And we’re off and running.
The minute it became clear that Sevco’s season is all but over, and in ruins, the media wants to move us on to the silly season of transfer speculation, all the better to sell season tickets over there. And what a start to it we have, with the Scott Arfield business.
I wrote about this yesterday; talk about kite-flying. Arfield may or may not be on the way to Ibrox on a pre-contract agreement – he will be costing them a fortune if he is – but the last people I would take as source material for such a claim would be the geniuses at Sky Sports News who’s “sources” said Brendan was on the way to Liverpool, who actually had Dembele sold on Christmas Day and who are the last people to believe Charles Patterson is a journalist.
Arfield is a lot like the midfielders they already have at the club. He plays a certain role. He fulfils a certain function. This reminds me an awful lot of the hype over Joey Barton, who also played at Burnley. Remember how he got on?
John Hughes is in one of the papers today talking an almost absurd amount of tripe; “they will be getting five players in one” if they sign Arfield. No, big man, actually they’ll just be getting one. There’s hype and then there’s this kind of stuff.
The Record is gushing that it will be “the best bit of business the club has ever done.” They’ve clearly ditched the Survival Lie, because if they are including him on the same timeline as people like Laudrup then clearly that’s a ridiculous comment. He “impressed during a fine campaign for Burnley” says the paper, omitting the fact he’s played only half the games and been dropped the other half this season. Oh yeah and he was “overlooked by Scotland” and chose to play for Canada as well. Who have obviously overlooked him of late … he last played for their national team in 2017, and has featured a total of twelve times for them.
There’s also talk of Palace midfielder James McArthur. These two players have a couple of things in common; they played in Scotland and they are available free. There is a lot of talk about which team they support; I’ve written before about the utter folly of filling the team with “Real Rangers Men” and I don’t see any reason to change a word of it.
That club needs more than midfield bling. It needs a rebuilding job that should have started at the back. More midfielders? That’s creating a classic squad imbalance, but in their desperation I guess the Ibrox club are ready to try anything.
Which is why I found the story about Glen Kamara interesting and kind of hilarious this morning. This is another one of these “the Glasgow clubs are set to go head-to-head” type stories, and I find it amusing because Kamara is based here, at Dundee, and I actually had to go and look him up. I know Brendan has an eagle eye but this one smells like dead fish.
I would say that Kamara is closer to what their fans should expect from signings except that he’s carrying a £1 million fee … which means if Celtic were interested that would be the end of the Ibrox club’s involvement in the story. The days of “head-to-heads” with that lot are over; any such contest has one winner and one winner only.
I just find it curious that if we’re in the market for a midfielder and Arfield and McArthur are so good, and available free, why we aren’t going for them … except that we don’t do Sky Sports Scouting. We have a little more to our bag of tricks than that.
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