Steven Gerrard is celebrating three years in the job at Ibrox.
Their fans are celebrating because he has won his first trophy. The media is hailing him a genius and touting him for the Anfield job when Jurgen Klopp, one of the finest managers on Earth, departs.
There’s only one problem with the Gerrard hypothesis. It’s pish.
Gerrard has one trophy in nine attempts. He has signed almost forty players in the effort and spent close to £35 million. To win the SPL title.
I would stipulate that Derek McInnes could have won the SPL for Aberdeen with that kind of spend, and that number of incoming footballers.
Anything less would have been a sacking offence.
That his club would have gone bankrupt in the process hardly needs pointing out.
Gerrard has probably come very close to bankrupting the club he manages. How close? We’ll probably never know, but I know that when you are betting everything on the vagaries of football results and European draws you are dicing with death
His club spends far more than it earns, even taking European football income into consideration. With no overdraft facilities and a need to maintain a high payroll and early exit from Europe, if it comes, any year without group stage football will hit them like a sledgehammer.
Gerrard the “tactical genius” is a figment of the media’s imagination.
This joker has rode his luck all the way to that title, and in the circumstances of this dire season he’s been made to look better than he is. He has already brought in a new player for the next campaign and I fully expect that he will want five or six more.
He has already put the board under pressure over it, and he’s not listening to the drum-beat over there about needing to cut costs.
He wants a new contract for Defoe. He wants a new one for Kent.
He wants to keep everyone and buy another half dozen on top of the current squad. He doesn’t give a damn what state that leaves the club in because he has no intention of hanging around long term.
He thinks he’s heading for Anfield eventually, and he must know he’s not going to get there from Scotland. Furthermore, he knows that a revived and renewed Celtic will be waiting for him when next season starts.
He hasn’t even thought through what it will look like, an SPL manager spending £40 million in just a few years and signing 40 odd players. This is a measure of his stupidity … and his fear. Because he knows that if we get our act together questions are going to be asked as to what the Ibrox club got for all that money and all those signings.
A single league title in four years? Will that really be good enough for him and for the fans over there? We know that it won’t be and he knows it as well.
As much as I cannot wait for this disgraceful season to be over, I cannot wait for the next one to start when we finally have a new organisation in place … we are going to take back our title and leave Gerrard facing harder questions than he ever has.
And we’re going to leave his club with some as well, such as whether these spendthrift years of craziness were worth it.