Steven Gerrard was nowhere to be seen when Jon Flanagan was unveiled as Sevco’s latest signing.
That was probably wise.
Leave it to your assistant to announce something like that.
Leave it for someone else to sit in front of the hacks and answer questions about a vicious beating administered to a woman on a public street.
Good move, that one.
But you know, this one doesn’t just go away because he wants it to.
From the comments from McAllister and others you’d be forgiven for believing that Flanagan was the victim here. He wasn’t of course, he was the vicious aggressor. You’d also be forgiven for thinking that this was some kind of distant event from his past.
This happened less than six months ago. She’s probably still got his boot-print on her.
When a new manager takes over a club, he wants to make a statement there early.
The statement that Gerrard has made here cannot be mistaken. He’s saying that Ibrox is a place where even the worst people can come for career rehabilitation … and that’s going to haunt him long after this particular signing does.
They have an open door policy for violent thugs … as long as those violent thugs are available on a free.
Because let’s face it, this is nothing to do with rehabilitating a footballer and his reputation.
This is an act of desperation from a club who’s fans no longer care whether they are funded by Russian gangster or South African tax cheats as long as Gerrard gets his war-chest and in the absence of that they’ll take the dregs of football as long as they can play a bit.
Can Flanagan play a bit?
When I wrote my article on him when the press were linking him both clubs last week, I said that he didn’t meet our standards on or off the park and I stand by that with no equivocation at all. This signing is a joke in oh so many ways, but one Liverpool fan summed it up very succinctly when he said on Twitter that “Flanagan is going to the right club and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
And yeah I know Mr Odsonne Edouard had his own wee issue in France; a moment of idiotic behaviour firing an airgun pellet at a passer-by from a car. Had he gone to jail for that I might have said it was harsh, but he fully deserved to be charged and punished. Anyone trying to find moral equivalence between a bit of boyish high-jinks and a man kicking a defenceless woman on the ground is the one in need of serious help.
Gerrard might not have wanted to sit in at the press conference, but this one’s on him just the same. He has made it plain the kind of team he wants to build and the kind of example he wants to set to the world at large. It’s not a pretty sight, is it?