It’s become common practice to be disparaging about the standard of football north of the English border. Perhaps this comes down to the fact this is a two-horse league with only 12 teams in it, the substantial lack of finances, or the harsh reality that anyone offered a chance to ply their trade in the Premier League usually grabs it without a second thought.
Steven Gerrard falls into the last category and has naturally upset the Rangers fan base after deciding to become the next Aston Villa manager. You can understand the frustration that the Ibrox faithful may feel given that their manager has chosen to fight at the foot of the Premier League table rather than dominate at the summit of the Scottish top-flight.
It's hard to dress it up as anything other than a slap in the face and don’t for a second think that for all the chest-thumping currently going on at Ibrox, about no individual being bigger than the club, that this isn’t a kick in the teeth and further embarrassment for a league massively overshadowed by the Premier League.
Indeed, despite the precarious position that Villa finds themselves in after sacking Dean Smith, Gerrard had no other choice than to leave Rangers and take up a relegation scrap if he is ever going to eventually be offered the hot seat at Anfield.
Of course, there’s a chance Liverpool may have come calling had he kept winning Scottish Premier League titles at Rangers and adding to number 55 he delivered the club last season. Nonetheless, the hierarchy at Anfield know how life can be in the SPL if you manage one of the two teams in the ascendency.
Perhaps a better way of illustrating this point is that Brendan Rodgers won seven trophies in three years at Celtic which could only earn him the Leicester City job in the end, as covered by BBC at the time. That is not an insult to Leicester who are a tremendously well-run club, it is only meant to show that the Foxes aren’t part of the top six clubs in England, which is where you imagine a manager who had won those trophies over that amount of time anywhere else in Europe would have been headed.
You would have to say that the former Liverpool captain probably knew as much, which is why he agreed to swap Glasgow for Birmingham in a bid to fast-track his progress to the club that truly holds his heart: Liverpool, where he found his glory.
The long and short of it is that when you ultimately want the Anfield job, as Gerrard does, you do have to take risks to prove that you are ready for it by cutting your teeth in the toughest league in the world. In this respect, the 41-year-old deserves a huge amount of praise for taking the plunge in the Premier League when you consider that should he fail, he will most certainly not be handed the reins at Liverpool in the future. So, what is the likelihood of Gerrard succeeding at Villa Park?
If it came down to purely building a winning culture then you could say without fear of being corrected that Gerrard would be an immediate success at Aston Villa. After all, this is his forte given that he doesn't allow a culture of excuses to develop and is an obsessive winner himself. These are two traits that will help the men who run out of the Villa tunnel because they looked depleted and starved of confidence after a string of defeats under Smith. Gerrard was able to bring them back to winning ways with a 2-0 victory over Brighton in his first game in charge. As a result, they are now priced at 11/4 to finish in the top half on Betway as of the 24th of November. There is a faint inkling that the former Liverpool captain could have a sizable impact and it's still early days.
The truth, however, is that Gerrard will bring a lot more to the Villa dressing room than just a winner’s mentality, which was one of his main aims at Rangers because he wanted sustained success as covered in an interview with Sky Sports. Indeed, he possesses impressive managerial acumen and you only need to look at how well drilled Gerrard had his Rangers team in their 4-3-2-1 formation that made them impossible to handle in not only the SPL but also the Europa League, to understand that Villa will begin to win football matches again very soon.
There are, of course, no guarantees in the Premier League and life won’t be easy for the 41-year-old, especially if he battles to pick up points over Christmas and into the new year. However, you do feel that Gerrard’s recent managerial success wasn't due to the fact that he was in the SPL but rather because he is destined for the top of the game.