Oh poor Gerrard. Another day, another transfer target goes by the boards.
He wanted the young Millwall defender Jake Cooper, and I am sure people inside Ibrox had led him to believe that it was a deal they could close. Sadly for them the English clubs wants actual money paid into an actual account and not an IOU paid on the never-never.
Media sources have been briefed that the player is “not for sale at any price” but this is far from the truth, as it’s well known down south that he’s available for a sum around the £3 million mark. Sevco don’t have that kind of money, but Gerrard told them to move for the guy as if he believed that they did.
Which brings me to an interesting point.
The Wheelie Bin Revolution hasn’t gotten off to a great start, as Gerrard has realised he’s at a cut-price club in every way.
Now, we could all have told him that before he arrived but the more you hear on the grapevine the clearer it becomes that he really was made some grandiose promise by King and his board, and that he expected to have serious money to spend.
I find it more than mildly curious that King himself is all over the Gerrard deal. He took a back seat during the negotiations to bring in both Warburton and Caixinha – the latter famously never met him until the day of his unveiling – and both of those men arrived having a pretty clear grasp of the Ibrox realities. Not so with this guy.
King definitely told this guy some kind of fairy-tale about having tens of millions to spend, and Gerrard heard what he wanted to and believed it all.
Reality is dawning at last and he doesn’t like it.
As I said in an article last week, there’s no game-changing signing here. That club has not made the kind of moves in the market that would have given us genuine pause. The signing of a Millwall defender was certainly not going to do it.
But Gerrard did believe he would be able to build a team he could call his own. He now knows that’s not the case.
He is at the mercy of events already, and probably senses it.