Pedro Caixinha is a man who gets confused easily.
And I mean like very easily.
He gets confused by traditions and customs.
He thought We Are The People was a reference to Sevco as a club when in fact it was a slogan of religious supremacy. And not that of his religion. He grossly overestimated the decency of the company he was keeping.
He gets confused by tactics and concepts in football.
Which is why he’s failed everywhere he’s been, has averaged two years per club and why his time in Glasgow is doomed. It’s why he lost to a team that came fourth in a part-time league.
He gets confused over the merit system in football.
It’s that one which says the team at the top of the league at the end of a season are crowned the champions. It’s served the spot well over the years. Pedro thought wee fantasy league tables constructed inside your own dressing room mattered more. And he came third in those too.
He gets confused over how you judge a team.
One that consistently wins things, gets its players called up for international games and which goes a season unbeaten is generally considered the best squad in the country. He has publicly declared that two of his teams were better than ours. He dismantled the first without ever bothering to correct such a stupid view, after we’d easily dispatched them at Hampden and soundly thrashed them in front of his own fans. He said the same about this one, assembled at great expense, even after the Luxembourgers had beaten them.
He is now confused over how the discipline system works.
Now he’s keeping a “record” to see whether decisions which go against his team “even themselves out” over the course of the season. What a clown this guy is, and I speak as somebody who once harboured a very similar ambition; I started my own running count of bad decisions a few years ago, as some of you might recall. I even had a scoring system and I just bet in his current funk he has one of those as well. Jesus wept.
I realised pretty early on that this was obsessive behaviour and totally paranoid. It was also a lot of time and trouble for no gain whatsoever. It was based on subjectivity and in the end wouldn’t have changed a single thing.
Besides, the fundamental premise behind it was bonkers, as I knew at the time but was happy to ignore whilst my little project was running … for all the time it was.
See I’ve heard this “bad decisions even themselves out” patter for years and it’s just as corny, clichéd and nonsensical as this garbage about “the form book goes out the window” for certain games. Know who believes that? Mugs. And that’s why there isn’t a licensed bookie anywhere on this island who can’t afford turkey at Christmas. Managers have been sacked over the pressure that ridiculous belief heaps on people. The form team nearly always wins these matches, and that’s the same for any big game about which this lunacy is occasionally brought up.
And as form counts, so too is it true that bad decisions almost never even themselves out over the course of a campaign. Because some games are bigger than others.
If Caixinha wants to cry the blues he can go and find Ronny Deila; bad refereeing cost him a shot at a domestic treble, and that ultimately contributed to his eventually leaving the club. A guy who had done the clean sweep and followed it up with a title would have earned another year at least. Tell him that it “evened itself out” because we got a good decision against a bottom-dwelling team in a league match that ultimately meant nothing a few weeks later.
It’s nonsense. It’s just absolute garbage.
I’ll tell you who could keep a record of Scottish football’s dark side; Kieran Tierney.
If you look at the bruises and bumps he must have from this season alone – not one of which, including some basic assaults – has resulted in a red card, you can see exactly how “even” things are. I predict he’ll see a red card before one’s given for a foul against him in this campaign.
What exactly is Caixinha going to do with this ridiculous dossier once it’s finished?
Have it bound it leather, so he can stick it on the mantelpiece? Perhaps he’ll drop it off at the UN or Downing Street? Perhaps he’ll try to spin it into a Great Scottish Football Scandal … cause the press has a long and illustrious history of really digging deep into those, right?
In this case, I think some of them just might.
But honestly, all this sounds like the laying of a great conspiracy theory, or perhaps putting down roots on the Big Excuse when it all goes wrong, and that’s part of the problem here, of course, because Caixinha is a dead manager walking and it might be something as unavoidable as a ref not spotting an incident or thinking he’s seen more than is there to bring it all crashing down. And you know what? That won’t even itself out.
Because sometimes it doesn’t.
I don’t think he believes half the nonsense he talks, or feels he has to talk, as a consequence of Ibrox’ unique working environment. Whoever is filling his head with this nonsense ought to quit. They aren’t doing him any favours.