There’s moment in the third season of the outstanding Boardwalk Empire which gives me the giggles every time I see it.
In the scene, a gangster named Gyp Rosetti has taken over a small town and is using it as base to smuggle alcohol and wage a war against Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson. There is a minor Civil War memento in the town, a wide general’s hat owned by a famous commander. Rosetti admires it. Then, at the end of the episode, he strolls down to the beach where his men are taking delivery of a booze consignment … and he has the hat on.
Rosetti is a psychopath; we learn that early.
What this moment signifies, and what makes it hilarious, is that it’s the point where we realise he’s also bat-shit crazy.
It’s the moment where some of his men realise it too.
I felt a little bit like that this morning, watching Pedro Caixinha moving glasses around a table in an attempt to explain his tactics yesterday. That feeling only grew when I read his account of how he changed his team talk because he realised his players were scared. Scared of him? The idea makes me want to burst out laughing, not because he seems scary or that I find the idea ridiculous, but because a picture is emerging here of a guy who’s not quite right.
Six days a week training, anyone? Cutting the close-season short? Is there something wrong with a standard training regimen? Have teams suffered from a too-lengthy break in the summer? Does he really think he can elevate his sub-standard players by making them work until they drop? I’ve listened to this guy talk and it doesn’t take long to start forming the impression that he is absolutely barking mad.
Before Pittodrie he talked about it like he was going to war.
Did his team look ready for war yesterday? They were absolutely spineless.
The entire club is in locked in a waking nightmare. Darkness has fallen right across it. Their supporters have regressed into their old obsessions and “cultural norms.” Their boardroom is a dysfunctional shambles, run by a crook.
Their first team squad is sub-standard at best.
Their manager finished fifth in Qatar last season. In Qatar. Think on that for a moment.
Yesterday was a performance even Warburton would have been ashamed of.
It says a lot that Graeme Murty – who they couldn’t wait to replace – got more out of these guys for the visit to Celtic Park than this guy managed yesterday. That was a cup semi-final … with the added prize of halting our unbeaten run and wrecking the treble talk. There is a feel-good factor at Celtic Park that is part of what’s driving us forward; I’m not saying they would have ruined that yesterday had they won, but they would have removed the warm glow that’s over everything right now.
And they didn’t show up at all.
We owned the whole pitch. There was a seven minute spell when we played with ten men and passed the ball around like guys playing in the park on their holidays. Do their fans know what that means? There’s no desire in that team of theirs, no heart, no bottle, no ambition whatsoever and that permeates their whole club.
This is a club getting by. That’s all. They have no long term strategy or direction. They appear to have one goal; catching us, somehow, before we hit the ten titles. A smarter group of people on the board would focus on simply getting their house in order, and being the best club they can be in the short to medium term, and building up.
Not these people.
The stupidest thing they ever did was appropriated the name Rangers and grabbed the Survival Lie as hard as they could. Had they accepted they were a NewCo they might have the realistic expectations of one instead of trying to re-establish something that was, in itself, little more an illusion. Rangers was built on debt.
Trying to be that has made them desperate and when it becomes apparent to the men who offered him the job after a single interview – and ponder that for a moment too – that Caixinha is a guy a few sandwiches short of a loaf they will have to act and that will make matters worse.
They did no due diligence on this guy at all. That should tell you how well thought out the move is. The idea of appointing a Director of Football was put on hold almost as soon as they were telling the world that it was the way forward and essential to “the plan.”
A plan so subject to the fluctuations and palpitations in the stands ain’t no plan at all.
They are a club without leadership of any sort, whilst Celtic is now a well-oiled machine. We’re planning a bonanza strip launch in a few weeks to which the fans have been invited. They don’t even know, over there, if they’ll have one at all because they are still bickering with Sports Direct. When they can’t even get the simple stuff right, and look professional, then they can certainly forget trying to chart a course to overhauling us.
There is no sign of this ending. They are years from being able to compete with us. Years. The forlorn hope that Brendan would get tired of it all and head for England has already been dashed; he’s made it clear that he’s here for ten and perhaps beyond, not that it matters. There are other top managers out there and once we’ve re-established ourselves as a club to take seriously in Europe there will be no shortage of interest in the job he leaves behind.
Caixinha is a dreadful appointment, and it was suicidaly stupid of them to give such a guy a multi-year contract. But he’s a symptom of the wider malaise, the one that has Joe Garner, Joe Dodoo and Martyn Waghorn “competing” for a place in the team alongside a 37 year old Kenny Miller. The one that saw them sign a kid from Accrington Stanley about whom the best the media could say was that he might even be better than his dad.
His dad, Dean Windass.
And even that proved out of his reach, a step too great, shoes that were just too big to fill.
“Now he knows how Jordi Cruyff felt,” my mate said yesterday, to much hilarity.
This is the surreal level they are at now, where everything comes off a little farcical. I don’t know how they dig their way out of this. The one obvious move would be not to try, to settle for what they are for the moment, but there’s zero appetite for that confrontation with reality.
The pain that’s engulfing their support is entirely self-inflicted.
And there is no end to it in sight.