Celtic Fans Would Love To See Gerrard Or Some Other Bling Boss At Ibrox.

Following this club of ours, and watching the media with interest, all kinds of bizarre ideas and bizarre theories come across my field of vision. There are two of them happening right now which inspire the same hilarity, and I’ll tell you what they are.

The first is the Tory Party Conference which is happening down in Manchester.

The second is Ibrox’s search for a new boss.

To be actively involved with either, it seems to me, involves leaving reality at the door.

The Tories have apparently noticed the state the country is in. But that’s apparently the fault of the EU, immigrants, “wokeishness”, kids using mobile phones in school and speed limits. Those things and a rash of others. Not 13 years of their government of course, which of course is what actually is to blame for the calamitous state of the nation.

To be involved in the Ibrox manager hunt requires perhaps an even bigger separation from reality though.

The myths they cling to are incredible.

The first of them being that they are in their present state because in 2012 there was a vast Celtic-led conspiracy to put them out of the top flight for three years. (It turned into four; I guess we were to blame for that as well.) It all revolves around their size and status as a club … and the lies they believe about that.

I’ll write about some of those lies a little later on, but there’s one which directly relates to where we are right now, and the unreality which swirls around their manager hunt. Kenny Miller summed it up best on Radio Clyde yesterday with his own bizarre fantasy-land suggestion that they should attempt to bring Steven Gerrard back from Saudi Arabia.

Little things like his massive salary could be gotten around, Miller thinks, if the will was there. I mean dear God, where even to start with that lunacy? That guy couldn’t wait to get out of Ibrox, and this joker reckons he’s going to give up mega-bucks earnings and no pressure on him at all to come back here and go again? Miller really is a moron, eah?

But there is some logic to this, if you subscribe to the underlying theory in it; that Gerrard has the measure of Celtic and that he has the magic spell which can wrestle back the title. The only trouble is that’s it’s garbage. Utter rot, which somehow has not been wholly stamped on and held up to the contempt and the ridicule that it deserves.

Gerrard was an utter failure at Ibrox, managing a single trophy in a three and a half year spell. He would have been sacked had the COVID shut-down in his second season not ended the title race early because we had already left him flailing in the dust.

I am at a complete loss as to how Ibrox fans somehow convinced themselves that winning the title the following year meant more than it did. Even the most optimistic Celtic fan, under similar circumstances, would have held off from getting carried away until we saw whether or not the guy could hold up under a return to normality.

Gerrard and his former assistant place great store in having been ahead when he left. But the slide had already begun and everyone knows it full well. They had dropped enough points in the league that we were still in contention. We were on the rise, and everyone watching could see it a mile off. They were on the slide and it was obvious to all but the most deluded.

We would have caught Gerrard’s team, and Gerrard knew it himself which is why he left the way he did. After our initial bad run as Ange got his team together we didn’t lose again all season in the league. Gerrard’s team looked like it could lost every game it played. In the end, we won a double and followed it up with a treble.

We proved – we’ve conclusively proved – that the COVID Campaign was a freak event.

We clearly demonstrated our ability to pick up right where we left off in the four preceding years, and we’ve been moving ahead since. We are the biggest club in Scotland and we were caught that year not by a brilliant management team but by a bizarre confluence of circumstances which our management team, and our club itself, handled spectacularly badly.

But when we gave ourselves a shake and got back rolling again, there was only ever going to be one outcome.

The Greatness Of Gerrard is a myth.

He had already crashed out of the Champions League, at home, to a ten man team, when he left and they were on course for losing at Hampden in the League Cup which they duly did after he’d gone, but the writing was on the wall for that result.

He went to Villa and did nothing but get sacked early. No club in England wanted to touch him which is why he’s in the football backwater, where he went for money and nothing else. Because what else is there?

Let me tell you, as a Celtic fan I’d love it if they got Gerrard back, if for no other reason than we’d smash that mad fantasy about his having our number into tiny shards before the season was out.

I would equally love it if they went for the guy they’re currently talking about, their next “bling name”, Frank Lampard, whose already been sacked twice in a five year career.

A bling appointment of that sort would be perfect.

For Celtic.

And it would lay the table for a crisis the likes of which even their club has never seen.