The Daily Record’s Sevco writing team tonight wants us to praise the club for not “giving in” to pressure from Hearts over the Jamie Walker transfer fee. Apparently we’ve to give them credit for no longer being stupid and paying over the top fees for crap players.
Quite how they’re going to excuse the spending on Pedro’s dreck when the roof comes in is anyone’s guess but tonight let’s marvel at this fantastic piece of spin.
Sevco refused to “give in” to a club who wanted the market rate for a player. Rather than give Hearts credit – which not one outlet has done, nor will do – they want to give it to the club from Ibrox. Their pursuit of Walker was public when it should have been private. It was conducted through the media rather than via the clubs. Sevco was well aware of the transfer fee but rather than say it was too much for them and walk away they used the press to try and pressurise the club and the player in order to get him on the cheap.
Now we’re expected to believe there was some virtue in all this, that it’s a victory for good football governance, that it all makes the dysfunctional Ibrox operation look good.
What utter, utter contemptible rubbish.
This is coming from McFarlane and Scott McDermott of The Sunday Mail. McFarlane and Scott McDermott have released the so-called “inside story” of the deal on the Sevco podcast, and what’s the upshot of it?
That the club has finally learned not to throw away money.
You know what? It’s easy to talk about no longer throwing money away when you are skint. As I’ve said on here before, it’s no coincidence that clubs in the UK proved harder to deal with for this lot than clubs on the continent did.
The assumption in the media is that Walker will sign in January on a pre-contract deal. I wouldn’t put money on Walker ending up at Ibrox at the end of this. Clubs in England will be able to make him far better financial offers … and doubtless The Sunday Mail will run its own wee mini-campaign telling him to get out of his comfort zone and show more ambition.
(Aye, right. We all know better than that, don’t we?)
I find their efforts at spin control hilarious here. There’s no virtue in working like crazy to unsettle a player and then walking away cause his club won’t sell him on the cheap. It’s just wrong, it’s low-ball stuff, and that the media is pushing this line is scandalous.
Hearts do have an unsettled player. They have potentially lost money from a future fee. None of that could matter less to The Record and to the Sevconites. Because this is the level at which they operate, and this is the nonsense they push.
In the end, it’s all going to come down to cold hard cash, and if Hearts get any offer in January from anywhere but Ibrox it’s going to come down to the colour of someone’s money … and Sevco will have even less of that than they do right now, unless they really can find someone willing to take their extraordinarily unprofessional midfield maestro back off their hands. That’s the real story of this window, the signing of Pena, one the media seems curiously keen not to write although there’s an avalanche of available info out there for them to find.
But the idea that Sevco would have squandered what, to them, is serious money on a guy with more personal issues than a bus load of Trump supporters is one they’d rather not explore. No, instead lets focus on how they “saved” a few hundred grand they couldn’t pay anyway on not signing a fine young talent from Scotland.
What jokers these people are.