Today, a headline on the BBC website accuses Alfredo Morelos of “undermining all the good work” at Ibrox right now. Utter tosh.
Morelos is a thuggish footballer who will keep on misbehaving until he is reigned in.
You cannot blame a mad dog for wanting to bite. But you can blame its owner for not putting a muzzle on it or for failing to keep it on a tight enough leash.
If you want to know whose fault it is that Morelos routinely behaves like a psychopath look no further than the refs who show him such abysmal and routine leniency and the manager who refuses to condemn his neddish behaviour.
It is way past being stupid to hold Morelos accountable for his own natural proclivities. The SFA’s approach to refereeing him since to come out of a whole other rulebook. Perhaps they are waiting for people at Ibrox to realise he’s a menace and get a grip of him; if so that’s just as stupid a policy as expecting them to stop spending money they don’t have.
He gets away with things that no other player in Scotland would, and the reason he does is that the SFA is petrified of the rabid response they get out of Ibrox every time they cite this guy for something, no matter how much he deserves it.
The last couple of times, it’s bordered on the grotesque. On one occasion the whole of Scotland was alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to chase him out of the country. Gerrard frequently snarks at opposing players that “if Morelos did that …”
The last time he hit out with this nonsense he was hauled before the SFA. In spite of his comments being a matter of public record, and the inference in them very clear, he was allowed to walk with a “not proven” verdict. What an association this is.
But Gerrard’s defence of him is far worse. His sarcastic question to a journalist this weekend when asked if he intended to talk to Morelos about his behaviour was quite pathetic, and revealing of someone who simply doesn’t care what his players do as long as they win.
“Why would I speak to him about that?” he asked. “I didn’t see an elbow. If you look at him again, there’s no elbow there. The referee saw it and dealt with it.”
If there’s no elbow, what did the referee “see and deal with” then? Gerrard is making us all out to be idiots with that comment. It was captured on camera, it’s there for the world to see. This isn’t an SFA tribunal with a not-proven verdict and even if it was, the pictures are pretty clear-cut on what happened and we all saw it happen.
This stuff encourages Morelos’ worst excesses, and more than that it promotes a general contempt for the rules and for truth itself. I understand manager’s protecting their players, but this is denying objective fact to defend the indefensible.
It makes Gerrard look like crap. But then, that goes with the territory at that club.
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