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The Only Criteria For The Next Sevco Boss Is That He Has To Be Desperate Enough To Take The Job.

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Mark Guidi. Aaaah how I’ve missed him.

And where is he plying his trade these days?

Well apart from running a PR company (stop laughing; I am doing a piece on PR companies for Fields and they are no joke) he is now doing Radio Clyde – the last bastion of the thick – and writing occasionally for The Sunday Post, a newspaper made famous by Oor Wullie cartoons and … ahem … not much else. Quite a comedown from when he was working at The Record and being read by hundreds of thousands of readers a day.

The steady decline in those numbers is one of the reasons he’s no longer there. That the decline was partly his fault is another.

It was The Post I found him at today, doing a piece on the Sevco managerial shambles, a piece in which he interviewed Arthur Numan and asked for his opinion on whether De Boer or Van Bronckhorst might be interested in the job. Hilariously, Numan told him that was a pipedream and that neither would touch it. “Ten or fifteen years ago,” he said, “they would have been interested. Not now.” I assume he meant in a job at Rangers.

He had a highly unoriginal suggestion as to who might be; Alex McLeish, who moved so quickly to distance himself from the idea a few weeks ago (doubtless hearing the drumbeat of Derek McInnes stories in the media) that you’d have thought Ibrox was radioactive. And actually, that’s not a bad way of looking at things there right now.

McLeish would take it, I reckon. He is piqued at not being asked. He is not the sort of man who will go crawling to them. But if they asked he wouldn’t hesitate. Pride would not come into it. He would not care that McInnes was asked ahead of him.

He’s not alone. A number of others like Billy Davies would take it. They all have one thing in common and it isn’t that they are “Real Rangers Men” who get it and couldn’t wait to ride to the rescue of the club they once played for; it’s not the club they once played for, so it would be hard to do. No, what they have in common is they are desperate.

To give Dave King a modicum of credit for a moment, he knows this full well. He knows the stink of it is on these people, and he knows that although some segments of the Sevco support would welcome them most would see it as the cheap option and they’d be right to.

But King has played himself into a corner with his stupid games; he has promised the fans a guy under contract, who knows Scottish football. That narrows his options severely, and they are further narrowed by the fact those who do tick those boxes also know what a shambles things are at Ibrox right now.

I don’t think their next boss will be a guy currently in a job. He will be someone who’s “between roles” as the media will put it.

I can write Keith Jackson’s column for him now;

“He was waiting for right opportunity” is how it’ll go, but he’ll be someone who an internet search will reveal has been linked with more clubs than Rory McIlroy and turned down more times than Chuck Sherman.

The criteria goes out the window for Sevco now that McInnes has snubbed them and they’ve taken a flamethrower to most of the other candidates. The unemployed and unemployable are all that’s left here now, and my guess is that it will end up being someone like McLeish who gets it, someone who’s tongue is already hanging out at the prospect.

It won’t be an up-comer, you can forget that right now. Nobody trying to build a career will go there knowing anything but second is impossible for the foreseeable future and that finishing there will be a sacking offence. That leaves the old timers, who the press will call “experienced managers who know the game and what it takes to win.”

Yeah, the game as it was fifteen years ago and, in the case of McLeish, who achieved his best results in the business with a team that, by his own admission, couldn’t have competed with the Celtic team of the time without the financial doping of EBT’s.

So everything you’ve heard about who the next boss at Ibrox will be … forget it all. Only one criteria matters now; someone desperate enough to take it.

That leaves the field wide open, of course.

It’s such a shame (haha) that it also means the quality of candidates will leave a lot to be desired.

No wonder they are praying for Murty.

 

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