Today, fresh from being hailed as the next manager of Liverpool – in the deluded minds of some this apparently is a possibility when anyone living in the real world knows there is no chance whatsoever of it happening – Steven Gerrard is being held up as a model for Scottish football altruism as he goes to bat on behalf of players everywhere who are being rough-housed.
What a brass neck, and what a craven media we have here for clambering aboard this latest bandwagon of his, another which is designed to accomplish nothing except make us forget that Gerrard’s team is rank rotten to watch and floundering.
Gerrard doesn’t want greater protections for players; of course he doesn’t.
If his own footballers were treated according to the standard he seems to be demanding of refs – where every robust challenge results in a yellow card or worse – his wee face would be tripping him in every match. The red card count would be equal to their points tally.
Where was all this talk of protecting other players when Mad Dog was gurning and elbowing and snarling his way through games? This is the manager who appealed the Ryan Kent red card when TV evidence showed clearly what happened.
Gerrard is showing the first signs of cracking under the pressure of this campaign.
He is concerned about the weaknesses of his own squad – shown up the other night in how few changes he was able to make for the Livingston game. He knows that a couple of injuries will reveal how few genuinely good options he has, unlike our own situation.
Look at the players who were either out injured, benched or otherwise not in the squad the other night when we beat Thistle; we could have fielded the following from the start, as an alternative starting eleven, and it would have been enough to beat anyone in Scotland; Forster, Bauer, Jullien, Simunovic, Bolingoli, Bitton, Brown, Christie, Johnson, Forrest and Edouard.
That’s the power Lennon has at his disposal.
Of those players named, only Brown played on the pitch at any point that night.
We breezed through anyway, and that even some of the hacks were forced to admit that Gerrard “couldn’t take any chances” with his team selection confirms that even they know he’s squandered fortunes and still not even got close.
Gerrard went to the bat for his own players, in defence of his own team, because he is petrified of what happens if he loses a handful of key players for big games. He could not care about the rest of Scottish football; no-one at that club does or ever has.
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