I had to laugh yesterday when I read that The Mooch had issued a “hands-off” warning to Gerrard over their dross. The press tried to maintain that he was, of course, joking when he added “It depends how much”.
It’s like that old joke about the guy who offers a woman an exorbitant sum to sleep with him and when she says she would he immediately offers her a vastly lessened amount. When she asks what sort of woman he takes her for he tells her amiably, “We have already established that, now we’re just haggling over the price.”
Let me tell you; it wouldn’t take much haggling here. Gerrard would not need to offer them anywhere near the alleged £4 million a downmarket rag said he was considering paying them for the comically awful ex-Aberdeen reserve Scott Wright.
That has to be the second daftest transfer story I’ve read this year, with the first, of course, being Bayern Munich paying £1 million to keep their own player.
But the one about Tavernier, and how it would take a “huge sum” before Ibrox would be parted with him, as if such a sum were actually on offer anyway, is going to run those two tales a close second. The idea that Ibrox would resist any sort of bid in the mid seven figures is for the birds. James Bisgrove would personally pack his cases for him.
One newspaper yesterday said that The Mooch will have to sell four players before he can bring in another one; the four are rumoured to be Colak, Kamara, Barisic and Davies.
But we know they are also hoping to move on Wright, that they’d consider offers for Hagi and that if something half-decent came in for someone like Lundstram that they wouldn’t stand in the way.
In short, the better part of last season’s squad is up for grabs. Hilariously, they do fancy retaining the services of Roofe. I suppose it gives the medical staff over there someone to practice on. But if they got a good enough offer for him I suspect he’d be gone too.
Unfortunately for them, they’ve been in this spot before. And before. And before.
The smell of desperation wafts off them when they are trying to move people on, and without a full-time director of football at the club, their CEO is trying to cover a lot of ground and without the requisite knowledge. He has virtually no chance of selling more than one or two of these guys and he’ll be lucky to get a couple of million apiece.
That won’t make a dent in what they need. I suspect their wage bill has probably majorly increased; I hear the salary for Butland alone would give Peter Lawwell a nosebleed. As usual, their club might find its biggest problem, as far as the future goes, is not so much those who come in not doing the job but those they can’t get rid of sucking on the wage bill.
There are a lot of players over there who frankly know that their time is up.
The thing is, if you look at their squad overall, they still need a hell of a lot of players in a hell of a lot of positions before they have anything like our strength in depth; their central defence is threadbare for a start, and the fans are not in the least bit convinced by either Souttar or Davies.
And so of course they’d take the Saudi’s cash if it was on offer. Christ, they have hung the For Sale signs up and are actively encouraging them to come and take their pick of the playing squad.
What a pity for them that it’s of such poor quality and that Gerrard is, of course, more interested in protecting his job than helping The Mooch save his.