Fear And Loathing And Broony: Steven Gerrard, Even The Refs Can’t Save You Now …

By the time this season is over all the dominos will fall. The statues will be torn down, the streets renamed, the pictures taken down from behind the bar in the dingy backstreet pubs. The reign of Gerrard will be no more. It is inevitable.

How will he be remembered? As the man who stopped the ten?

As a legend? Or as a woeful tactical manager whose name no longer inspired awe or respect or fear?

Relegated to touring the studios with Lennon as a pundit, a washed up coach with a mystery forever hanging over him; just how did he win the 2020-21 title?

Maybe one day the wall of silence will crumble and all the secrets will come out.

I will be waiting to write about them when they do.

But tonight the empire teeters on the brink. A six point lead has been almost completely blown.

They needed a refereeing decision of scandalous proportions to come to their aid tonight, and it’s not the first and it won’t be the last. But it wasn’t enough. It will not be enough in the long haul. It’s starting to crumble.

This monument to hubris is coming down.

This is the night when even the most shell-shocked hack has to start looking at their club and accepting that something has gone very, very wrong.

They’ve shipped points in as many games as we have this season, but we had the excuse that we were bedding in a team. We are now starting to roll at just the point that their fragmentation becomes clear.

But it’s been clear for a while to anyone who’s wanted to see it.

I can’t say this enough times; Gerrard’s form almost exactly overlaps with how it was in his first and second seasons; last year was a dopers dream, an aberration so stark future football historians will look at in awe and wonder the same as we do; how the Hell did that happen?

Tonight the Honest Mistakes were brought to bear to aid them, and even that wasn’t enough to stem the way the tide has turned here. Gerrard has no answers. The solutions elude him. The hope of all at his club was that Celtic would be in such dire straits that they would still get over the line.

Nobody can honestly still think that this is the case.

Gerrard increasingly looks like a man who wishes that he was somewhere that the dark whispers of beheadings were all he had to worry about. Wait until Protestants Against Discrimination turn on him; perhaps someone should tell them his daughter is named Lourdes.

That will start their fevered minds wandering and wondering.

All joking aside, how long until he’s under serious pressure?

The media won’t willingly do it, but his own supporters will and they are and the volume hasn’t even started to get turned up yet.

The fear is also coursing through their ranks. It will turn to loathing soon enough, loathing of this manager who is one of them and yet not and who deep down they know would have gone to manage at the club owned by the Saudi princes in a heartbeat.

Oh how he must wish that the offer was real, but of course it was not.

There is no safety net here, no passing boat to jump aboard.

His fate and the fate of his club are now inextricably entwined.

One by one the rats are going to start jumping off that sinking vessel but he won’t be one of them; he is the captain and it’s his fate to stay on deck as the ship goes down.