Keith Jackson launched a broadside against Pedro yesterday after the cup semi-final fiasco. We had all expected that. Keith is persona non grata in the Ibrox press box at the moment, in spite of being a leading Dave King cheerleader. That’s gratitude for you, right?
When Keith writes an anti-Sevco piece these days you stop and wonder what the agenda is. Is he angry about his current status, and trying to rock the boat? Is he (don’t laugh) a concerned journalist doing his job and asking the questions that go with it? Or is he writing as a Sevco fan who can’t stand what’s going on and wants answers?
I’d say it doesn’t really matter. He’s arrived where some of us are, and have been, and so we welcome him to the quest for truth, regardless of his motivations.
Chris Jack is a different ball game. He’s not interested in truth or facts or reasoned argument, he remains a King loyalist and as blind as any guy in the stands. To read him turning on Pedro last night was to glimpse someone acting out of acute embarrassment at being made to look like a mug. Caixinha is just one of a number of charlatans to breeze through the doors of Ibrox these past few years; Chris Jack has waved a flag for them all.
His piece is lashing out at Pedro for letting him down, and for making him look clownish. As I said before the Ibrox game, there was only one mainstream journalist in the country who did not take Celtic to win that game, and it was Jack.
His prediction – a draw – was even more ridiculous when you consider he alone thought Sevco were not a long shot to win the match. He famously wrote that “the Light Blues are more equipped to deal with Celtic than they were when they crashed to a 5-1 humiliation on home soil last term but they may not be good enough to emerge victorious.”
In his after-match report on the game he said the defeat was “not costly” to the club. Now, today, with them out of the cup, he’s really crying the blues.
Suddenly Caixinha was a risky appointment. Suddenly his players don’t look up to par. In May this year he was all full of “Pedro needs time” and during the summer he was practically salivating as the players rolled up to the Ibrox doors. Then, at the height of it all, he pronounced the club in rude health with his ludicrous “the banter years are over” nonsense.
Within eight days Progres had been derailed. They were out of Europe against Luxembourgian minnows. He has alternated between fevered dreaming and cold bursts of reality since. Now, with the league race slipping away and another cup run over he’s snapped.
Jack is not interested in the quest for truth. He’s scrambling, madly, to rewrite the history of his own headlines and his own stupidity. This is a guy who ought never to be held up as a serious journalist; he’s a fanzine writer, doing PR pieces instead of news.
Caixinha was always a gamble. His hiring was ridiculous. There was no merit to it or logic in it. The decision was baffling and should have had people like Jack asking hard questions. They preferred to write puff-pieces and nonsense, to help the club sell season tickets on the back of a travesty. He and others spent the summer pushing the “Pedro will come good” narrative like a drug, when there was not the slightest evidence that he would.
Now, today, with egg all over his face and dripping down his chin, Jack has turned on the manager who’s praises he briefly sung.
If you’re employed by Sevco and this guy turns on you, that’s when you know it’s over.
Pedro, pack up your pencils my son!