Just when you thought this saga could not get any crazier and the people involved in it any stupider, but Dave King has announced that Gerrard has been secured on a four-year deal. Yes, read that again and try to take it in. A four-year deal.
The terminator line has been well and truly breached.
For those unfamiliar with the expression, it’s from astronomy and refers to the line that separates the light side from the dark side of a planetary body.
Oh they are in the darkness now all right and the only two unknowns here are how deep they go and how long they stay. If they emerge from it at all I’m be astounded.
You know, something like this, something this desperate, something of this nature, an “all-in” punt, was going to happen at some point. I just thought we’d have to wait a little longer for it. We just made it seven. I didn’t expect this until at least the end of next season and possibly even the one after that; in short, I didn’t see this coming until doubling down was all they had left, the only stratagem after all other barmy avenues were exhausted.
But here we are, at least twelve months ahead of schedule and I can’t help but think that the Scottish Cup semi-final crushing hit that club harder than we believed. Like getting whacked over the head with a hammer. Disoriented, stumbling in a bloody haze, they’ve reacted out of fear and confusion.
There is no other explanation for this; we completely obliterated the remnants of their sanity and sent them careening down the path to complete and utter destruction. They could not afford to make a mistake here.
They have made the mistake.
All that was left to do was put some sort of sensible limit on how damaging that mistake would be.
On one hand, you must give him and his advisors full credit for the way they’ve handled this. They have made sure that even if his managerial career is wrecked by this move that he’ll never need to worry because under the pay-off terms of a four-year deal – especially if, as I suspect, it ends before the first season is even up – the cash from Sevco season ticket holders will still be keeping him in retirement slippers even if he lives to be 150.
The one blind-spot, of course, is that they’ve failed to consider the full effects of such a big payday on the club itself, and you cannot have followed this story up until now and be unaware that such a scenario could quite conceivably wipe them out.
And in that scenario, of course, Gerrard gets only what the administrators or liquidators are able to get for him after everybody else gets theirs.
Look, Sevco fans are delirious about this news, or some of them are. There are a lot of them who are deeply sceptical and some who I’d go as far as to say are scared stiff, and they are the sensible ones because in all honesty I can’t conceive of any scenario in which this has a happy ending for their club. It’s a gamble of the craziest sort and with a hand so bad that the other card players don’t even need to look for tells because the stink is wafting through the room.
Before he even sits down to talk to the media the hype train has already left the station.
He’s already been warned, by the directors who hired him, of what the “expectations” are.
He is deluded to believe there’ll be big money.
He is insane to trust these people at their word.
If he thinks he’s been lied to he’ll not meekly accept it and knowing what we do about the state of that club you have to assume he’s been lied to over and over and over again.
He clearly believes he’s inherited the big seat at a global giant.
At a mammoth club with a rich history.
The reality is that he’s the latest to sit in a shabby electric chair that has fried the last four people who parked their arses in it. The club he believes is comparable with the one he’s just left is, in fact, the badly glued together bits of a shattered institution that collapsed in disgrace. The fans whose rabid personality disorders he’s mistaken for passion will turn on him the second it becomes clear that he doesn’t have a magic hat.
He believes he can handle a job and a task that, actually, he only partially understands. If I were a Sevco fan that alone would terrify me. But the four year contract is far and away the clearest sign that this is a gamble of monumental proportions, and the primary-risk taking party is the club itself.
A one year rolling contract would have put some ceiling on the consequences of this all going wrong, above and beyond what having to fund another squad rebuilding job will cost. A four-year deal primes a bomb at the centre of their club and they just handed Steven Gerrard the detonator.
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