Van Bronckhorst Knows Its Over, But He’s Clinging On As Ibrox Fan Frustration Grows.

It was Tom Petty who said “the waiting is the hardest part” and he knew exactly what he was talking about. For football fans there are two things which are almost unbearable as you wait for them; triumph and the moment that puts you out of your misery.

Waiting for triumph can be as simple as counting down the clock in a match you are winning. It can be as complex as counting games left in as season and wondering at which point you can finally be confirmed champions. That calculation is always changing.

But it’s waiting for the pain to be over which can be the worst. Nothing is more soul sapping than seeing a manager who is actively doing your club damage hanging on in there, waiting for his pay-off, waiting for the board to do the coldest calculation there is and finally accepting that its less harmful to give it to him than to keep him in post.

We went through it with Lennon, and other managers before him. What had to be done was clear. We knew it, and the man in the dugout knew it too.

But managers are stubborn, and even arrogant and although deep down they know the game is up they never want to publicly acknowledge that. It’s not all about money; nobody wants to walk away from something that there might be a chance of salvaging.

So the waiting continues. It may well be that the board has already made its mind up, but what today proves is that he’ll have to be pushed because he refuses to jump on his own, and when a manager feels that way it doesn’t matter what his motivation is.

In these circumstances, fans can shout as loud as they like, but the board only moves when it feels that the situation can no longer be put off another minute longer. The added complication is that if a manager already appears to have cost his team a title tilt that sacking him immediately might not necessarily do any good … and a board might want to wait so that it has the freshest range of options for when it has to pull the trigger.

We were in a similarly poor position in Lennon’s final months; a lot of us told ourselves that sacking him immediately might offer us a shot at winning the title after all. In fact, it would probably not have made the slightest difference, although we’ll never know for sure.

Did the board make the right decision to hang onto Lennon?

No, I don’t believe that they did, but they made the right one not to appoint a successor mid-campaign with everything still in the wind.

In hindsight, the squad needed to be rebuilt by someone who came into it with fresh eyes and a new perspective, and so the really cold-blooded decision – to delay the appointment and effectively write-off the campaign – was taken when Lennon was denied funds in January. Those funds were needed for the next guy … and that’s the choice Ibrox has now.

Their fans want action, of course they do … we would if it was us, and we did. But there are no good choices here, only a selection of bad ones and the trick is to pick the least worst option. Is that something their supporters will live with?

My guess would be no. Which is why their board will probably rush this and get it wrong. The waiting might be over soon … but that just sets up the next disaster.