Everyone knows that I think Kris Boyd is a blowhard and not fit to be working for a national newspaper.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Boyd has hit the mark with his latest piece, which accuses Sevco of playing games with other SPL clubs and trying to unsettle their players. Ironically, Boyd himself has helped them do it at times.
The media has so much previous for this it actually feels like banging my head against the wall to keep hitting them on it. Boyd offers no criticism of the hacks or the ex-players who cannot wait to run to the press with these kinds of stories, but his barbs directed at the club itself have weight and everyone knows that they do.
The offers to Hamilton and Kilmarnock were rightly described as “insulting.”
They were meant to be. The aim is not to get the clubs to agree to part with players on the cheap; Killie and Hamilton will never sell at the quoted prices. It’s to upset the players themselves because if they start agitating for moves then control of the situation moves from the team that holds the contracts to the one stirring the soup.
That way, when Sevco makes its next offer, it’ll be harder to resist.
Sevco wants to get these guys for under their value. That’s no sin in itself, every club wants the best deal that it can get. But Sevco is using the media to do what it can’t do with cold hard cash; force the hands of the clubs who have these players under contract.
When Celtic was after Jonny Hayes we did our negotiating with the club itself. We didn’t use the media to constantly undermine Aberdeen’s efforts to keep him. In the end, we paid a fair price and reached an equitable agreement. Sevco worked hard to undermine Hearts efforts to keep Jamie Walker, without ever submitting an actual bid for him. They continue to talk around Kenny McLean without making a concrete offer.
Here, in both cases, they have offered money, but that’s a smokescreen. We don’t know how much and we don’t know what the terms of it were. Some in the media say £300,000 was the offer they made for Jordan Jones; forget that it wouldn’t buy the left half of him, we don’t know how much of that was up front, how much was in instalments, how much might have been dragged out as pitiful incentives. Kilmarnock had no problem turning it down.
Yet the Jones move was a club doing things credibly in comparison to what they did over Greg Docherty at Hamilton, where they leaked their interest to the media in lieu of even making an opening bid. The opening bid itself was far below his valuation.
It’s as clear as day what the strategy is here, and Boyd is right to call it out. Where his argument falls completely short is his failure to follow through with the plain fact that Sevco’s strategy could not succeed if the media didn’t print every word that comes out of the Ibrox PR team.
Kilmarnock could simply have rejected the bid as unsatisfactory; it’s the hacks who are doing the bidding of Sevco by asking how much Jordan Jones is really worth. It’s them accusing Hamilton of “standing in the way” of Greg Docherty’s “dream move.”
Boyd’s trouble is that he hasn’t grasped yet that he’s inside the tent pissing out, not outside the tent pissing in.
He’s not a rebel, speaking his mind. He has no mind.
He might think slamming Sevco in such a fashion makes him independent … but he’s just another hack and as long as his bosses are doing the club’s bidding he’s kidding himself on about being part of the solution. He writes for The Sun.
Until he points his criticism in their direction – at which time he’ll no longer be there – he’s part of the problem.