This morning a mate of mine sent me a video clip that is doing the rounds on the Sevco fan forums and elsewhere; in it Pedro Caixinha talks to their in-house media after yesterday’s game, where they lost 3-2 at home to Neil Lennon’s Hibs.
The whole interview is painfully hard to watch; Caixinha’s manful struggle to explain himself gets more ludicrous by the week. But this time there was anger too, and spite. He peddled conspiracy theories. And he moaned about our former boss, buying right into the anti-Neil Lennon sentiment that sweeps through his club’s supporters.
Does he know our former manager once recieved a bomb in the post?
Does he care?
Caixinha is slowly but surely being overwhelmed by the same creeping paranoia and egotism that eventually gets every inhabitant of the Ibrox manager’s office.
Remember when McCoist was a genial nice guy, or so the media image of him suggested?
How long did it take before he was an aggressive, self-righteous, arrogant bully, making demands and stoking hate? Almost certainly there was always an Ally McCoist who was all of those things, carefully hidden from the public view, but that job magnified those traits spectacularly.
Mark Warburton was clearly a good man before he ended up at Ibrox.
His early press conferences were open, honest, and forthright, he was considerate towards other clubs and other managers. By the end, he was trotting out nonsense about the world hating them and taking his team to sectarian friendlies, wallowing in the hatred. He was also secretive, dismissive of legitimate questions, prone to angry outbursts and even played a role in the public humiliation of one of his own players.
Part of that was the PR operation surrounding the club; without a doubt, that factored into it. Who can forget the sight of him being marched out of a press conference he was in the middle of, by a skulking, scowling, Jim Traynor?
But it’s no excuse. That job did terrible things to him.
Caixinha was clearly a little bit unhinged before he got here; reports from Mexico already suggested that he was easily provoked and ridiculously overbearing. But the way he’s behaved since getting to Scotland has surpassed even the most crazy descriptions.
That’s all part of the man’s personality, perhaps, but there’s that other thing too, that supremacist mentality, that idiots mindset which sets their club apart. That’s there, in full, with this guy already and he’s not even been in the job six months.
It does not bode well for his future.
He’s already swallowed it whole and he’s choking on it already.
The interview he gave after the game was a sterling example of everything that’s gone wrong with this guy and a clear-cut demonstration of where he’s heading. Aside from the casual embrace of the notion that all of Scottish football hates his club – and him – there was a telling moment, about two and a half minutes in, when he said this;
“We are here, we are united, we are the people.”
My jaw dropped listening to that, although my mate who sent it to me had previewed the moment in an earlier email. Because it’s so nakedly out there, so ridiculous to hear a manager come away with a statement of such breath-taking arrogance and stupidity, following a game in which they were comprehensively outplayed for much of the time.
This is playing to the gallery of the worst kind.
It is deeply disturbing, and you wonder how far this guy might go in order to keep the Peepul on his side as the progression of his team, the downward slide, becomes more apparent.
I never had that worry with Warburton or McCoist; they both had to work on this island again, and both had a grip on sanity. Not so this guy. He is a hothead, and although he mouths the slogans and even had them painted on the dressing room wall you get the distinct impression he’s got no idea what he’s tapping into.
That means he could do anything, heedless of the consequences.
His stoking of the anti-Lennon hate yesterday was but one example, and it could prove heavy when these two clubs meet later this season.
The irony of all this is that none of it will save him in the end.
Sevco fans already see things that seriously worry them; even they are not falling for this obvious pandering. When even the most optimistic of them concludes that this team is no better – is in fact worse – than the one Warburton built they will turn on him with a vengeance.
The signs at their own club are worrying enough but yesterday Waghorn scored a match-winner on his debut and O’Halloran was superb for St Johnstone, adding to the excellent displays other of their former players have put on since leaving. It makes you wonder if he got anything like their best, and it’s notable that he’s already begging for his Colombian striker to be “given time” although he’s scored three goals in the last two games … but after putting the ball in the net yesterday, in the opening minutes, he was utterly ineffectual.
Actually, he was useless.
And the manager knows this full well.
The doubts in the stands are wholly justified. His pitiful attempts to ingratiate himself with the Peepul is doomed to disaster for this is the most ungrateful and intolerant support in the world. Ally McCoist gave them the best years of his career, and coined one of the more ludicrous phrases they cling to like a comfort blanket, this “we don’t do walking away” nonsense. Easy to justify to yourself, that one, when it means leaving a multi-million pound contract behind.
For all they loved his exploits as a player, and for all they bought into that transparent nonsense when he was trucking it around, they were ruthlessly unforgiving when it was time for the axe to fall. The Peepul have been conditioned to think they are something special, somehow superior, and if you needed any proof that Caixinha just doesn’t get it then it’s contained in that ridiculous phrase. In reinforcing this view he’s making failure all the more difficult for them to swallow.
The noose is already around his neck.
Right now, like a sleepwalker, unaware of his surroundings and his actions, he tightening it himself.