Michael Beale has (indirectly) accused Ianis Hagi of leaking their chat about his situation at Rangers after the manager suggested the private conversation between seemed to have got out of the building and accused the attacker of making demands.
The Romanian playmaker’s future is under major scrutiny after it was revealed by club sources that he’d asked to leave the club, following Michael Beale’s inability/refusal to guarantee him playing time, and Beale, pressed on this said:
“There’s been a lot of hot air around Ianis in the last week or so but it was a logical conversation if you think about it. He’s missed a year of football and we’re very loaded in the position that he plays.”
He went on to say:
“It was a logical conversation that seems to have got out of the building in terms of playing time and guarantees around it.”
This appears to be a thinly-veiled swipe at Hagi for ‘grassing’ Beale up to the press by attacking the decision not to play him and suggesting he doesn’t agree.
It’s all got a little petty really – Hagi has no divine right to play, and did ‘squeal’ to the media about it, while Beale clearly isn’t pleased that a confidential and adult conversation about his situation has been used against him in this way. We’ve been harsh on Beale in the past few months, but we can’t help sympathising with him on this.
If we were to take a stab in the dark here, we sense Michael Beale feels a little betrayed by the 24-year-old who chose to comment to the press about his situation in a way that implicated Beale as the instigator and cause.
By contrast, Scott Arfield, in a similar scenario, didn’t complain – he never whined to the press at all about the same decision Michael Beale made about him. Beale was never anything other than kind about Scotty in the press, and while we fans don’t agree with that decision, we can’t say Arfield ever held himself with anything other than wonderful dignity.
We can’t say the same for Hagi and Beale, love him or not, appears to feel the same way.