Everyone’s wanted a piece of the action
If you had told me a fortnight ago that the likes of Patrick Kluivert and Guti would grace the back pages of the PDE, I would have asked you what exactly you were smoking.
But alas it is all true. Kluivert, despite whatever his so- called biographer tweeted, apparently engaged in a brief chat with the board outlining his desire to land the gig on Greenhill Road.
Some say talks broke down because he wasn’t willing to pull on his boots for the boys in the black and white stripes.
But who needs Kluivert on your frontline when you’ve already got Danny Mullen, am I right?
If you thought the Kluivert saga was bad enough, a bizarre tug- owar between Saints and Spanish minnows Real Madrid also developed, with Spanish maestro Guti interested in moving from the Spanish backwater to the bustling Paisley metropolis.
Unfortunately Madrid appear to have other ideas and with Zinedine Zidane, the second best French footballer of all-time behind Ludovic Roy – and only just pipping Moussa Dagnogo in third, handing in the towel after winning the European Cup the supposed Saints target was installed as second favourite to land the manager’s job at the Bernabeu.
But Gordon Scott has apparrently put the buffers on any chat of the illustrious names bagging the management role in Paisley anyway, taking the sensible option of focusing on a manager that actually knows a little bit about Scottish football.
With less than a fortnight until the players are due back, to be fair it is probably the most sensible decision the chairman could make – not that it all seems a little boring now among the madness that has ensued.
But we have to trust that the board know best – they did unearth the Lord, the saviour Jack Ross after all.
Following in the footsteps of Ross will be a daunting role for anyone to take on, especially considering the status that Ross had among the support.
The task only becomes a little more tough-looking when you realise that pre-season starts in two weeks time. Did I say that the players are due back in two weeks? Two weeks!
In all seriousness, the job should remain an appealing one for whoever is going to step up to the plate, should it be Stubbs, Caldwell, Kearney or McIntyre... or who knows, someone else may come along. This is St Mirren afterall.
Any manager coming in should have a sizeable transfer budget to work with, with a hungry squad which has the makings of a side capable of building on last year’s momentum.
Building on the work that Jack Ross done behind the scenes won’t be easy, but it also won’t be half as difficult as it would have been had the new man walked into the job in seasons gone by.
St Mirren are in a good place at the moment. With an ambitious owner at the helm everything is rosy.
It is then perhaps easy to see why Guti had his fingers crossed that Jack was going to chuck it.
With his CV landing faster than you can say adios amigos, perhaps he thought his time was now.
Instead it looks like the board are edging towards tata senor, gracias but no gracias. What happens next? Who knows. The more I think about it, did someone say... Zinedine Zidane?
On second thoughts, what’s Moussa Dagnogo up to these days?