So it looks certain that Portuguese manager Pedro Caixinha is about to become the next Rangers boss.

Qatari club Al-Gharafa have said as much on their Twitter feed:

Al-Gharafa got to agreement with The Scottish Club Rangers F.C. about transfer of the Head Coach Pedro Ciaxinha. pic.twitter.com/5pXir0MBrt

— Al Gharafa SC (@ALGHARAFACLUB) March 9, 2017

If all goes to plan then the forty-six year old will be at Celtic Park on Sunday and take in the Old Firm game from the stands before starting his duties on Monday morning.

The fact is this, I know very little about the Pedro and the Scottish media haven’t got him sussed yet either.

His appointment has been a bit of a surprise. His CV is vast in terms of teams that he’s work with but it’s not exactly full of headline names.

Yes he’s done well in Mexico and in Qatar but these are regions that miss most of us with an interest in Scottish football. We can’t stand the heat and very rarely venture away from the UK or Europe for our footballing fixes.

Now sometimes it seems the main attributes needed to become a football writer or pundit in Scotland are that you need to be able to tell the future like Mystic Meg and stubbornly argue your point like a Donald Trump or a Nigel Farage.

Listen I’ve often fallen into the trap and offered too much in my writing that passes as telling the future. But alas my opinion is as fallible as the next punter or writer, I predicted that Leicester City would get relegated last season and I also stated with great confidence that Bert Konterman would be a terrific defender for Rangers back in the year 2000.

Obviously I got both predictions spectacularly wrong. The Foxes went on to win the Premier League title against every odd imaginable and Konterman, god love him, was a dud at the back for the Glasgow giants.

So getting back to the incoming Pedro Caixinha. I find it odd how so many people have been able to judge the man, especially when they know very little about him.

Former Gers midfielder Derek Ferguson had this to say:

“At the time, because he was a top class coach, everybody was excited by it. He tried to change the culture of the club, the way they played.

“One thing about Scottish football and it might not be the best but we have aggression and passion. That’s part of our identity. Take that away and we lose a lot.”

“I think that’s maybe why the Portuguese coach is a gamble.

“In my opinion they should go for a British-based manager. Somebody who knows a bit about the club. If it was my decision it would be someone with Rangers running through their veins.”

So basically Derek is comparing the new man to Paul Le Guen and Derek also wants someone like his wee brother Barry to take on the job.

I never get the great rush to give a manager a job just because he knows the club. Hell I know the club, get me in!

I agree Mark Warburton didn’t get how big the club was but that was with Davie Weir (a former Gers captain) as his number two.

Tony Mowbray struggled to deal with the size of Celtic and yet he played for them and had previously managed in Scotland.

We need to look past the mentality that no one without any previous association can boss a football club. In England the top five sides are managed by gaffers without previous allegiances to their current clubs. It might actually be a good thing to come in without too much baggage or precise knowledge.

Former Rangers winger Neil McCann has also queried the decision to give Pedro the job:

“I think they’ll entertain a wide variety of coaches, but I’d be surprised if they go for someone like that. I don’t know too much about him, I have to be honest,”

“Would that be the right guy to come into this club at the minute? Does he know the environment? I imagine, being Portuguese, he’d speak to Pedro Mendes, who spent a lot of time here and might give him the basis.”

McCann does well in highlighting my main points, at least he admits that he knows very little about the man.

He too questions Caixinha’s knowledge on Scottish football. Well he earned his coaching badges here, so he’ll probably know more about our game than most realise. Plus our game isn’t vastly different from anyone else’s. It’s all about being able to adapt, with both the manager and the players  having to adapt to each other. It’s one thing Warburton really struggled with.

Some of Pedro’s coaching methods will work, others will need altered to work and others will need the bin. It’s as simple as that.

I love the fact that Neil believes that just because they both come from Portugal, that he can easily contact Pedro Mendes and get the lowdown from him.

Kris Boyd wrote the following in his Sun column:

‘No harm to Caixinha. I don’t mean any disrespect to him personally.’

‘But other than a decent spell in Mexico his CV doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement.’

‘Half the teams on there I can’t even pronounce! He will be used to working with technical players — but there’s not enough of them at Ibrox.’

The former Gers Hitman showing here that subtlety isn’t one of his strong points, I’d like to see him being directly disrespectful to someone.

He can’t say certain team names, yet he knows exactly how they play… Hmm that’s a bit odd.

We can’t stay stuck in this 1970s attitude about foreign coaches and their styles.

According to a lot of these pundits and writers, we have a passionate and physical style. Great, so how is that working out for our clubs in Europe? Is it working for our national team?

Nope. It doesn’t work, we actually need new ideas and methods.

I’m getting sick and tired hearing from all these old duffers talking about our game and who are keen on resisting change.

The same thing happened when Hearts hired Ian Cathro as their head coach earlier in the campaign. He’s too young, hasn’t got a big enough CV and relies too much on new technology. People were up in arms when Cathro took over, some were frothing at the mouth.

Like Pedro Caixinha, Ian Cathro was being judged before he managed his first game. They are ecstatic that he’s so far struggled to live up to the Harry Potter style story that they themselves had built up and knocked down before a ball was kicked in anger.

The fact is that Cathro is still very much a work in progress and shouldn’t be judged until the end of his first full season in charge at Tynecastle.

The same old nonsense has started with people are discussing Rangers hiring a director of football.

Some of the old press guys will only back the idea if an old school manager takes the job, even if they don’t have any history in football administration.

Listen it’s a system that has worked on the continent for decades. It gives the head coach more time to concentrate on the training field and the tactics board or god forbid the laptop! The Director of Football can then oversee the academy, the recruitment and be the middleman between the board and the coach.

It’s not a system used by witches, wizards and dirty evil warlords – It’s actually a well used footballing practice.

Hearts have shown that it can actually work well in Scotland. Various teams down south have shown it works on British soil.

But yet again we have a Scottish footballing snobbery (let the irony sink in) that ‘Oh no we don’t need that here‘.

Ally McCoist seems against the idea, even if he says he’s not:

“I am not against a director of football but it is absolute garbage if anyone thinks that a director of football is going to solve Rangers’ problems right now.

“It is nonsense. I have never heard so much nonsense in all my life.

“Did Jock Stein have a director of football? Alex Ferguson, Walter Smith, Martin O’Neill? No.

Mr Stein was before my time so I can’t really comment. But Sir Alex Ferguson had a huge amount of help from people like Peter Kenyon and Martin Gill who were Man United Chief Executives. While Martin O’Neill had Peter Lawwell at Celtic from 2003. These are active members of the board who took an interest in helping-out their managers. So between them, the managers and Chief Execs filled the role of director of football.

Rangers might feel that they need someone in with previous experience to help run that side of things. Again just because it’s kind of new here, doesn’t mean it’s bad!

Of Course Ally is right, it won’t solve all of Rangers problems and neither will hiring Pedro Caixinha. The club need more investment and that’s plain to see.

But it really is time for our football writers and pundits to sit back, embrace some changes and give people time to settle in before we judge them.

Before this month, very few of us had heard of Pedro Caixinha. Yet a few weeks later we have every pundit and their aunty looking at his CV and stating if he’ll be a success or a Portuguese donkey!

The fact is pretty simple, we need to wait and see what kind a person and coach he’ll be.

After his first press conference no doubt some in the press will have fallen in love with his ideologies and others will slate him for being different. Some will call him the next Jose Mourinho and others will state that he’s the next Paul Le Guen or Dr Jo Venglos.

Maybe this time we can put our crystal balls away and see what the future brings and we can just report the facts and bin the spin.

On that not I’ll leave a tweet from Derek Rae, BT Sport’s chief Scottish commentator who tells us how to say Pedro Caixintha.

I hope this at least helps Kris Boyd:

@Thefootyblognet Quite an easy one, Scott. Kai-SHEEN-ya. Kai rhymes with pie.

— Derek Rae (@RaeComm) March 2, 2017

Posted on March 10th, 2017 by scott
Filed under: Article