Clownish McLeish Offers The Mooch The Same Old Tired Advice; “Just Copy Celtic.”

The Mooch is surrounded by well-meaning Peepul, isn’t he?

Not that these are the kind of folks you would listen to if you wanted to be a success, but they certainly do seem to think they are giving him good advice. It explains why some of them are on the periphery of the game now and earning a living talking about it instead of active involvement.

Take Barry Ferguson; he thinks they should find the £9 million or so that it would cost to buy back their former youth player Billy Gilmour. It’s as if reality only exists as something for them to shuffle around the edges of.

They certainly never engage properly with it.

This was the week when Ange released a video laying out his blueprint for success.

And what it boiled down to is that managers need to cultivate their own style and follow their own principles, instead of trying to copy someone else’s.

It has taken Ange two years to build this team to where it is today, to where he knows it can play the way he wants.

Yet McLeish’s big plan for The Mooch and his team is simply to copy the way we play, as though that would ever work, as though you can get that brand of football with the type of players they have over there.

The one thing that man has done right is mould a style that fits with the dreck at his disposal; I rejoice at the idea he’s “trying new things” because that kind of experimentation is how stuff gets messed up unless you really know what you’re doing.

I enjoy McLeish these days, which I never thought I’d actually say.

It’s the way he keeps on banging on about the situation at Ibrox when he arrived there as manager to take over the old Rangers.

He never ceases reminding the media, The Mooch and the fans over there that he too was well behind in the league but still in both cups, and he won them both. Every time he opens his mouth he reminds people that The Mooch hasn’t managed to do that.

He rubs it in a little more. He heaps another mound of pressure onto the current manager’s shoulders.

This is what they are all about now.

Copy Celtic. Match Celtic. Beat Celtic. Nothing is done for its own sake, in its own way, simply to improve things there. I’ve never seen a manager under such scrutiny after losing one game, even if it was a cup final.

Now everyone within the Ibrox orbit has an opinion they can’t wait to share and so much of it seems to be based on the same idea, that The Mooch try to do what Ange said was impossible; a cut and paste job. How many more times will they try this before concluding what most of us knew the first time? That it simply will not work.

They tried this with the formation.

They’ve tried playing high-tempo football

They don’t have the talent for it.

How long have they been trying to map out their transfer strategy based on a surface understanding of what it is that we do with ours?

“Copy Celtic,” McLeish says … but it’s all they ever do and it hasn’t paid off so far.

Why do I get the feeling that he’s going to be the last person in Scotland to twig to that?