Oh man, what a start to the day this has been.
The latest SPFL reconstruction proposals are dead, Craig Gordon is trying to negotiate with Celtic over a new contract via the media and Jermaine Defoe is on TalkSport and then in The Record laying out the latest “plan” to stop Celtic.
What a joke it is too.
You know things have got to the truly desperate stage when they are trying to invoke the attitude at Celtic in 1997.
Defoe says they will stop us because they are no longer really trying to. They want to win the title for themselves, not to deprive us of it.
Take a minute and think about that.
Apparently that turns crap footballers into class ones.
As I’ve said, back in 1997 Fergus was able to stop the ten when we stopped caring about it.
He didn’t let any of that extraneous stuff bother him at all; he knew that we had to be taking a longer term perspective.
He wanted to leave the club in the best possible place from which it could have built a sustained challenge to Rangers and then finally overtake them.
Fergus knew it could be done. He knew he was going to succeed.
Defoe isn’t even suggesting that Sevco will accept that mind-set; he’s saying the goal for next season is still to win the title, and that the club will give it everything. Do you even hear the first stirrings of an actual plan amidst that ill-defined hoping?
The Record put an astonishingly over-wrought headline on this guff; “Jermain Defoe fires Rangers status reminder as he reveals the Celtic strategy that can stop 10 In A Row.”
Not only is that wordier than it needs to be, it’s nonsensical when you examine what he actually said.
Because there’s no strategy whatsoever being proposed here.
Only “we’ll focus on ourselves” and, again, that’s copying what Celtic do … and we already know that nobody at Ibrox will stick to it because we’ve heard similar stuff from them in every season since they’ve been in the top flight. They have one eye on Celtic Park all the time.
That Defoe is coming out with this kind of stuff should be a good indication of how much strategic thinking is going on in the manager’s office. Gerrard does not have a clue how he intends to get a team on the park that is capable of winning things.
Nobody at Ibrox has a clue how to do that.
If they simply accepted their limitations and concentrated on being the best club they can be – which is what we did in 1997 – rather than focussing on overcoming us, an impossible job which they aren’t remotely equipped for, they would be better off for it.
But as today proves, they cannot get that idea out of their heads.
Their every thought is focussed on Celtic and how they might prevent the ten.
That’s only one of the reason why they are not to be able to actually do it.
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