Pedro Caixinha is definitely the right man for the Sevco job.
In a short time he has gone from being a personable, reasonable figure to embracing the full-bore paranoia, lunacy and hate that swirls through Ibrox like a tornado. Last night, in a breath-taking example of pandering to the lowest common denominator not just in the stands but in every part of the club, he issued a quite stunning, and bizarre, series of “protocols” who’s only consequence will be to remind the world why Sevco is a loathsome institution.
Towards the end of last season, I wrote an article which mocked their supporters websites because at a time when their team was in freefall they were obsessing over the colour of Barrie McKay’s boots. He had taken the decision to wear a green pair.
I thought this was moronic at best, and betrayed an underlying level of bigotry and bitterness which was seriously disturbing.
Incredibly, the green boots ban is now the official policy of the club, and Caixinha has made no bones about it; they are banning them because it’s the colour of Celtic.
This … is insane. What kind of football club which has aspirations to play at the big boys table acts in such a desperate manner? What kind of football club behaves in such a small-minded, petty, fashion? What kind of manager would order that, or director endorse it? What sort of behaviour is that for an institution which seeks to be taken seriously?
The same kind, presumably, which wants to paint a supremacist slogan on the walls of both the home and away dressing rooms …
I wish I was joking.
Caixinha puts it thus; “The slogan: ‘We Are The People’ will be stamped on the walls for both our players and our opponents to feel the strength of Rangers.”
There is so much wrong, so much that stinks, about that act, that it bends the mind.
What is that all about?
That slogan has always had a deeply suspect edge to it; it reeks of insular arrogance. It’s the language of the Lodge’s both Orange and Masonic, and has more than a faint whiff of sectarianism and even racism about it.
Who but a lunatic would suggest painting that on a dressing room wall?
It will not give opponents a sense of the “strength of Rangers” … it will give them a sense of the deep-seated sickness inside Ibrox, the one this club can’t shake itself from, the one that was ported over from Rangers when the best thing for them would have been to let it die with that club.
Is it a coincidence that he’s picked this point in the calendar to embrace this stuff? Of course it isn’t. Anyone who believes this is his suggestion is a bigger moron than he is for accepting it, and putting his name on it. But now that his name is on it, I hope it haunts him for the rest of his career.
It is a scandalously conceived act designed to cause deep offense.
Apart from its diabolical undertones, which are all too obvious, it is a blatant act of provocation that will inspire every player who looks at it to try harder.
It is putting there, for every member of every opposition team in this country, a simple set of words, whose meaning is impossible to ignore. It is what Dave King went out of his way to tell these clubs only last week; you do not matter. You are nobody.
I’ve heard of opposition managers pinning the words of a fellow manager to the dressing room wall to inspire them to action … I have never heard of the home manager doing it for every team who comes to visit, giving them their motivation to get a result before they walk out onto the pitch. It is the kind of egotistical action, divorced from reality, of which spectacular crashes emerge. There is no way this ends even remotely well for this guy.
Last week, in one of his newspaper columns, Derek Johnstone wrote of how “Pedro Caixinha will be aware of how many people in Scottish football dislike his team …” as if it were the fault of the other clubs that they are offended by the attitude that permeates Ibrox.
This is a sterling example of exactly why many people in this country positively loathe everything about them. From their chairman on down, this is a club populated by people whose every instinct is to behave in the most grotesquely unpleasant fashion towards everyone else in the game.
There’s no point in me labouring the point.
This act is unmistakably unhinged, and that Caixinha has signed off on it is the proof of what I’ve been writing here for a while, that this guy is mentally unbalanced, and that going to Ibrox was the worst possible move for him.
He is careening down a spectacularly self-destructive path here and he won’t stop until he hits the wall.