The elephant that has been in the room for Formartine recently is “was it right to bin Craig McKeown?”
Make no mistake, this was no gentle parting of the ways, it was more of a ‘you have no future here’ job. It is a spectacular shift from club captain one day to twiddling your thumbs at home, transfer listed the next but that – to the best of my knowledge – is how it went.
It was certainly dramatic at the time but that’s not to say it was completely unexpected.
There had been a growing gulf between big Craig and sections of the committee and fans – I can’t talk for management or others and there was a perception that this player, who put a very high premium on professionalism and demanded high standards of everyone else around him, including fellow players, management and coaching staff actually did more harm than good.
Problems arise when one person sets himself as the sole or superior judge of all matters to do with professionalism in the game.
It implies that others whose approach or opinion differs from his are less professional. In these situations respect is demanded rather than earned and that’s a very dangerous position for a club captain to find himself in.
I’m not saying that was the case, simply that it sometimes looked like that to quite a few of us.
When he berated others around him for their mistakes, he had to be pretty mistake-proof himself to have credibility. If he got to the length of blaming others for his own mistakes, he was on a slippery slope. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones etc. A bit of humility would have gone a long way but looks like it wasn’t there.
Stonking good central defender though. Pity.