You just can’t catch a break if you’re head of Sevco PR can you?
Fresh from a week where they finally got ahead of the curve after last Sunday’s pasting at our hands, they surfed a wave of euphoria these last few days as football’s dumbest fans celebrated the appointment of an Under 18 coach with a big name.
Steven Gerrard has no managerial experience. It didn’t stop them from gibbering like loons, and from certain hacks to embarrass themselves with purple prose right out of a gushy romance novel. There’s being a fan-boy and just being a fanny. The line between the two has been well and truly erased on some of the tabloids.
Those tabloids had gone over his career and talked about what a guy he is. What a lovely, engaging man. How great he will be for Scottish football. Real journalists, on real papers, have been going through the back-catalogue of cuttings though and looking into his court appearance for a vicious assault and to other stories, even darker ones … ones about how he used a gangland enforcer to take care of a wee problem he had once upon a time.
I knew those stories of course; one of my mates and a co-worker on a number of projects is a journalist and photographer called Brian Anderson. His award winning photojournalism, capturing the bad lads from up and down the country, has featured in numerous books, TV shows and papers throughout the years. There’s probably nobody in gangland Britain he has not met and interviewed and gotten to know.
Amongst his many current projects, Brian runs a digital magazine called Glasgow Eyes which delves into that area.
Brian and I had a laugh about it some years ago, as he related the best bits of the story, the comic parts included, such as that Kinsella ended up getting sentenced for a robbery in 2008 wherein he and a group of men took down a haul at a storage warehouse that netted them detergent, Easter eggs and Pringles. Not that he was in any mood to serve the sentence; he absconded and whilst on the road actually lodged an appeal – which was successful by the way – relating to the length of it.
You couldn’t make this stuff up, but you couldn’t make up the best bit either … the letter which the Gerrard family had lodged with the court, in his defence during the case, which laid out the story of how he had stepped in to settle things between the family and another local nutter called George Bromley Jnr, who had been extorting Gerrard and generally terrorising him over a girl he once dated and protection money Bromley had thought he was due.
All of this might have slipped by the Scottish media, and Sevco were probably hoping that those stories would be left in the background where they belonged. But of course, when the God’s aren’t smiling on you they let you know it in so many ways. There’s never a dull moment over there, and the scrutiny the club has been getting these last few days because he’s been appointed manager is about to be multiplied ten-fold.
There’s going to be a lot of Gerrard related content in the press over the next few days, and I don’t mean The Record’s ludicrous eight-page pull out sort.
Because yesterday, at around seven a.m., Gerrard’s pal John Kinsella was shot dead in a gangland execution. He was with a friend, who was unhurt in the attack … the hallmark of a targeted hit. And so one way or another, Sevco finds itself back in the news and for all the wrong reasons.
And since the tabloids will have no choice but to lay out the full shady story once more – and it’s hard not to conclude that they will take some satisfaction in it, of course – I might suggest they take a fuller look at the events of 29 December 2008 again … a finer example of Gerrard’s “motivational style” you’d struggle to come across.
Sevco’s PR people have played a blinder this week … they got themselves in the papers again.
They won’t enjoy that much over the next few days.
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