Wow. Pedro Caixinha has given one of those interviews to the media, one of those interviews which makes your jaw drop and your mind reel for a moment. It is loaded down with the utter failures of logic and reality in it. It is mind-boggling.
It is unintentionally hilarious.
Let’s start with what he said about the team.
He says as many as 14 players could leave Ibrox, with as many as 11 coming in. So it’s real then. This guy is being given the authority to rebuild the entire squad. Remember when he arrived at Ibrox? The squad was perfect, so he said. They had the best team in the country.
That was less than six months ago.
Now he’s rebuilding all of it.
Brendan Rodgers arrived at Celtic and in a very short space of time turned a side that lost to Lincoln Red Imps into the Invincibles.
Caixinha is a chequebook manager, with a very thin chequebook. He’s doing what all sub-par bosses do. He can’t improve the current squad with innovation or inspiration so he’s going for the dumb method; rip it up and start again.
This is the mark of a man who’s indecisive.
But more, it’s the mark of a man who is weak and scared of failure.
He looked at that team and what happened to it over the games in which he was in charge and he bottled it. He has no idea how to fix what’s wrong. He’s simply grabbed a load of footballers who played in the countries where he’s been a boss and assembled them cheap; hey, either that or the agent who brought him to Ibrox is recommending them, from his own batch of players or those of mates in the business in a bit of mutual back-scratching.
It says a lot for the gullibility of the press and the Sevco fans that none of them has even bothered to ponder that theory, instead of gushing about how brilliant all these guys are, sight unseen.
It’s been weeks now since the players who are surplus to requirements were told they could go.
Some fancy footwork has gotten Garner off the wage bill; and to think he was such a hero to their fans too. Makes you wonder what went wrong behind the scenes, right? More on that in a few moments, believe me. There’s a story there.
But what of the rest? If they’re going to get rid of all those players they have to move fast, because right now the Ibrox dressing room must look like a film set with extras walking about everywhere asking where the buffet is. It’s sheer fantasy to think they’ll clear most of this dreck out.
The need to do so is acute, and not just for financial reasons.
Curiously enough, it’s Kenny Miller who’s seen through the bluster; they’ve gone out and signed two strikers who we are told are capable of being world beaters … and yet they gave him, a 37 year old, a brand new contract at the end of the last campaign.
Someone inside Ibrox rates him.
And it’s not the manager.
Miller knows there’s something not quite right about all this, but he’s assumed the mantle of dressing room spokesman and told the players already at Ibrox they’ll have to work to stay in the team. Yet for all that, he’s maintained that the club needs a “British core” of people who “get it.” He’s already questioning whether these guys will be committed, and he’s essentially setting out what he thinks the blueprint for the squad should be.
It’s a not-so-subtle dig at the signing policy, but he’s also saying it wouldn’t be necessary if the last guy had done his job.
As I keep on saying, Caixinha better be watching this guy. Before long, I predict that Sevco fans will, again, be saying he’s the best player at the club. Beyond that, he’s going to want the manager’s job, and he thinks he can get it.
On top of discussing his squad rebuild, he hit out with a Sevco fan favourite; how “special” the club is for the elements of The Journey. He’s right in one sense; they are absolutely unique. Unique in that they were liquidated for a tax fraud, reformed as a NewCo and suffer from the profound identity crisis of believing they actually avoided the grave and were, instead, victims of a conspiracy involving everyone from HRMC to the SFA.
“(We) must be the only club in the world that has been able to move from the fourth division to the Europa League in five years …” he said.
Well, yes, I would bet on that.
Especially when one considers there are six continents on the planet and five of them aren’t eligible to send teams to that competition.
There are numerous leagues where there is no fourth division.
And of those which there are there are some that are so utterly insignificant that I neither know nor care whether he’s right.
They choose to care about curious things over there. Having 50,000 fans packed into every lower league match would be a much greater achievement if they hadn’t constructed a toxic fiction to get them to keep coming; the Victim Lie.
He talks about how Celtic have won six titles “but (we) were only in two of those leagues.” He has his facts slightly confused; a team called Rangers played in one of them, and were liquidated at the end of that campaign. Sevco played in the other, and might well be gone before the end of the next one, depending on how badly he screws up.
But the comment is telling because of the colossal disrespect it shows to every other club in the country. What is it with bosses at Ibrox that they all talk this arrogant tripe the second their backsides are in the manager’s chair?
On top of all this, he comes out with this absolute beauty;
“It’s been going very well for me in Scotland …”
Ha! Stop laughing, I can hear you!
This is meant to be a serious piece!
Yes, things have been going well. So well that he’s having to rebuild the squad that he said was the best in the country. So well that they went from snatching a draw at Celtic Park under Graeme Murty, before he arrived, to the Skelping of Hampden and then the Ibrox Massacre just six days later. Aberdeen have won at Ibrox for the first time in 26 years.
Sevco is his fifth club in seven years.
None of the others fought to hang onto him. His career thus far has been largely free of scrutiny. That changed the moment he walked into Ibrox. Since he did he’s pissed off his own players by imposing draconian training regimens on them, he’s given insane press conferences where he’s revealed his tactical plans before games, he’s chopped and changed the side so much footballers didn’t know where they were supposed to be … this guy has presided over a mini-crisis already, except the press isn’t calling it that.
And one other thing; he’s lost the Ibrox dressing room.
Aaaah yes, all true.
Some in the media know this, and they must have thought that it had slipped our attention. But the Bampots have had a sniff of that story and we’ve seen it proved in his sudden rush to rebuild the squad. For those who missed it, let me enlighten you.
Pedro Caixinha isn’t buying all these guys because there’s some big rush to get the squad rebuilt before the Europa League qualifiers; they should be safely through the first round without any difficulty, even with the Accrington Stanley players.
In fact, this is a race to have a new team in place before the league campaign starts because he already knows that a lot of the current crop aren’t going to do it for him.
Why do you think he’s trying to force around a dozen of these guys out the door, when their replacements aren’t proven, when he’s no idea if they’ll settle, when he’s got no clear concept of what his team shape will look like or whether it will gel? It’s because these are his people, and they will be more susceptible to his ideas than the guys who were here before them, guys who’ve decided they’re not buying what he’s selling.
There are stories about more than half a dozen of these guys basically downing tools and chucking it during training or voicing their dissatisfaction at the imposition of an extra day of it on top of extending the sessions. There is fury about his cutting the pre-season, when many of the players had booked holidays and made plans. His disrespect for Scottish football extends to his own dressing room; this is not a benign, benevolent regime.
No-one will ever love this guy.
So, knowing that, Caixinha is bringing in a whole new team, to replace the one that won’t play for him. Miller, he keeps around because he has no choice right now. Whilst the current dressing room factions exist, and the players are still at the club, he needs Miller to keep the peace and hold it together. But soon enough he intends to cut his mouthy striker down to size … if Miller doesn’t get his job first. There is no love lost between those two.
The fact is, Caixinha went to Ibrox knowing it might be a short term stay.
He has no intention, or plan, to stick around and “build something.”
He’s already got out of this all he actually wanted, a job at a European club again, one that gets him in the papers back home. That he’s giving such a fulsome interview to them and talking about his career progression is telling.
This guy sees Sevco as a line on the CV, and he’s acted fast because he’s got one eye on the clock.
He’s burned one dressing room to the ground and he’s building a new one in its place, one loyal to him, and fast. He doesn’t care if the club takes a hit from this long term. If he even mounts a challenge – haha, fat chance – he’ll consider that a success.
At that point he’ll be touting himself, through his agents, to every club in Southern Europe who even hints at wanting a new boss.
The writing is already on the wall for those who can read it.