Today Sevco played Motherwell at Fir Park and they were honking. They defended in a far more slapdash fashion than we have these past few weeks, but nobody in the media is going to call it a crisis. They have drawn two of their first three league games.
Gerrard’s overall record is now played eleven won six. Keevins, on the radio last night, was cheerfully telling us they will be looking forward to Celtic Park.
Well, not half as much as our strikers will be.
On Thursday Sevco play the Russians, away in Europe.
That’s a difficult game, and today was a difficult one for them. Gerrard’s entire season might pivot on them. Yet he appears less concerned with those two matches than he does with the one that comes next weekend, the one where he has to bring his rag-bag mob to our house. He has had nothing else on his mind for weeks.
Someone who’s concentration is so flaky is clearly already under pressure, and even as he talks about us and worries endlessly about the match he’s telling the media that this is not obsession. He sounds like guy in a police station saying that spending six nights outside the same girl’s apartment and calling her 200 times to leave messages on her machine isn’t stalking. If I were a Sevco fan, I’d be worried about this guy’s lack of focus.
The signals he’s sending out are pretty clear; you do not need an Enigma codebreaker to follow them. We are ever on his mind. He worries about us more than Trump with Robert Mueller. He has signed a full first-team squad and wants more players because he still doesn’t feel ready to play us; even coming off the back of the worst two weeks since Brendan’s been in charge, this guy was scared to death. Today, we’re one point ahead of them in the SPL.
Think on his signings for a moment; last night somebody on Twitter told me that we should have gotten his players instead, not for the first team, you understand, but to warm our bench with dross. That would have worked out well.
Look at some of those he’s signed.
Where’s the “wow” factor?
And if you were his bosses, wouldn’t you be asking just when he intends to start making the players he inherited better?
Gordon Parks, who produced one of last week’s most abysmal articles, was at it again today before their defensive horror-show at Fir Park, with another sophomoric piece of nonsense. In this one he seems to think the age of the ball boys at the Russia game is an indication of the positive changes Gerrard has wrought.
I won’t even go into it; it’s barrel-scraping with a shovel.
But when the hacks have to flag up something like that in the search for signs of progress you know how barren the landscape is.
As I said above, Gerrard’s win ratio is six out of eleven, and they haven’t played anyone of high standing yet.
As of now they are still unbeaten; well ra-ra-ra to that.
That state of affairs will end, at the latest, this time next week at Celtic Park, and he knows that himself which is why he’s spent the whole of last week sweating on it.
Celtic has three home games in a row, the first of which we’ve just won, just as Sevco prepares for game two of its away run.
For all the media opprobrium we had to face this past week because of our poor performance in Lithuania, I would rather have the home game in front of us with a 1-1 draw than a tricky away tie thousands of miles away, holding a narrow 1-0 lead, and especially with a defence that creaked today like a 75-year-old stripper trying to give a lap dance.
The media’s love affair – the Sevco fan’s love affair – with Gerrard continues to baffle me.
Had Caixinha or Warburton or Murty started this season in such poor fashion the clamour for them to improve would already be at high decibels. Not so here. Gerrard has some temporary goodwill. He has some time. But it’s already running out.
By this time next weekend, serious questions will already be getting asked, and because the transfer window shuts two days beforehand he’s going to be all out of answers.