Pena is the elephant in the room for Pedro
TALKING rubbish and signing rubbish make for a pretty potent combination in football management. Particularly at the likes of Rangers. Just ask Mark Warburton. It is something Pedro Caixinha ought to be mindful of as he battles to avoid the same grisly fate as his predecessor.
This is not his chat about clowns and elephants and Vegas and dogs and caravans we’re on about here. That is harmless enough. Amusing, even.
Certainly much better, as Nottingham Forest fans will no doubt testify, than sensing your mind collapse in on itself piece by piece as some bloke in the corner drones on about ‘pitch geography’, ‘taking care of the football’ and ‘going again’.
You would never come back from long nights in the Nevada desert with Warbs. Mentally, that is. His press conferences alone have left grown men with the thousand-yard stare and the slabbers coming out the side of the mouth. I’ve seen it. Wiped their chins.
The same cannot be said of a man’s man like Pedro. What happened in Vegas would stay in Vegas with him, all right.
Get Carlos Pena along for the ride and, going by the reputation for the extra-curricular he came with, you could really take a trip to the edge of your existence on The Strip. And that’s from someone who spent his last trip there hiding in a Perspex telephone box during a gunfight.
The problem here, though, is that Caixinha and Pena are not in Glasgow to plot a remake of The
Hangover. They are here to win football matches. And they are not proving terribly good at it.
Pena, in fact, is turning out to be a bigger liability than any of the roasters you will come across in any dive bar Downtown. And Caixinha should quickly disabuse himself of the notion that the midfielder is somehow attracting such negative attention because he is a non-Scot.
Earlier this week, amid allegations he had accused home-based players of not making him and others welcome, Caixinha certainly gave the distinct impression he believes there are double standards based on nationality at work.
‘We are talking about Carlos, but I think we have two of the best midfielders in Scotland in (Ryan) Jack and (Graham) Dorrans,’ he said.
‘However, the majority of the time, they receive the ball in safe positions. The passes they need to perform need to be forward, even when they are at the back.
‘They are Scottish. Nobody discusses (their) fitness levels. Or nothing.
‘Being proactive with the first pass forward and looking for the spaces in front is another type of work we are doing with our midfielders and they are Scottish.’
A couple of days later, Pena proved exactly why he is getting it in the neck. And it is nothing to do with being Mexican.
It has everything to do with costing £2.6million and delivering precious little. The same goes for Eduardo Herrera. Fabio Cardoso’s £1.3m fee is also coming under increasing scrutiny.
Given where Rangers have been of late, big outlays need big returns.
Pena, however, was an empty jersey in the Old Firm game, substituted because he had done nothing to stop Scott Brown enjoying the freedom of Ibrox. At Hamilton on Friday night, he was taken off before he was sent off.
Surely aware that Caixinha was under pressure and needing a controlled, disciplined display, he let him down so, so badly. What was he thinking of when clearly throwing an elbow at Greg Docherty early on? He could easily have been red-carded a little later for the dreadful lunge at Dougie Imrie that referee Andrew Dallas deemed worthy of a yellow.
He was lucky to escape again when putting the ball into the net with his arm in the second half. His reaction? To laugh about it. It was madness. And it cannot go on like this.
Reasoning with Caixinha over Pena is difficult, though. After the Old Firm game, he spoke in the press conference about how the midfielder had ‘struggled a little bit’ and failed to play the killer passes. Asked to elaborate this week, he denied saying it.
‘No, I didn’t refer to that after the game,’ he insisted. ‘I referred to it before the game against Partick Thistle, the day before we took the team pic at Ibrox. I was very exhaustive on the details he needs to improve.’
Erm, you did talk about him, Pedro? ‘No, I didn’t refer to that. Someone did it. Not me,’ he added.
Hardly the memory of an elephant he was renowned for as a child. The board will not forget Ibrox last Sunday when the day of reckoning arrives.
Results will decide Caixinha’s fate, for sure. His transfer record will come into it should there be a case to be made to prepare the guillotine, though.
And the signing of Pena — just as the signings of Joey Barton and Joe Garner helped kill Warburton — will be up there at the top end of the charge sheet.
It remains difficult to see either of them being here next season. And xenophobia has nothing to do with it.