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Their Club Is A Mess, And Sevco’s Manager Wants To Play Hunt The Mole.

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What a club Sevco is.

They are a disintegrating shambles, facing crisis on several fronts, with a support mired in scandal, a deteriorating financial position, a divided board, a crooked chairman and question marks over the award of a European license. They are the successor club to one who’s entire upper echelon is being paraded through a courtroom even as I write this.

And what is the pressing concern inside their walls?

Their manager wants to have a mole hunt. He is focussed on plugging dressing room leaks. He went in front of the press yesterday and moaned about their internal business ending up in the papers, such as when he told Clint Hill and Senderos to find new clubs last week. Within hours of the conversation that was all over the media.

And he wonders how this happens.

It happens because it’s always happened. Every club has at least one person in it who loves to run to the media and tell stories. Celtic had dressing room leaks too. The difference is, Brendan went about the business of finding them quietly and took care of it in private. I won’t speculate on how he did it, but you can look back at his early actions and hazard a guess.

Pedro seems to think the way to do is to line everyone up against the wall and do an interrogation. I wonder where he gets these ideas, these “strict disciplinarian” type concepts he’s always talking about. Six day training. Players coming in at 6:00 am. Cutting short their holidays. It’s almost as if he wants to weed out the leaders and have them disposed of.

See, this is the problem with Caixinha’s ideas. He says he wants “real men” in the Sevco team, but they are exactly the sort of people who these kind of ideas will rile and annoy. You can’t treat those folk like children and expect them to tolerate it.

Besides, as I wrote earlier in the month, everyone knows there’s at least one person in the Ibrox dressing room who leaks like a sieve and who doesn’t even particularly try to hide it; Kenny Miller has so many mates in the press he might as well get his NUJ card right now, because he’ll have a column the second he hangs up his boots. He’s not the only one, of course, but if Caixinha really does want to focus his energy on this nonsense that’s where he has to start, otherwise he’s just kidding himself on and all this talk is for show.

All this mole hunting is a distraction anyway. He wants to do it for one reason only; so that when he starts trying to force players to terminate their contracts that the media doesn’t find out and the club is able to torment them in secret. It won’t work. Even Miller wouldn’t have been at the meeting where Harry Forrester, Rob Kiernan and Michael O’Halloran were told they’d be training with the kids at 6:00 am. One of those players leaked that himself, and why shouldn’t they? Unless there’s a clear-cut disciplinary reason for that sort of treatment these guys are being singled out and their lives made deliberately hard so they’ll walk away.

In any industry that would be called constructive dismissal, and it provides an iron clad justification for the players to take legal action against the club, by claiming it’s an effort to get them to quit. It is an underhanded, shady tactic which the PFA will end up dealing with.

Hunt the mole is a dangerous game. It can sew suspicion in a dressing room, and if you treat people badly enough it can actually cause even those who normally wouldn’t talk to the press to adopt a pet journalist and start blabbing.

It’s one of the many symptoms of a manager who’s lost a dressing room.

As I’ve said before on here, if Caixinha hasn’t yet then he will. He’s making every mistake a rookie boss can and this is just the latest of them.

It has disaster written all over it.

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