Joey Makes His Debut … And That’s The Start Of The Slide.
The first time an audience would get an inkling that Jailbird Joey: The Movie is going to be about an enormous reversal was when the football actually started. Up until that point this could have been one of those movies where evil triumphs, subverting audience expectations; the schoolyard bully story where it’s the bully who’s still standing at the end.
But of course, from the moment he stepped onto the pitch for the first time in the SPL he was on the back foot.
If they were playing fair, any film-maker would have to focus, again, on the BBC’s coverage.
Because they actually had someone on hand to do a minute-by-minute accounting of his game. That article is up on their website to this day. It is full of praise for the handful of things he did right, but it crucially – incredibly – misses out the highlight of the match, when Ali Crawford, who bossed him all day long, nutmegs him. Quite how a minute-by-minute coverage failed to mention that salient detail, which is all most people remember about that game, is astonishing.
He was absolutely outplayed that day by Crawford and the rest of the Hamilton midfield, and based on what we know happened later it might be worth putting in some scenes of him moaning in the dressing room after the game about how nobody backed him up.
A few weeks later at Kilmarnock he was again bossed by a midfield where a 19 year Greg Kiltie absolutely destroyed him … and actually skinned him for Killie’s goal.
Off the field, there would need to be a scene of his notorious interview where he accused Brendan Rodgers of being all about “the tan and the teeth” and being in the midst of a mid-life crisis.
(An appropriate response to that would be to flash some images of him at his worst; brawling with his own players, snapping at refs, leaving court …)
At that point the media started to ask when he was going to start to play … and they were right to wonder, and they were right to be worried about his lack of impact, because next up was Celtic and the boss-battle with Brown.