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Sevco Has Lost The Plot Completely. You Don’t Bury Bad News With Worse News.

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Sevco. You gotta hand it to them.

Who the Hell advised these people on media management? I thought they might make some attempt at media deflection today, as a means of trying to bury the Dave King story, but I had no inkling of what was around the corner.

They have tried to bury bad news with … errrr … worse news.

A seven week managerial hunt has ended today, with Graeme Murty. When I wrote yesterday about how Tony Pulis was a pipedream and that no “big name” could be expected I had no idea that it would be so swiftly, and definitively, confirmed. A fortnight ago Graeme Murty was taking the final bow. He was packing his pencils and talking about how much he was looking forward to taking a back seat role again. Today he’s got the job.

It’s just till the end of the season, according to the club. But that, in itself, is suspect. The announcement says he will be given full control over the January window – a total 100% reversal on the statement he himself made just seven days ago – and that he will have an input into the summer’s targets.

Does that sound at all tenable to you if they guy is going to be replaced then? It is farcical. It’s like they panicked this morning and decided to try to change the media story from the King situation to something that would be guaranteed to sweep it off the back pages … and they chose this. And our media is too spoon fed to challenge it in any way.

But the reek of chaos wafts off Ibrox in waves now.

This goes beyond mere shambles. This is anarchy.

Nothing at that club works as it should.

The boardroom wars which have raged over who the manager should be are over for the moment; the Murty faction has its man in place, the other side has collapsed in exhaustion. But even now no side has triumphed. Their opponents were weak enough that they got their one concession, the idea it’s not a permanent arrangement.

All this does is ensure that the agony will last all the way. When Murty comes to Celtic Park at the end of the month and goes home whining, tail between his legs like a whipped dog, the faction of the board which never wanted him in the first place will be vocal in its determination to undermine him. The stories about the global search will start anew.

There is no way that this lasts until the end of the season; Murty will be gone long before then, and serious damage will have been done to his career prospects. He must be a mug for agreeing to this, working amidst the noise of this insane asylum.

Perhaps he simply feels, as the minions of Milton’s Satan did, that it is better to reign in the Palace of Pandemonium than to serve with the angels in Heaven. What a let-down for him when he finds out that the third-rate Beelzebub who runs the club has no loyalty to a living soul except for himself. Murty is going to be hung up on a bracket before this is done, as pickings for crows. King is in full scale denial mode and so is his board.

They will sacrifice anyone before admitting they’ve gotten all of this horribly, horribly – and hilariously – wrong.

What mugs King has made of a whole lot of people here. The media who expected a huge name and were steered to write glowing tributes to the likes of McInnes – not to mention Craig Swan’s toe-curling piece of yesterday on Pulis; Good God he must want to hide under the bed this afternoon – have so much egg running down their faces even Kirk Broadfoot is jealous. They cannot keep on denying what is obvious now.

Sevco is not a big club. They are not seen as one. They are certainly not acting like one. No-one credible wants the job, and why should they? Because this club does not resemble an organisation with a scintilla of credibility. Everything it does is reactive and short term. They are locked in a spiral of bad decision making and panic which leads to more bad decision making which leads to panic which leads to … which leads to … which leads to.

And the most incredible thing about this is that it just keeps on getting worse. I know we all mourned terribly when Pedro left because you couldn’t help thinking that this was the nadir, that we’d seen the lowest of the low, that it could not possibly become any more hysterically incompetent, that they would never be able to beat that.

A six week global hunt which ended in being snubbed by the boss of Aberdeen and has resulted in them giving the job to an Under 21 coach who’s already lost three games … a complete reversal of club transfer policy, the upending of a thousand media pipedreams … on the day a court tells their “penniless” chairman to cough up £11 million ….

And to bury that story, they gave us this instead.

I watched Fargo the other day, one of my favourite movies ever, and I was struck as ever by the utter wretchedness of Steve Buscemi’s character, for whom everything that can possibly go wrong over the course of a movie does …

That’s what Sevco is like now. The hapless victim of a Coen Brothers film, stumbling from one indignity to another, like a drunk who’s shit himself and doesn’t even know it.

Who said the Banter Years were over?

It feels like this is just getting started.

 

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