GORDON WADDELL ON CONCOMITANTGATE
Someone should have told the Rangers statement writer.
Did they not realise their effort the other night to denigrate Derek McInnes and question his competence for the role only took a giant highlighter pen to their own incompetence?
If he’s that much of a bottle merchant, what does it say about you that you actually spent six weeks thinking about his candidacy then STILL decided to go and recruit him?
You could almost hear the sound of the toys whistling out of the pram. You could feel the petted-lip rage in every one of 273 words which read like they’d been delivered via a baseball bat to the keyboard rather than touch-typed.
Yup, 273 butt-hurt words – when PR 101 tells you none would have done.
Because every single one of them served to vindicate McInnes’ decision and confirm his fears. Which leaves Rangers with a problem. Where do they go now? Whoever it is, he’ll know he’s at least second choice to someone they claim they never really wanted in the first place. Way to make Mr Plan B feel wanted, lads.
Whoever it is, the first call they’ll make on the QT will be to McInnes to find out what put him off. The managers’ eco-system is the smallest of ponds.
Whoever it is, he’ll also know now that if he says no, they’ll happily take his reputation to the dumpster in public just to protect their own.
And whoever it is, they’ll now have to fit a profile articulated by Dave King at their agm last week which was designed to make it clear that virtually the only guy who actually fitted it was McInnes.
Anyone who falls outwith that category now of being in employment and having a knowledge of he Scottish game will look like a complete reverse ferret.
They’ve painted themselves into a corner. And what about Mark Allen in all of this? Their director of football? How big a part has he played in this saga
lasting six
weeks, with no resolution in sight? He was so determined to prove there was an alternative to a guy who clearly wouldn’t be his choice that he ran a complete false-flag recruitment process to arrive right back at the point we all knew they would – McInnes.
This shouldn’t have started for him the day Pedro Caixinha was sacked. It should have started in Luxembourg, the day everyone knew without question he would be.
That’s just a basic competence of succession planning. In his position there should be a moving list of the next guy for every role in the club, including the manager.
At some point you’ll lose your current guy, either because he’s too good or too bad to keep. Your finger should be on the pulse of who the coming man is and how you go about getting him. As for McInnes? Six weeks ago, this column said “…the same alarm bells going off in his head when Martin Bain tried to persuade him to take the Sunderland job in the summer should be clanging l ike Big Ben if an approach comes.”
Just because we all thought he was the right choice for Rangers never meant they were the right choice for him.
And yes, maybe he has snookered himself from ever being offered it again but would he ever want it again anyway? How far in the distance is the day when he would look at the club and think they were any less of a basket case?
McInnes’ two most successful stints in management have come at clubs where he has developed a strong daily rapport with stable, clear leaders. At St Johnstone, it was Geoff Brown. At Aberdeen, it’s Stewart Milne. Owners, figureheads, direction-setters, decisionmakers. Simple, concise relationships.
Who would that have been with at Rangers? Dave King on the end of a phone? Stewart Robertson with so little executive power? The hired help hovering over your shoulder?
He was rightly concerned about all of it. So concerned, he wasn’t prepared to risk his reputation on it.
Sure, even unremitting success at Aberdeen won’t have chief execs of top clubs down south beating a path, such is their disdain for the environment the success comes in. But the right one will come along eventually. Will the right one ever come along for Rangers though?
Brendan Rodgers put 20,000 season tickets on overnight the day Celtic appointed him. Rangers’ support has been loyal these past five years through some of the garbage they’ve had to endure, so their board has to be careful that the guy they eventually get doesn’t underwhelm them to the point where they lose 20,000 overnight.
They have been getting away with ramping up the rhetoric for five years now but the fans are no longer buying the snake oil.
And it wasn’t the word “concomitant” that did it. It was the realisation that there was as much BS in the other 272 words as there was in that one.
It was the realisation that what they’re looking at is a leadership operation who can’t get the job done with an attainable, appropriate choice for what should be an attractive management job but which they’ve now given the toxic glow of Springfield’s nuclear power plant.
A leadership operation shunting a decent man in Graeme Murty in and out of servitude to a job they’re not prepared to consider him for. Last weekend he shook everyone’s hand at his press conference, assuming it would be his last, only to have to walk awkwardly back into the room on Friday. He deserves better. They all do. And they could start by whoever is in charge – and that’s clearly debatable – removing all keyboards until they’re ready to type the words “The new
manager of Rangers FC is…”