream of Ulster Loyalism just makes him all the more repulsive and detestable.
I mean, when you think about it even the title of the book (that awful, awful title) screams “REJECTED!” at you, especially when you realise even he doesn’t claim to have been the one who pulled out of the deal. Who puts a blatant lie on the cover of the book about their life, and claims that it defined his entire existence from thereon?
Who except someone whose life was defined by it, but not in the way that he means?
There’s another Magnetic Fields song that goes “Bitter tears keep me going. Through the years, freely flowing” and that sums him up perfectly and it’s why the sting of rejection from Ibrox now hurts so much. It’s the second major one of his life, and because he immersed himself so completely in them to mask the pain of the original one it’s all the more painful because of it.
Well, it’s a tough old world.
If he needs to understand these things, I can help him out because I know one of the reasons he was snubbed by the powers-that-be over there, and not just for a coaching job.
It’s because Nacho Novo is the proverbial man without a country.
Renounce your religion to become a hater of the worst kind, build a lie around your life, act in the most profoundly selfish way towards all around you (read the comments from Sporting de Gijón’s manager Javier Clemente, who accused him of cowardice and not giving a toss about the team), and don’t be surprised that the whole world turns its back on you and anything to do with you.
When he was at Gijon they tried to palm him off to Aberdeen on a free. Craig Brown wouldn’t touch him with a twenty foot pole. When the media started a ludicrous campaign to convince Scotland fans he should play for the national team after he qualified by virtue of spending so long here that he’d grown roots the backlash from the Tartan Army sunk the idea like a stone. We might be perfectly willing to go “the Ireland route” and tap up players with only tenuous links to this fair land if they’re good enough … but he never was and the very idea of it would have turned a lot of people’s stomachs over and stopped many from attending any game he played in.
Novo can lie to himself about where the odium the rest of the country feels for him came from as he likes.
The disregard from Ibrox is a whole other thing.
His portrait hangs in the Hall of Fame there; proof if you needed it that their club values some strange traits, personally and in terms of football, but the idea of him finding a home there after his career wound down … it was never going to happen and there are many reasons why, including the straight up fact that his bigotry is so naked and out there it would embarrass even them.
But there’s another reason, an underlying one, the one no-one ever talks about.
They know what Nacho Novo was, and what he is.
He’s a Spanish Catholic who jumped the fence. A turncoat. They know he’d have signed for Celtic without a second thought, and because of the sort of person he is he’d have crafted an equally noxious myth about how it was them he snubbed instead.
And because of those things, in spite of a hard-core that can suspend disbelief for a moment and appear to welcome him as “one of them” – let’s face it, Joey Barton got away with it, and his version was half-hearted compared to this mugs –he makes them uncomfortable and will never truly belong.
Nobody loves you Nacho.
Nobody will ever love you, honestly.
They may sing songs about you but they think of you as a curiosity, like a talking dog.
They love your hatred for us … but they’ll never forget where you came from and what you were, even if you have.
It’ll always be there, hanging over you, and everything you do, from now until they bury you in a Union Jack coffin with all the paraphernalia of hate you accrue over the rest of your miserable life.
And from here on in, that’s the last time in the course of it that I’ll spare you more than a cursory thought.
Because you aren’t worth any more than that. You never were.
That really is what defined the course of your life.