Tonight, if you look carefully enough for the piece – it was supposed to be in The Evening Times but it isn’t on the website – you’ll find John Hartson delivering a message to Sevconia, and one that it has no interest in really hearing.
I am not saying they pulled that article deliberately, but it was not the sort their target audience enjoys.
Big John didn’t give them anything that we haven’t been saying, but I thought he nailed it nonetheless.
Hartson is a smart man, and he might well find himself in a manager’s office before too long. He has earned the right to talk about what he likes, and what he wanted to talk about to the media today, at a hospital where he was doing charity work, was Gerrard.
More specifically, he wanted to talk about the response to Gerrard amongst the Sevconuts.
And what he had to say was not flowery praise, but a little hard realism. Not only does he not think Gerrard can catch Celtic – which means his sacking, it’s inevitable – but he reckons that the fans euphoria will die pretty quickly too.
He reminded them that all this hype was present last close season too. They were drooling over signings who ended up a colossal waste of money. None were high calibre footballers; they were just massively hyped. The same way their current signings are being massively hyped. And Caixinha was, we were told, a guy working with shoddy materials when he first arrived at the club, and he would be transformed with his own men around him.
All of it was nonsense. They inflated a bubble that was always going to burst, and this bubble is bigger because Gerrard has ten times they hype attached to him, and so the expectation level is entirely through the roof.
Remember, this guy has never coached a senior, professional, match in his life. When you’re a player you can make mistakes and have bad games and you never get to feel the heat in the manager’s office. When you’re a youth team coach the kids all look up to you and there’s nothing at stake. Hartson doesn’t know any better than Gerrard what life in the pressure cooker is going to be like, but the fact is he doesn’t have to; he recognises this for what it is.
Sevco fans are setting themselves up for one Hell of a fall, and Gerrard – and can this guy get through a single press statement without a cliché? “Time for me to walk the walk”? And from the media reaction you’d think he’d invented the wheel – well, he’s walking into something he cannot even properly comprehend.
Well, Sevco fans, I know what you did last summer.
Exactly the same as this.
This has “car crash” written all over it.