I read the articles this morning linking Ally McCoist with the vacant post at St Mirren with something like incredulity, because the central conceit at the heart of them is absurd. McCoist is free. There’s a post available. They are a newly promoted club. He wants to get back into management. A perfect fit, in the eyes of the press.
Read McCoist’s own comments and you’ll find out just how absurd this actually is. “It [St Mirren] is very handy for me, a good club and a good group of people running it now which has to be said.”
Handy for him.
The whole interview reeks of “Well, aye I’d certainly do them the courtesy of talking to them and if I like what I hear then yes I’d take their job.”
But first he has to be offered an interview, and frankly that’s not going to happen if the people who are running the club have a fraction of sanity.
The hacks are doing their bit for their mate. As usual it has led to them asking all the wrong questions and so is he. The media has never once, not for a second, stopped to ask the question not of what St Mirren could do for McCoist but of what McCoist could do for them. He’s managed two clubs. Rangers and Sevco. His bad performances and dreadful decisions helped liquidate one and broke the finances of the other.
McCoist was a chequebook boss who bought himself two lower league titles. He failed to win the third and was dispatched. He was unable to secure even a Petrofac Cup. He claims he “learned more in three years than most other managers learn in a lifetime”; he learned to spend other people’s money and rely on it for success, and even it wasn’t enough.
It is an embarrassment that this guy still hangs out on the fringes pretending to be a football boss.
His career is over.
When you can’t win Scotland’s third tier cup competition with an advantage in wages around 100 times that of your closer competitor it’s done and dusted and you’re wasting your time putting your name out to clubs for consideration.
Stewart Fisher of The Evening Times, who wrote the most stupid article on this subject, has drooled over the “box office potential” of McCoist going to St Mirren and of Livingston promoting their strikers coach, John Hartson, to the manager’s office. He threw Gerrard’s name into the mix, along with that of Brendan Rodgers.
But guess what?
Only one of those guys is qualified to be an SPL boss.
McCoist has shown how staggering unsuited to management he is and neither of the other two has ever managed a first team football match. This is all about bling, but sensible clubs will ask exactly what the benefits of appointing a rookie will be. Answer; few in number.
The dangers of appointing a rookie or a boss who’s a proven failure to take over a newly promoted club is just as acute as appointing one to try and wrestle the title from Celtic’s double treble winning team and manager. It would be an appalling risk.
Our media really are a desperate bunch, pushing celebrity names on clubs rather than experienced coaches.
One of the hacks who writes for The Evening Times is, of course, Lee McCulloch who the media pushed for to get a managerial gig which lasted about five minutes. Likewise, with their pal Barry Ferguson, another guy who might never sit in a dugout again. The trouble with McCoist is that he hasn’t sussed what a lot of ex-players who tried management briefly appear to have – like Chris Sutton, for example; that perhaps they don’t belong there after all.
That perhaps they’re not cut out for it.
But the media will keep on pushing them regardless, heedless of what damage they could do to the clubs which are daft enough to mistake prowess on the pitch for the ability to organise a team and win matches off of it. One is not the same as the other.
Hell mend those clubs which listen to the hacks and decide to find out the hard way.