It is convenient, even easy, for Sevco fans to point their fingers at others for the mistakes that are made inside their walls. It plays in to a psychological need many of them have to create conspiracies and multiply hatreds.
But it has consequences they don’t always expect.
One of the things they are discussing over in La La Land today is Morelos and his drop in form.
Now, this is not the first time he’s gone through such a dip but it feels significant, it feels different. Nobody at Ibrox believes they’ll get £30 million for him anymore, not when he is huffing and puffing and Eddie has cruised easily ahead of him in the scoring charts.
What’s more, Defoe is ahead of him by a goal despite having played less football. Sam Cosgrove, Christian Doidge and our own Ryan Christie are just a goal behind him. Lyndon Dykes is two shy of his league total, which is an unimpressive 12.
Morelos looks like a player whose confidence is shot. I don’t doubt he still score goals between now and the end of the campaign, but he’s not playing like someone who wants to be on the pitch at the present time. Sevco fans want to blame us for that.
But in fact, the people who have done this to Morelos are inside the walls of Ibrox.
They are the people who are putting insane valuations on him, both ramping up the pressure and pricing him out of the move to the kind of club he wants.
It’s those who are comparing him to Suarez and other top players
. It’s the people who are dressing him up as a hero of the working people of Colombia and a paragon of family virtue when the truth is very different.
Those working the Ibrox PR apparatus have put their player under an intolerable spotlight, asking him to live up to an impossible standard and at the same time focussing attention on his personal life which the media would never otherwise have taken.
In claiming he gets a hard time from referees they have made him the most scrutinised player in the game.
In bringing up allegations of racism they’ve forced people to ask why other high profile black players don’t get this treatment … and that has led to articles by people like Leckie and Provan and Stewart which focus on his on-field behaviour.
The media whirlwind he’s found himself in these past few months is entirely the creation of the Ibrox spin machine, with every part of it sparking unintended consequences and causing problems where there otherwise would have been none.
And he’s clearly not dealing with it well. As a result of his collapse in form, the Sevco forums are casting around for someone to blame and they’ve created this whole new conspiracy theory about us ramping up the media pressure to “force him out of Scotland.”
Really, with the form he’s in at the moment why would we even bother?
He’s more use to us lumbering about in their first team squad contributing nothing, racking up bookings, turning the heat up on the spotlight.
They simply refuse to accept that this was the fault of those inside the club who wanted to promote these nonsensical stories about how the press and others were trying to unsettle him. The player himself has clearly swallowed much of this garbage whole. None of us ever thought we were dealing with a rocket scientist here, and Ibrox has a habit of fusing paranoia into people’s heads even at the best of times. It’s no wonder he’s cracking.
How much worse this gets for Morelos depends on two things, and neither of them involves scoring goals.
If the club keeps pursuing this line that everyone is out to get him, it will make him angrier and more susceptible to lashing out. And then there’s the manager, who already sounds frustrated with his overall play. If he throws Morelos under the bus as he has his defenders, then I’d suggest that it’s all over for one or both of them at the club.
I’ll be writing more about Gerrard tomorrow … but Morelos looks crushed at the moment and it was not the result of some external conspiracy but the cack-handed behaviour of those inside the club who did this to him.
Long may they continue.