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Fear And Loathing And Steven Gerrard: This Is How Your World Ends. Not With A Bang …

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It was TS Elliot who said, “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker.”

Oh Steven Gerrard. How does it feel now?

How does it feel to stare in the mirror and know that you blew it?

You had a chance to go and be the roving ambassador for the club where you were an icon. You had the chance to stay there on the coaching staff and a job for life. But you thought you were worth more than that, and in your egocentricity you believed that you could turn around a ramshackle club which has blundered from drama to crisis for the past seven years.

That club is a shadow of what it thinks it is.

You didn’t just overestimate your own abilities, but you arrogantly underestimated every other club in the country here.

Your words about how your club should not be dropping points against “teams like these” should haunt you for the remainder of your career.

I try not to laugh writing that sentence.

Because your career? As a manager? Ha! What’s it worth tonight?

It’s on the downslope and it has just started. You have wasted it. Whatever it was going to be, it no longer is.

Ironically, you might have gotten away with it with Brendan at Celtic Park and driving a coach and horses through every other club, but he’s gone now and his wasn’t a barnstorming first half of the season anyway.

Whilst he was there, pundits in England might have accepted that you had no chance at all – and you didn’t; that’s what makes this most hilarious – but not now.

People like you, people who see the name “Rangers” and think it means something, will suggest that there was an opportunity here and that you should have done better. There’s no point in talking sense to you, or to them.

You bought into the hype … about that club and about yourself, and this is the cost.

Your reputation is swirling down the bog.

There are rumours that you’ve already lost the dressing room. Well, it would come as no surprise to me or to regular readers here.

Your old school “kick in the doors and shout and bawl” style doesn’t work in the modern age and only alienates people. You can’t go in front of the media every week and slam your own players and question their mentality and expect them to perform for you in the way you need. Only someone completely disconnected could think otherwise.

Tonight your comments on the radio, about Kilmarnock and their style, were disgraceful and the measure of what a small man you are. As a player you had all the skill in the world, but the talents needed to be a coach are very different and you are simply nowhere.

And although it isn’t over yet, you can already see the end from here, can’t you?

The only question remaining concerns the manner in which you’ll go. But it’ll be on an afternoon like this, a dreary, drizzly, Scottish football day at the end of a dark period. It might not even take a hammering, a Mowbray style event, and in fact it probably won’t.

But you will never be a top class manager.

The Ibrox gig might be the biggest job you ever have in the game.

You will forever regret having done this, and on Saturday’s and Sunday’s when you cannot get another manager’s job and sit in TV studios beside the other management failures as a co-commentator, those long days measured out in coffee spoons, with the weight of what you did here bearing down on you … remember, we told you so.

This is how your world ends
This is how your world ends
This is how your world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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