It takes a special kind of player to get red-carded in a friendly match.
When that happens – something as rare as seeing cows on the moon – it tells you something. It drops a big hint. When the same player is then sent off several times in the actual football season that paints a picture that’s very hard to ignore. There are names for players like that.
The word “thug” springs to mind, although that will cause much howling from across the city. The media won’t use it either. They lobbied (successfully) to overturn one of the reds and to have him in the Scotland squad. Ridiculous stuff.
I was amazed at his conduct last season, because he never showed that level of viciousness at Aberdeen, perhaps because he wasn’t at a club which encouraged such vile tactics except against Celtic and when it came to employing people like Shay Logan, Jayden Stockley and such. In fact, the way they’ve lined up against Sevco over the years leads one to think that it would break McInnes’ heart if so much as an opposition eyebrow were mused.
But as so often happens, Ibrox has a peculiar effect on people. A player who hitherto had never shown such a level of aggression has turned into a ned, and he was lucky, indeed, that the crime count wasn’t even higher last season.
His comments about Cedric Kipre are frankly deplorable. He’s accusing a fellow pro of deliberately injuring him, and pushing this “because we’re Sevco” garbage to ever greater levels. I am amazed that Motherwell haven’t yet responded to his ignorant remarks, but I’m certain they will. Kipre is a decent player, but he is prone to carelessness as is evidenced by his short displays against us. But he is not a dirty footballer by any stretch of the imagination.
The idea that he deliberately set out to injure Jack is preposterous. His own manager at the time (Graeme Murty in case you have to try and work your way back through them, there was so many) didn’t believe it was deliberately malicious.
Jack says that if you asked ten people five would agree him and five would disagree; it depends, I guess, on who the ten people are. If they were scooped out of the Ibrox social media cesspit I’d wager the percentage in agreement would be far higher.
But if you asked normal well rounded football fans of other clubs they’d probably say that it’s a bit rich for someone with Jack’s recent record to be making such claims. It’s funny, actually. It’s as if he can’t even see the irony in what he’s doing.