Whispers and winks are not new to the game, it goes on at every club
THE TWEET was tacky and tasteless. But so, at times, is football. Yes, it’s tempting to lambast the SPFL’s official sponsors for pushing the photo of a celebrating Derek McInnes as a ‘humorous’ reaction to Rangers taking the lead against Aberdeen yesterday.
Grim stuff, fellas. Don’t you have a murder case you can take bets on?
Yet the bookies, with their usual subtle touch, were merely reflecting the awkwardness of a real-life situation. Albeit through the darkest prism of black comedy.
Spare us the outrage, then. About the social media blundering and, while we’re at it, the ‘shadowy manoeuvres’ decried by so many selfappointed arbiters of morality and justice.
Should the Ibrox board make an actual approach for McInnes over the coming days, the righteous indignation will reach a crescendo.
If the former Rangers player actually accepts an offer to return to his former club, well, he’ll know what to expect.
Shame, traitor, Judas… take your pick from the inevitable insults already primed for lobbing in his general direction.
Go ahead and holler about it, guys. You’ll find plenty of approval out there in the echo chamber. If you want to know the cold, hard and genuinely unpalatable truth, however, here it is. Professional football is a grimy and grubby business. To those who believe otherwise, could we interest you in an email just in from a Nigerian prince?
Look, there are questions to be asked about Rangers’ treatment of a man who would probably walk away from any other club so indecisive in their courting; dithering over the best candidate for the job suggests a lack of common purpose, at best.
But the notion that the Ibrox club have crossed some kind of line with their back-channel whispers, hints, nudges and winks? Grow up.
This is standard operating procedure among football clubs and the men they employ; some of the most sainted and beloved characters the game has ever known have been caught in the middle of such an ugly imbroglio.
We keep parts of the beautiful game deliberately opaque because it suits our sensibilities.
The brutality of contract negotiations. The underhand cheating in every area of play.
The meat-market element of youth development programmes that must break the hearts of thousands in search of The One. Don’t think about that stuff. It’s necessary to churn out the product.
Accepting all of this as nothing worse than the ‘real world’, it makes no sense that the recruitment of a manager should be held to some higher standard.
As for whether McInnes should jump at this chance of an Ibrox homecoming, well, plenty has already been said.
But look beyond the fact that Rangers have just beaten Aberdeen home and away in the space of a few days. And consider whether the Dons have reached a plateau.
In his four-and-a-half years at Pittodrie, for all the brilliant work he’s done in turning the club around, McInnes has just one trophy — the 2014 League Cup — to his name.
Whatever problems Rangers might have, he has to believe that moving to Govan will give him more frequent — and more realistic — cracks at silverware. His current sense of unease, the anger at how the Ibrox board have handled things, feels like some kind of hazing ceremony for what lies in wait. But a price worth paying, maybe, for a bigger budget and greater demands.
Not exactly convincing in his denials yesterday, at one point appearing as if he wanted to filibuster the whole question by talking for ages about the minutiae of a 2-1 home loss, McInnes will clearly have a decision to make.
And, barring a major surprise, Aberdeen will then face a tough choice on who comes next.
Someone who knows the Scottish game, obviously. Hey, maybe somebody pulling up trees elsewhere?
All tastefully done, of course.