Ange’s Latest Message To Celtic Fans Is Profoundly Shocking. For Our Rivals.

It is the worst nightmare for those engaged in crisis management that trouble begets trouble, that when things seem at their darkest they don’t start to steadily improve, as one would hope for, but instead start to accelerate down towards Hell.

In that scenario, you end up firefighting on multiple fronts and eventually simply plugging holes in the superstructure as they appear, until at some point there are too many of them to deal with.

Over at Ibrox, The Mooch was never going to get things easy this week. The media honeymoon is over, because there are two things the pro-Ibrox press dislikes intensely; a manager who fails and one who makes them look like a fool and the thing is, he’s done both of those things and now, for the first time, he’s coming under proper scrutiny.

Has he really improved them? Has he really closed the gap? These were questions our sites were asking in the run-up to the game. Now the mainstream media has finally gotten with the program and is asking the same ones. Because this guy has made them look stupid and that is one of the cardinal sins. They are now scared he might not have what it takes.

I listened, briefly, to Clyde last night as Roger Hannah tried to tell us that he never really had a honeymoon in the first place. What rot that is. The Mooch has had a smooth ride since the minute e walked in the door. He, like Charles Green and a host of other charlatans before him, knew just what buttons to push to get them eating out of his hand.

Well, it is certainly over now and finally attention is being paid to his stupid remarks, the myriad contradictions in his comments, his numerous reversals and also to his brand of football which allowed our defenders a relatively easy afternoon.

The long ball punt is not sexy stuff. It is turgid and awful to watch. There is “going direct” and there is this public park stuff which they seem to play. My old man nailed it when he described it recently as “brute force football”, and if our defenders had played in novelty slippers yesterday they would still have been able to handle much of what was thrown at them.

It’s at this moment, then, with their club mired in an orgy of self-recrimination and their fans now realising the full scale of their problems, that Ange Postecoglou decides to whip out from under them one of their most fervent hopes; that he will be looking to move to England in the summer, or at the earliest opportunity.

This is what has sustained them for months now. With our victory putting us on the brink of a double if not a Treble – giving Ange a return of four trophies from five and perhaps five from six – this is quite obviously the last news they wanted to hear.

It has been delivered emphatically too, leaving not the slightest room for doubt.

“When people say ‘he’s going to go down the road or somewhere else with the first offer he gets’, it’s not how I’m wired, it’s not how I think. For me, what it’s about is just trying to leave a mark wherever I am. I have done that with every football club I have been at. I want to do that at this football club and that is all that consumes me. I don’t think about the next step or I need to go somewhere else, or I need to do this or I need to consider other things.

“I am hoping that over the course of time, as long as I’m here – and I am still here even though people have been getting me out there door, and I think you will be surprised how long I am here – all that I do when I am here is just be consumed by what I do and try to make this football club the best it can be and enjoy every minute of it.

“Things change very quickly. How many managers last three years in their roles these days? You have either got to have extraordinary success or in rare circumstances a club sticks by you. Apart from that, everyone doesn’t last that long. I am going into my third year next year and I am going to keep doing what I am doing and not really worry about what other people see. Because I’ll tell you what the first thing that will be said – and one of you [in the media] will be the first ones to do it – is I am not ambitious enough because I am not moving on.”

And he’s right of course, that’s a charge that will be levelled at him and he knows it. He just doesn’t care about it. If he’s happy – and he is very happy, and you can tell – what else can the man want out of life? He will be well taken care of by this club, that’s for sure.

This is the worst possible news that the Ibrox club and its fans could have got, and there’s a little subtle turning up of the pressure on The Mooch as well … and to think there were people in our media who thought that he’d got under Ange’s skin.