Caravans and barking dogs? Pedro’s facing an emergency.. he’s made a canine nine nine call
It was more than 25 years ago, but the phrase has gone down in Scottish newspaper folklore.
Showbiz writer Gavin Docherty walking into his editor’s office after three weeks at the ill-fated, David Murray-owned Sunday Scot, and saying simply: “I’m in the wrong movie, maaan…” before walking out the door.
With every week that passes, with every press conference, with every dog barking at a moving caravan, whether bedouin in the desert or attached to the back of a Volvo on the A9, with every Kelly Clarkson lyric quoted, it feels more and more like a phrase which belongs in Pedro Caixinha’s lexicon.
And more and more like the twoquestioned dilemma now has to be raised: Can Rangers afford to sack him… or can they afford not to?
He may be on the back page today saying he doesn’t fear it - and it does seem ridiculous, three games into a season, after a 10-man summer recruitment drive. But it’s definitely there in the background.
Failure to win in the perceived graveyard of Dingwall today will bring it all the way front and centre. His problems? Plentiful. One, the constant companion of a yardstick which still only has Celtic on the other end of it. How many points behind them they are, what kind of nick they’re in before they play them in four weeks’ time. It’s a millstone not a measurement.
It’s been said before but he should be more worried about where they are in relation to their own standards than anyone else’s.
Two, his hit and miss recruitment. Graham Dorrans and Ryan Jack have been as solid as you’d have expected, Bruno Alves has brought experience and leadership. Alfredo Morelos has potential.
Maybe Fabio Cardoso as well, although the debate remains in the balance over whether he’s the Portuguese Karl Svensson or not.
The others? Herrera, Candeias, Dalcio? The jury’s back, and they’re looking grim.
Then there’s Carlos Pena. Impossible to convict due to a lack of evidence. Although if social media and Glasgow rumour is to be believed, he’s got some great dance moves and his regular room service order is a cheeseburger and six bottles of Bud!
Joking aside, some serious dough has been paid for the acquisition of both the players and the management team.
Rangers can’t just empty them all. They’ve just gone through the process of tipping the previous lot back down the road after being left with virtually a full squad of players who’d become redundant overnight.
And on that subject, what about Pedro’s total dismissal of Michael O’Halloran this week? A guy who’s a Rangers ‘asset’ on loan at St Johnstone, he’s just reduced his value to zero overnight when he comes back.
And two, how bad does it look if he gets to Christmas and they’re sitting behind St Johnstone and a player he insists is never good enough has scored 15 goals to get them there? That’s by the by, though. The main question is still whether he can get the team he actually does believe in to produce the results he needs.
At the end of last season, the impression was that he was overcomplicating things for his players and that they didn’t get his system.
That’s not to say there’s no room for academic thought or innovation in Scottish football but you have to get your message across in a way the players understand it.
When Brendan Rodgers whistles in a game, his players respond like they’re on ‘One Man and His Dog’. He once told us he did it on a coaching course at Largs and a collie and a dozen sheep appeared at the side of the park off the hills.
He’s constantly talking these days about his players’ seamless ability to implement what he wants from them, and how much better they are at it after a year.
With Pedro, if you look at the last time the two sides met last season, the theory of how to stop Celtic was there, but the execution of it was miserable.
It’s maybe no coincidence this season that any improvement has been seen when they’ve been running a straight-up 4-4-2.
But they’re still a mile off. He may yet shake it off, and the fans may well still be at his back, but there’s a growing sense of impending doom about the whole thing.
And four games into the season or not, this is a big day for him.
On a bank holiday weekend, they’ll pass every caravan known to man on their way up the road, but if they don’t win, it’ll not be the dogs barking he has to worry about. It’ll be the Bears growling.