Last week, Pedro Caixinha sat in front of the Scottish media and vowed to find the “dressing room mole” at Ibrox. Many in the room must have been dying to laugh. I know I was when I read it. Celtic forums published more memes of Lee Wallace, and those are quite funny but only up to a point. The truth is, there’s no real secret about who the “dressing room mole” actually is. He doesn’t even try to hide it particularly well.
Kenny Miller loves talking to the press.
Kenny Miller is an attention seeker.
Kenny Miller likes to be in the limelight.
Kenny Miller knows his career is winding down, and he’s been busy setting up his next one.
Listen, good luck to him for that. Everyone in his position should be doing the same. He has a woman who likes £24,000 earrings. I suspect neither of them is looking forward to the day when the big pay cheques stop coming out of Ibrox.
I am not saying that Kenny Miller is the only person at Ibrox who leaks; whoever talked to Keith Jackson in the aftermath of the cup final, to claim that every Sevco player had been assaulted on the park that day, it wasn’t him.
He condemned that article, publicly, although Jackson never bothered to rescind it or correct the narrative.
But Miller definitely tells the press things he shouldn’t. And today it looks as if he’s spoken to just about every hack whose number is in his rolodex. There’s some blubbering over the treatment he received at the weekend – pious, pitiful nonsense, all of it – but that’s provided a thin veneer to cover what the real point of the exercise was. It wasn’t to talk about Brown or Jozo. It was to talk about the manager. To talk about the direction of the club.
I’ve seen this happen before. Organisations which get a lot of media attention occasionally see a phenomenon like this. It happens to those which appear to be rudderless, heading for the rocks. It’s happened to Labour, most notably, and with too many examples to count. But let’s take just one of them, Hillary Benn. His speech on Syria had everyone in the press box wetting themselves about his potential to become party leader instead of the floundering Jeremy Corbyn. He was the latest in a long line, most of them nonentities, many of them unheard of outside of their own living rooms. Benn, at least, knows his own limitations.
Miller has become Mr Sevco these last few months. It’s been a slow process, but I’ve been watching it happen. There was talk that he might end up interim boss when Warburton was sacked. That never came to pass. It was never going to. But Miller made sure he was very vocal in that period, and that he got his opinions and ideas out there. The ground is being laid. He knows he’s in a uniquely good spot for stepping up; the club is a shambles.
The Caixinha appointment is a mad gamble which even now you can see will not end well.
Miller is correct to think that if he positions himself right he’s got a shot when the wheels come off and Pedro gets sent back to the ranch. The club will not have the money to attract someone with the name and reputation the fans want; the only other choice will be to give them someone they know and respect, and Miller fits the bill.
It’s a smart play, and he knows he could pull it off.
But the trouble with this scenario is that Miller is not as smart as he thinks he is, and if you’ve watched him on the park you know he frequently has difficulty in getting himself under control. He thinks his opinions are so fantastic he has to share them with the world, and he’s not good at hiding his feelings even when he wants to.
There is a lot to admire about Kenny Miller. He doesn’t give a toss what other people think about him, and that enabled him to play for both sides of the Glasgow divide. He charts his own course, and he is a model professional who lives a clean life and looks after himself, which is why he was the only player in their team who posed even a minor threat to us at the weekend, although he’s 37 and just about ready to hang up his boots.
Miller is also ruthlessly ambitious, and that is something to respect.
But when you combine those things with his friends in the media, the fawning over him that the press is doing right now, the smoke the fans are blowing up his backside, his ego and the big mouth that can’t stop broadcasting his opinions about everything including his own greatness to all and sundry, you get a bad combination and not just for him.
I know why Warburton wasn’t keen on giving this guy an extended deal. I know why Pedro was wary about doing it. In the end, the fans would have been in uproar if Caixinha hadn’t approved it, and anyway he’s not going to have the kind of money he needs to buy the sort of players who can replace Miller in the team.
But Miller’s presence in that dressing room is not good news for a manager who’s already got strained relations with a number of key players, including Lee Wallace himself. If the two most senior Scottish players at the club, and with the best claim of “understanding” it, come together in opposition to this guy the party is over.
Miller knows that he’ll be at Ibrox for an extra year; that’s his window, that’s his chance to make his move. He is ambitious and ruthless enough to do just that, and Pedro is already looking to a lot of people like a man lost at sea.
If I were him, I’d be hiring a food taster. In giving Miller a new deal he’s keeping close a guy who wants his job. Mario Puzo never wrote a stupider line than “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
He clearly didn’t have a lot of enemies.