OCCASIONAL INSPIRATION.. CONSTANT PAIN IN THE BEHIND
CUP LOSS COULD SIGNAL THE END GAME
NO wonder Steven Gerrard needs a little time to think things over.
Right now the Rangers manager has to figure out how he allowed himself to be shoe-horned into this position, wedged between a rock and hard place while working out the best way of extricating himself from it without doing permanent damage to his reputation as an upwardly mobile young manager.
And the more he dwells on it all, the more his mind will drift back to one issue. How exactly is he meant to solve a problem like Alfredo Morelos?
He’s tried every trick in the book since inheriting this Colombian loose cannon and none of it, whether carrot or stick, appears to have made a bit of difference.
Morelos is exactly the same enigma he has been since Gerrard’s first day in the job. An occasional inspiration but a permanent pain in the arse.
And yet here’s the predicament with which Gerrard must now be grappling.
If he is to have any chance of escaping from what is beginning to look like a car crash of a season with his managerial credentials intact then he needs to achieve something really quite remarkable in European competition.
And to do that he’s almost certainly going to need a fully-functioning Morelos leading his attack.
Beating Bayer Leverkusen to reach the quarter-finals will be difficult enough already without trying to do it without his top scorer.
But a place in the last eight – or better still the last four – is precisely what Gerrard must aim for now if he’s to make an elegant exit from this crumbling campaign with his global reputation enhanced.
What a pickle to be in. He can’t trust the worst of Morelos. He can only cross his fingers and hope for the best.
No wonder he looked so ashen-faced and haunted as he made his way out of Edinburgh on Saturday night. He now finds his professional integrity entirely dependent on a South American man-child with serious behavioural issues.
Wedged between a rock and a hard place? This is hardly the position Gerrard thought he’d find himself in after all those years of excellence at the highest end of the game. And yet he is hardly blameless here either. By mollycoddling Morelos for most of last season Gerrard was actually playing the part of an enabler.
By pandering to his worst eccentricities the manager was tacitly lending them his approval. It resulted in Morelos getting himself sent off in a crucial Old Firm derby at Parkhead, leaving his team-mates in the lurch and ruining Gerrard’s last faint hopes of tripping Neil Lennon up on the home stretch to title No.8. Gerrard reacted by
placing his faith in
Jermain Defoe for what was left of the campaign and also threatening to throw the book at Morelos if the South American stepped out of line again.
The message seemed to have struck a chord for a while at the start of this season. But Morelos is the conundrum that can’t be fixed.
That Gerrard’s patience snapped at the weekend, after the 23-year-old went AWOL for 24 hours on his way back to Scotland from Colombia, suggests the manager has been pushed way beyond the end of his tether.
Had it been a simple misunderstanding or even a one-off mistake then Morelos would most probably have at least made it on to the manager’s bench on Saturday, especially given the monumental importance of the occasion.
That Gerrard felt so compelled to act, jeopardising his side’s chances of salvaging some silverware from his second season in charge, indicates this no-show was instead the latest in a long line of discipline breaches.
What if, for example, this was not the first time in the last few weeks Morelos has pushed the boundaries? What if it wasn’t even the first time he had gone missing shortly before a defeat at Tynecastle?
A story has been doing the rounds since that 2-1 loss in the league at the end of January that one training session was held up by around an hour and a half because of his notoriously wonky and self-centred sense of time-keeping.
If that is indeed the case then it’s little wonder his manager, and team-mates for that matter, may feel better off without him.
The problem being, it certainly didn’t look much like it on Saturday when Rangers took a Swiss Army knife to a Scottish Cup gunfight. Which is Gerrard’s problem in a nutshell.
Afterwards, he sounded very much like a man giving some hefty consideration to his own life choices as well he might do after two seasons coming up short.
Perhaps he may also be wondering if the funds he requires in order to tool up for a third attempt at stopping Celtic’s domestic dominance will be made available this summer or not.
Given Dave King is meant to be stepping down as chairman this month, there seems to be an alarming lack of clarity and strategy off the pitch as well as on it.
Back in November when King first announced his time was nearing an end, it was widely anticipated that he was walking away at the behest of potential new investors.
Talks with one Scots-born individual based in the Far East were believed to be at an extremely advanced stage.
And yet three months on nothing much continues to happen other than more exorbitant legal disputes and Morelos’ mood swings wiping millions off his own market value.
Gerrard, of course, can do little if anything about any of that. He’s got a rock and hard place to deal with first.
He sounded very much like a man giving some hefty consideration to his own life choices and as well he might after two seasons coming up short