The media continues to foam at the mouth over the “revolution” taking place at Ibrox; English team rejects and relegated strikers from Italy. That’s the ones they’ve got over the line. They are taking a comically long time to get the Honduran signed up because his side has the cheek to want money, and there is talk of other offers on strange terns.
The second relegated striker from Italy, they offered to loan first and buy later. That has turned out so well in the Malik Tillman deal, which continues to generate the most bizarre headlines. There was a story earlier in the week which I thought was absolutely brilliant and was going to highlight but it was too crazy even for our media, who are probably still cowering in shame from having swallowed the initial one about him, which has already collapsed.
No, the new one was great; according to Ibrox fan sites, their club had actually bought Malik Tillman; they paid the transfer fee Bayern wanted, had the deal confirmed … and then Bayern exercised their buy-back option and actually paid £9 million for him! This was trending on their sites, but it was only picked up by one tabloid and even they didn’t take it seriously.
Look at the number of nonsensical stories which the media has promoted in order to legitimise their initial piece of shit story. Tillman turned the move down, so it was a good deal. That was the first one. But when it was pointed out that if Tillman had turned the deal down that there was no need for Bayern to pay Ibrox anything, that one died.
The second version – the “we bought the player but Bayern bought him back” – was so ludicrous that it didn’t get off the ground. Which gave birth to the third and fourth versions, which are doing the rounds at the moment.
In the first, Tillman’s brother has said he actually would like to come back to Ibrox, and in the second the club has not given up hope of getting him on loan again. I mean, honestly, rather than accept that the deal simply wasn’t going to happen because they don’t have the money to get it done, they invented a fiction which has spawned even more fiction.
The manager who vowed to ditch loan deals – and he was emphatic about it – has been forced to change his tune because they haven’t moved on any of their duds and lack the funds to do the deals he wanted.
Yet the media even tries to spin this by claiming that ruling out loans only applied to the last window; I’ve cheated, I’ve actually read his comments, in full, and that’s absolute nonsense. He made his disdain for loan deals clear.
Now he’s considering begging Bayern Munich to let them have Tillman for another year even as he attempts a “try before you buy” on Dessers, whose club must be watching the shenanigans with Bayern Munich closely enough to know how that’ll end.
They’ve even made a low-ball offer for the striker at Feynoord for no other reason it seems to me than to try and give the appearance that they are looking at other targets. It’s an effort to bounce someone into giving them a cut-price transfer on their own terms. But as long as Josh Maja is available for free don’t except them to pay even that.
Having slagged Andy Walker earlier, I now have to credit him with talking sense for once; he ripped their transfer policies apart in a way no-one else in the mainstream has, although their conduct has been begging to be ripped apart.
“I’ve no idea what sort of money (they) have to spend. It goes from ‘we need two players’ to ‘we need five players’ and ‘we’ve got a lot of money to spend’ to ‘we’ve got very little to spend’. I don’t know what the truth is. As far as Michael Beale is concerned, you need to change the menu. You need to get players in who are capable of delivering immediately.”
And even Ibrox fans must see already that there’s nothing game-changing here, nothing that’s truly going to get the pulses racing, just a series of freebies and one striker who doesn’t score goals. Where is the excitement they were promised? The best news they’ve had in this window was the Tillman clause, and the club had to make that up.
I suspect Brendan Rodgers, who even as I write this will be putting together his own list of targets, will not be losing sleep over what’s going on across the city.
I get being careful with the money, especially when there isn’t much of it … but they are like a guy who rents a TV, carves a big scar into the screen and then goes back to the shop with it and offers to buy it cheap because it’s damaged stock.
They might as well have the begging bowls out.