We are three games into the new SPL season and Sevco are already five points behind the champions and Invincibles.
If your side is trying to challenge for a title this is not the way you want to go about it. This was their second home game in as many weeks against clubs from Edinburgh. It was their second failure to pick up maximum points.
Just which of these sides is the club in turmoil, without a manager?
You would be forgiven for thinking it’s Hearts … but in fact, it’s the Ibrox club which is heading for rocks on the back of a disastrous appointment and some of the worst football in living memory.
I watched Celtic play earlier with six first team players left out of the starting eleven.
We have a further four key players out with injuries. And we breezed past Kilmarnock. Sevco has had no such injury concerns and a team we dismantled with routine ease on the opening day of the league campaign, and who are looking for a new boss after Cathro was dispatched early, held them today with consummate ease.
Sevco’s game was to lug the ball up the pitch.
Caixinha was supposed to bring continental flair; remember when you heard that?
Haha.
He has turned them into a public park team playing Sunday League football in no time at all.
All the optimism of beating Dunfermline by six is gone.
This team has been exposed for the woeful shower they are, early doors.
The longer Sevco persists with the Caixinha experiment the more horrible and painful it is going to be and this doesn’t have a happy ending either way. Today Ipswich won comfortably thanks to goals from Martyn Waghorn and Joe Garner. Barrie McKay scored for Notts Forest. Michael O’Halloran scored for St Johnstone as the hapless Columbian striker signed from Finland toiled yet again up front with Miller.
Do you sense the emergence of a pattern here?
Their club is in freefall. Caixinha has made every mistake a first year manager can.
He’s cleared out the dressing room of guys who wouldn’t play for him; that’s the prerogative of a new boss and he had little choice in it. But the guys he brought in are definitely not better than the ones he’s chased; those guys are proving themselves capable elsewhere.
But no manager with a reputation would have needed to take such drastic action. No manager who was capable of leading a dressing room would have had to clear one out instead. That the players so early on decided that he wasn’t worth listening to, that senior squad members have nicknamed him The Fraud, is astounding. His “team rebuilding” was an act of weakness, not strength. It was not motivated by the desire to make things better.
It was a product of fear.
That fear has leaped into the fans like a virus.
The pain is just getting started over at Ibrox.
They are stuck with Pedro and his witless team. Their football is turgid, dreadful stuff to watch; their fans must be just about had it with this guy already. During one of his rambling press conferences last week he said that the team never loses because they always learn from something when they do so losing is impossible. Whatever that means. I don’t know whether he has a talismanic spell against drawing too many matches, and today he doesn’t have a referee to hide behind.
The longer he is there the worse this will be … and some genius at Ibrox gave this guy and his management team a three year deal so sacking him is not straightforward.
But some things are. Look at the league table tonight. All the big talk of the summer – which had already crashed on the night Progres knocked them out of Europe – is at an end. To think that just eight days ago they were euphoric … what a shower.
This is the show that never ends. The gift that keeps on giving.
Chris Jack was celebrating earlier this season that The Banter Years were over. As per usual that eejit had the champagne corks popping way too early. We’re going to be laughing at this lot for a long, long, long, long time to come.