I read a lot this last week about people feeling sympathy for Graeme Murty.
It is a perfectly valid, perfectly human, reaction to seeing someone in a terrible spot. I understand it implicitly. It shows that there is a lot of generosity of spirit out there, and I admire those who can muster it. But when it comes to how I feel myself, I have to be honest; I have none.
In the last month or so, that man has been undermined and fatally compromised. He is being judged on results, and his future might well be defined by the manner in which he departs Ibrox. He has to know that. He has to know that his prospects of landing a good job somewhere down the line will be impacted by how he does in the here and now, and he has allowed himself to be brutally treated by the players under him and those above him alike.
Frankly, it has made him look foolish and weak and I can sympathise with someone up to a point but where their own action contributes to the way they are treated and they carry on making the same mistakes it runs out fast. Yes, it is dreadful how they have behaved towards him, but he tolerates it and he does not have to. He can walk away.
Nobody would blame him, even the hacks who worship at the Level 5 tit. King cut the legs out from under him prior to the club’s most important game of the season. In the run up to this one, they have destroyed his veneer of control by talking to other people behind his back and making sure the media knew it all, so they could sell season tickets.
He has to know that the whole country is watching him flounder.
I cannot believe he is not furious, but he is not acting like a man who is. He is acting like someone desperate to hang on in there even though his fate has already been decided. I cannot even muster grudging respect for him at this point; he is behaving like a kid who got a late invite to the party, gets there and is ignored by all the other kids, but remains perversely grateful just to have been there in the first place.
What does he owe these people now? Certainly not loyalty. Not even the professional courtesy they have resoundingly failed to give him. Even the hacks who the Ibrox board turned on him after Hampden must be astonished at the cavalier way they have disrespected him in the last week, and by the way he appeared in front of them today, like a guy who’s caught his woman with another man but wants to believe her excuses and take her back.
“I’m in the role currently. I love the role and will do everything I possibly can to keep it,” he said today, in spite of a week-long media circus which all points towards his not having a chance. Someone has been offered his job. It doesn’t get more final than that. “I’ll be fighting as hard as I can in these last four games to finish as high up the table as I possibly can,” he continued. “The club knows I want this job. There has never been any doubt about that. I’m massively honoured to be sitting here. This is a stellar job. In my first appointment as a manager I could not have dreamt of anything like this and I’m desperate to keep hold of it.”
How ridiculous can you get? How many people were in that room today? Every single one of them knew the truth; can he really be in such total denial about that?
I cannot put it more bluntly than this; Graeme Murty has been stabbed in the back and in the front and he is allowing his wannabee assassins to get away with it. He is already done for. That they have not yet put him out of his misery makes me believe that some of them are taking an almost perverse, sadistic, satisfaction in watching him suffer. They are wrecking his career and he is letting them do it. He is a fool for staying at Ibrox one second longer.
To put him away on Sunday would be a mercy killing right now.
He should not have allowed this to go on as long as he has.
That man could walk away right now, leave Nicholl to deal with Sunday and the fall-out, and be better off for it.
That he would so willingly put his own neck on the block for people who have done this to him … he deserves everything he gets.
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