What do you mean, Mark McGhee is still in a job?
A week ago, the Aberdeen manager was about as likely to hold onto his job as I am to fulfil my lifelong ambition to become a house-husband (if any rich women are reading this, please please please contact me). Yet somehow he is still drawing a wage from the Pittodrie coffers and the vultures have completely stopped circling.
Another Scottish manager did depart his club last week, though; Derek Adams, a young, up-and-coming coach who remains the only domestic manager to defeat Neil
Lennon's Celtic without Lennon blaming it on evil, twisted Freemasons in the SFA
(or so I understand it), and in the process guided Ross County to last year's Cup Final, surprisingly left Dingwall. Having been linked with the St. Mirren job in the summer, and been touted as a replacement for McGhee - Adams even spent a short period as a player at Pittodrie - it came as a little bit of a surprise that he has gone to Easter Road...as assistant to Colin Calderwood, who he apparently had never met before.
Nope, I can't work out the logic either.
County hadn't started the season terribly well - one of the pre-season promotion favourites (according to me, anyway), they were nearer the bottom than the top, though they had also reached the final of the Challenge Cup, Scotland's version of the Johnstone Paint Trophy (a tournament that was of vital importance to me last year when Caley were in it, but is seen as a diddy cup now that we're not.
Hypocrisy? Damn right). County have a strong squad for first division level, and Dundee's impending gazillion-point deduction would make relegation really unlikely indeed. Certainly, Adams was under no apparent pressure. So why has he left to become someone else's number two?
Maybe it's just the income - it wouldn't be surprising if Hibs pay their assistant more money than County pay their boss. Maybe Adams knows something about County that we don't - the funding of chairman Roy McGregor has allowed them to live well beyond the means a team from Dingwall should, and it might be a sign the cashflow is being turned off. If the latter is the case, perhaps Adams thought he should get out before his reputation was damaged by poor results with a weaker squad. But I can't help feeling he would have been better waiting for the next SPL post to come, whether at Pittodrie (McGhee will never manage to get to the end of the season) or elsewhere, rather than being in the shadows of Hibernian's backroom team.
However, it does mean much amusement for those many Inverness fans who wish ill on their Highland rivals - the frontrunner to replace Adams is his assistant, Craig Brewster - he who proved on his second spell at Caley that he is to management what salmonella is to your bowels. Hopefully for the Staggies, a 3-0 defeat at home to Dundee last weekend, under Brew's charge, might have knocked some sense into the chairman. If it doesn't, the sound of sniggering from across the Kessock Bridge will be deafening...
L.
No comments:
Post a Comment