One bid- Russell Martin destroys the Mainstream Myth over Ibrox transfer offers

With one remark after the draw with Motherwell Russell Martin trashed a summer of transfer nonsense from the Scottish media.

He mentioned it to Sky Sports in his post match interview for the TV station then sat down in the media room with newspapers and radio stations, his own club helpfully put the full video on their You Tune channel.

Only Cyriel Dessers of the 20 players involved against Motherwell has attracted a transfer bid. The offer from AEK Athens was turned down, Dessers knows why.

The bidding war between Aston Villa and Leeds for Nicky Raskin is an illusion. Everton haven’t bid for Mohammed Diomande. There is no offer in from Lille for Hamza Igamane. No Turkish club has bid for John Souttar and not even the Daily Record has attempted to conjure up interest in James Tavernier or Jack Butland.

Only 30-year-old Dessers has attracted a bid.

No club is interested in the group of players that finished 17 points adrift in the two horse SPFL Premiership race.

The Player Trading Model won’t be starting any time soon because it requires bids and offers to get started.

A year ago the pages were full of the £2.5m fee for Sam Lammers, £1.5m from Cyprus for Connor Goldson and Blackburn’s £1m swoop for Todd Cantwell.

As the club accounts confirmed £810,000 was received for five first team players after June 30.

Martin has the same problem as his predecessors at Ibrox,  the players sitting on contracts know that they will outlast the latest manager who is no more than a 50-50 shot to remain in the job at Christmas.

4 minutes 20 seconds

QUESTION: Do you need to bring in more new faces who don’t have that scar tissue from previous seasons?

MARTIN: We need some better players to help us for sure, we need some players that we feel will do what they are asked to do all the time.

But the ones that are here are good enough, they just need to make a choice over whether they want to do it.

So I said to them that Cyriel (Dessers)  is the only guy in the building that we’ve actually had, who who’s in the squad today, that we’ve actually had a bid for.

We turned it down. I had a chat with Cyriel he’s dealt with it brilliantly. He’s not ready to start because he had an injury and he’s trained late then he comes on in two games then runs like a beast because he’s a good professional, a good human being.

He doesn’t want anyone to think that if he does leave or does stay, he doesn’t want anyone to feel negatively about him, that’s the way to behave properly.

Are we to conclude that there were players on the park at Motherwell that don’t behave properly, that aren’t good professionals, that aren’t good human beings?

Martin had the serial losers in for training at Murray Park on Sunday, today he’ll hold a media conference for tomorrow’s Champions League tie against Viktoria Plzen.

Teenage Spurs winger Mikey Moore could be added to the UEFA squad as could one other but Martin goes into a Champions League qualifier relying on the players that he called out on Saturday to bail him out on Tuesday.

If he had a lengthy and impressive CV he might be able to get away with it but in his last job he took five points from 15 matches in the EPL, trying to get a Southampton squad to play in a way that they weren’t capable of.

If things go badly on Tuesday night plenty of loyal bears will turn on the hipster manager than very few of them wanted with comments stronger than ‘I told you so’.

Watching from the stand will be a club ambassador with recent experience of being interim boss with an army of messengers ready to deliver the cry that the club needs a Real Rinjurz man that understands what the club is all aboot.

The Trinity Tims podcast will be live at 6.30pm tonight.