Tonight, in the aftermath of Sevco’s crash back to Earth at Hampden, the excuses have started.
Pedro’s was set to be my favourite one; he put his own players under too much pressure. I’ll get to that in another piece, it’s part of the problem alright, but Bruno Alves has come in this evening with a belter of a one; Motherwell rough-housed them.
“I don’t like to speak too much about referees,” he said, before he went on to do exactly that, “But he cannot allow this kind of behaviour, because this is too much. It happened too many times. I am really concerned about this kind of behaviour. This is not football. I also like physical contact and to play hard but this was too much.”
Awwww poor boy.
“The first action in the game was an elbow in the face of Fabio. After this anything can happen. It can happen but he opened Fabio’s mouth. It’s not acceptable. I don’t like to find excuses for why we lost but I am really disappointed about this.”
Whenever I hear a player say he’s not trying to find excuses after he comes away with garbage like that you can believe that’s exactly what he is trying to find.
This one is a beauty, because Alves has built his career reputation on being hard. On being tough. On being a physical competitor.
You cannot have watched him, ever, and think this is a guy who was known for his passing ability or running ability or any of that “build from the back” stuff that good defenders, top defenders, like Virgil Van Dijk does so well.
Brendan wants our defenders to play like that; Dedryk Boyata is much improved at that side of his game in recent months and I give full credit to the manager for that. Based on how Brendan wants us set up, Alves wouldn’t get near our team.
At the first goal he is standing there, watching.
He does not impose himself on the moment.
He allows Moult all the time he needs to stick that ball away.
It was one of the most shambolic pieces of defending I’ve seen all season.
This guy is here on holiday. There is nothing to credit him as a great footballer, he has taken the club for a ride. He offers nothing they didn’t have with Clint Hill, except that he’s four times as expensive and a manager’s favourite. What a waste of money.
And so tonight he’s making excuses.
This guy, who was lucky he stayed on the park, the latest in a long line of Sevco captains you can barely book far less send off, is crying in the papers like a wee boy who’s had his sweeties stole in a schoolyard. Last week in the papers he was promising trophies. He was a winner. He was at Ibrox to secure silverware.
Tonight he’s telling the world he’s here for an easy ride and he’s greeting because it’s become clear to him that he’s not going to get one in Scotland; he’s not the first Billy Big Time player to come here and realise that it wasn’t going to be the picnic he’d expected.
But they didn’t all go running off the mouth to the media.
Some of them had the sense to be humble before the humiliation.
Is it SevcoLand that breeds this mouthy streak? We knew Barton would big himself up; it’s all he’s done his whole career. But to read a guy like Tavernier writing teams off because they don’t play in blue jerseys … you look back on his “career highlights” and you wonder where he ever got such an arrogant attitude? Josh Windass … if he could play as good as he talks he really would be a sure-fire bet to be at least as good as his dad was.
(Yes, Dean Windass; that’s two helpings of sarcasm for the price of one.)
Motherwell did play football today. They played very good football.
Chris Cadden was exceptional in the midfield where the like of Dorrans and Jack – two guys being lauded by our media last week, which was demanding international recalls for them – were uniformly anonymous, their defence handled everything Sevco produced, with ease, even the boy at right back who started nervously but had an excellent second half, and Moult and Bowman who terrorised that defence, and Alves in particular, all day long.
The media started out in love with this guy; you don’t read that kind of crap from them anymore.
In fact, the best thing they’ve written about him in the last two months was that he was rated more highly than all the Celtic players on FIFA 18.
Yeah.
Someone did their homework on that one, right?
It offends me to read such arrant nonsense as Alves is coming out with here.
He was rough-housed and bullied and outclassed today by a guy who spent the last years of his career before Motherwell at Wrexham and before that at Nuneaton Town.
Alves is a coward who came to Scotland for a soft seat and an easy pay packet. He has done the sum total of nil, except to elbow and snarl his way through a series of embarrassments. He wasn’t in Progres but the result would have been no different had he played.
He owes Motherwell and their fans an apology tonight; after he’s finished with that he should think about saying sorry to his own.
Right now he is a fraudster, taking money under false pretences.
He would do better to concentrate on improving his own game, rather than criticising how others play theirs.