Sevco fans have a lot to learn, it seems, and this in spite of the world continuing to teach them hard lessons in humility and their place in the grand scheme of things. The latest have come this week, as Lewis Morgan prepares to sign for Celtic and Tony Pulis is told there is no interest in him at Stoke City if they fire Mark Hughes as their club flirts with relegation from the EPL.
Why is the Pulis story significant?
Well, it’s clear that if Stoke had been interested, and that job was open, he’d have gone there in the blink of an eye.
He has also put himself forward for the job at Swansea.
They too have told him not to waste their time.
Sevco fans had harboured hopes of seeing both Morgan and Pulis at Ibrox. The second Celtic were in the market for Morgan that particularly party was over. Pulis is never going there in a hundred years, even if the offer from an EPL club doesn’t come. When he spoke recently about them being “one of the biggest clubs in Britain” not only was he talking about Rangers as opposed to Sevco but he was merely being polite.
(He praised Celtic even more fulsomely in the same interview; no-one is talking about that.)
It’s all moot anyway.
Nobody with any experience at a top flight club in England would go near the job. Far from them lining up to submit applications as the Sevco support seemed to think, no-one will go as far as to even touch the Ibrox door-handle for fear that King had stuck a whack of glue on there.
The fear is not unfounded. The longer the “hunt” goes on the more desperate they get. If they are finally forced into a semi-kidnap scenario where they lock someone in a room until he signs, like something Brian Clough would have done I will not be shocked.
They have been turned down by McInnes already, which sent seismic shockwaves through the club. But they also discreetly approached Chris Coleman only to be told not to waste their time with an official offer. Who knows who else has said no to them behind the scenes? Their scandalous press release on McInnes has torpedoed many a possibility with their insistence that managers who have expressed interest aren’t up to snuff.
But more, this club has folded that job up in garish packaging so extreme that no-one wants to pick it up far less start to unwrap it. The demands on whoever takes it are ridiculous; to win the league, and nothing less will do. Any manager who knows his stuff would conclude that’s impossible without money. Any manager capable of basic research knows they have none. It is a suicidal career move, and that is something everyone outside Ibrox knows full well.
From the inside of Ibrox –and in certain Scottish newsrooms – they might believe that all this talk about a club that “needs to win every game” sounds big and important and makes Ibrox sound like a place that attracts only the best, but from the outside of the bubble they look and sound delusional, like a club that has not comprehended the place it holds in the game here or the limitations that are imposed on. Their contempt for every other club is arrogance for which there is no basis.
Their public statements and behaviour make them look deranged.
They still believe a Van Bronckhorst type appointment is a possibility; it’s been seven weeks and the phone has not rung with a top class boss or his representatives on the other end of the line. Their overtures to possible parties couldn’t even yield a result from the boss of Aberdeen, yet the second Pulis said they were a big club – and remember, he meant Rangers – their forums were filled with optimism that at last the hunt might be over.
Based on nothing at all except their own idea of themselves.
Pulis, by the way, is no great shakes. It’s not for nothing that first Stoke and now Swansea have said they aren’t remotely interested in employing him. But someone down there will take him, and he knows it. Why do Sevco think he took the question about them in the first place? He’s advertising himself; believe me, he has zero interest in their toxic job.
Craig Swan of The Daily Record wrote a truly cringeworthy piece about Pulis yesterday, which claimed he was the man who ended Brendan’s hopes of winning the title at Liverpool when he “masterminded” the Crystal Palace comeback.
Actually the night that ended Brendan’s hopes was the one against Chelsea, but Swan appears neither to know nor care about that. Facts are not important to this muppet and the rag he writes for, after all. He has detailed the numerous rescue acts Pulis has pulled in his career, but opts not to mention that he’s been sacked by seven clubs out of the eight he’s managed. He has never won a trophy far less a title. His favoured playing style reeks; he is a long-ball merchant in a sport which moved on about 20 years ago. Swan thinks he’s a Walter Smith type figure. Yeah, without the money. Because Smith never achieved anything unless he was outspending everyone.
Also, what does the term “fraudulent misrepresentation” mean?
I ask because I had expected it to be in Swan’s article, and fully explained.
Odd that he left that one out, right?
Pulis has been described, and not just in Swan’s article, as a guy used to working with a “shoestring budget.”
Funny that one too. He’s spent £10 million plus fees on individual players at least four times at West Brom, breaking their club transfer record with three of them.
If wishing made it so, Pulis would be my choice of Sevco boss.
How many times does the bubble have to be burst before they get it?
Before they understand where they stand and what their position here actually is?
They are a club operating on the fringes of reality. Their fans still expect a “name” for the management post and when one isn’t delivered there will be 99 kinds of Hell to pay … but had the board been honest in the first place and at all realistic on what they wanted a new boss to achieve they may have gotten away with the truth.
Now I doubt their fans would swallow the truth. They are not built for it, especially when so much of their collective ego is tied up in the idea they are a super-club brought low by Scottish football’s hate instead of a NewCo struggling in early life as most of them are prone to.
That their managerial hunt has taken so long should already have woken them up. But they carry on in the fantasy. They are beyond saving from the darkness that will envelop them when the truth of all this sinks in, as it will after the New Year.