Over at Ibrox Noise, the gibbering loons on their editorial team have churned out another of their delusional and paranoid articles about how everyone in Scotland is petrified of Steven Gerrard pitching up at their club. Seriously? Are these the stupidest people in the blogosphere or what?
Have they not seen the hilarity with which this idea is being greeted by our fans?
I cannot stress enough how keen I am for this to happen.
I could start writing Gerrard’s managerial obituary right now, and the one for their basket case club while I was at it.
I have a lengthy piece on Gerrard to put up later today, but watching him smirk his way through a couple of comments last night on BT Sport brought home to me something that I should have realised a lot sooner.
For Gerrard, this is brilliant.
The English media is falling all over him to tell him how great it is that he’s been given a big opportunity … but at the same time, there’s an underlying condescension which has been entirely missed by the commentariat up here and which has most definitely not sunk in to football dumbest fans.
I keep on hearing how Gerrard is “box office.”
Even if he were three years younger and able to pull on the football boots, this would be largely nonsense.
Hasn’t our game here seen enough of this kind of patronising cobblers? Gerrard is an ex-player whose managerial career amounts to a few games in charge of Liverpool’s Under 18 team. He brings with him a famous name, but really, is that what all the fuss is about?
He is not merely Steven Gerrard, he is STEVEN GERRARD.
And it’s almost as if Scottish football should be grateful that he’s even considering the job.
Sevco fans who were shrieking about Murty’s lack of experience – and Ibrox Noise was screaming it from the rooftops since he was appointed – and a media that scorned the same are dismissing the obvious problem here as if it weren’t even there … what’s the matter with these people?
Have you read some of this nonsense they are coming away with?
Top players will follow him here. Oh yeah? They’ll reject big wages and global exposure to come and play in the league everyone south of the border thinks is a backwater? Of course they will. What does it say about the way these people perceive our national sport that they believe this? That our profile will be increased exponentially because a big name ex-player has decided to cut his managerial teeth at one of our clubs?
When do we grow some spine and stop rolling over to have our tummy’s tickled by these patronising yahoos?
There’s a certain blindness in some sections of the media in relation to Brendan Rodgers at Celtic. It’s this idea that our club has risen from the ashes only because he’s in place, and it’s absolutely ridiculous as I’ve written many times. Celtic was able to attract Brendan Rodgers because we had done the groundwork and got the fundamentals right. He came here because of the size of Celtic, not on some quest to be the hero at the centre of his own movie.
Brendan and Celtic are right for each other, but he has never deluded himself into thinking this is a marriage of equals. He wants to shape Celtic into a design of his choosing, but Celtic was here before him and it’ll be here when he’s gone.
Celtic is the sum of its parts, it is not a single man and it never has been, not even when Jock was here.
Sevco are making a colossal mistake here without even knowing it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with appointing a rookie. If Gerrard accepts the job it’s because he understands something fundamental and which they appear not to; he is strong and they are weak. He will be the senior in the relationship. His global profile dwarves theirs. His name rings out far beyond their own. One of their websites gloated that he has 6.9 million followers on Twitter to their few hundred thousand … as if that were a positive. It’s not. It’s quite the opposite. He will have no interest in building Brand Sevco, this will all be about his own personal name and marketability.
This is why I’m in no way surprised by stories that one of the sticking points in the negotiations so far relates to image rights; his image is worth more than theirs and he will be ever aware of not wanting it to be tainted by whatever happens to him there.
Gerrard has already fallen into a deep and wide ego trap; he believes, as others before him have, that winning the title in Scotland amounts to simply “beating Celtic once in a while” and whilst certain people fawn all over him and talk this “box office” bullshit they are perpetuating that ridiculous and dangerous myth.
But it’s more than that.
Sevco forums were bloated with ego last night because of that sixty second segment on BT Sport.
And without even knowing it, they were being trolled.
They’ve accepted the premise of everything we’ve been saying about them for years; that they are nothing now. That nobody cares. If they need Gerrard to turn them into a “global brand” that’s an explicit realisation that they aren’t a big club anymore and the idea that Gerrard knows that but is riding the current wave to enhance his own standing, in anticipation of a real job somewhere down the line, hasn’t even entered their darkest dream yet.
Deeper even than that is the thing that comes across most; what they failed to grasp last night, watching him on BT Sport, was that their club was not the subject of the discussion. Gerrard himself was. They fail to grasp that if their greatest media fantasy comes true and the coverage they get worldwide increases as a result of this appointment – it won’t, by the way – that the world will not be watching them, it will be watching him.
This is not the Sevco show, it’s the Gerrard show and in that they are simply a bit part player.
This guy doesn’t come as a one-man band. His time in the EPL has surrounded him with advisors and media consultants and brand managers and an assortment of other characters whose sole purpose is to big him up and make him look good and in the event that his appointment at Ibrox is a disaster – and it will be, because even an experienced manager would be colossally outgunned here – their job will be to deflect blame away from him towards someone else.
Scapegoats will not be hard to find.
If Sevco believes this is a guy who’ll die in the ditch for them, I strongly advise them to think again. Lost in their ego trip they’ve failed to recognise that he has a bigger ego than any of them. If he takes the job it’s because he thinks he’s going to lord it not just in Scotland but first and foremost over them.
Anyone daft enough to take this job is a danger to himself. Anyone who arrives at the club with such a bloated self-image is dangerous to it. Have they learned nothing from the last media feted puffed up clown who promised them the world and didn’t deliver?
I’ll give them a clue; he calls himself their chairman.
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