Regular readers will know of the total contempt I hold Davie Provan in, with his articles being little more than self-serving screeds where he gets to attack people and clubs with impunity whilst he preens as though above it.
He has a particular fascination with attacking Celtic, and even when we’re not the subject of his editorials he manages to find a way.
This was one of those days, when he wrote something so pig ignorant that you felt your jaw drop as you were reading it. It managed to be both stone stupid and offensive in equal measure, betraying a quite incredible ignorance of the sport he is supposed to be an “expert” on.
First, he opines that Gerrard, if he’s smart, will walk out of Ibrox at the end of the season.
Provan reckons all that’s in front of him is more misery.
Well, what blinding insight that is. It’s not something that most of us even have to use brain cells for, but to him this has the force of a Revelation.
Of course Gerrard, and his club, face nothing but misery if they continue to delude themselves that they can stop Celtic making it ten titles in a row.
To those who have bothered to educate ourselves on the facts about the financial volcano Ibrox sits atop it is as clear as it could be that their only hope of even surviving the next ten years is to scale back and live within their means like every other club in the land is trying to.
Anything else is lunacy.
The media should be making that clear to their supporters, but too many people – like Provan – seem to believe, or want to, that the club at Ibrox has a bottomless well of money to which they only need dip in their bucket and take out what they want.
Provan understands that what they can scrape together won’t get Gerrard out of the hole, but he fails to see that part of the problem is Gerrard himself and the money he’s already squandered. Celtic is not the only major obstacle to Gerrard winning things at Ibrox; the bigger obstacle is Gerrard’s own lack of proper managerial nous.
At present Celtic stands to win the title with a double digit margin.
That possibility will harden to near certainty if we go to Ibrox next week and win.
In those circumstances, amidst all the talk of “progress”, Gerrard is all out of alibis.
In spite of this, Provan asserts that if Gerrard walked he would easily command a decent job south of the border. And this is the kicker; Gerrard’s “celebrity” and his “success” in Europe would make him a bigger draw even than Neil Lennon.
He couldn’t have come up with something more stupid if that was the object of the exercise.
Gerrard is not a good manager and no amount of hype will make him one. I would find it incredible if a club of any significant strength offered him a position based on his name and European results alone … and what other results are there to go on?
He’s spent a fortune by the standards of Scottish football just to finish second in the league two years on a row, and no trophies.
No club will touch Roy Keane because in spite of an incredible domestic and European CV as a player he has flopped as a manager in spectacular fashion. Gerrard’s divisive manner will not endear him to fellow professional’s south of the border any more than it has to players up here, who might once have been cowed by the name but now see another ex-player thinking that his prowess on the pitch makes him fit to sit in the dugout.
The highways and byways of football are littered with the corpses of these guys, and clubs are wary of appointing them. To say it’s unlikely would be to put it mildly. All he has going for is all this hype about how he might be at an Anfield as manager someday … surely we can already put a pin in such desperate nonsense? It is simply never going to happen.
The notion that Gerrard would ever be the boss at Liverpool is ludicrous to those of us who look at it dispassionately.
It reminds me, in some ways, of Sevco appointing McCoist.
His time in that job was supposed to set him up for management somewhere else if it didn’t work out; every chairman who has ever interviewed him for a post looked past his name and reputation up here and at the train wreck he left behind.
The idea that Lennon would not command greater interest, when he will have seen Gerrard off the premises, has domestic trophies, titles, and possibly a treble, when he has, in fact, had more respectable results in Europe than Rodgers himself achieved, is rank nonsense and the kind of fan boy garbage I’d have expected to read from a Ralston or Jack.
If Gerrard voluntarily walks he’s going as a loser and a quitter both.
What does that do to reputations? What does that do to the famous name?
If Lennon walked at the end of this campaign – no chance of course, even if a top side in England came calling, and we know it – he would depart as more than just the man who came in at a tough time and steadied the ship.
He’d go as a hero, as a club icon, as someone who actually improved on what Brendan Rodgers himself left behind.
Modern football chairmen know the difference, and if both men were available only one would have to turn off his phone to stop the endless ringing.
Everyone sane knows who that man would be.
Davie Provan thinks it would be the other guy.
The one crumb of comfort he can take if the men in the padded truck ever come for him is this; he’ll have plenty of company in the back of the wagon.