Do The Hacks Still Think It’s The Celtic Boss Who Sounds Like He’s Cracking Under Pressure?

Did you hear the Ibrox boss last night? Jeez. I thought he sounded bad in the little snippet I heard, but in fact the full segment was really something. He’s cracking up this guy. He’s demanded, again, that his own players get special protection from the refs.

He seems gobsmacked by everything he’s seeing around him right now. The sense of entitlement he projects is astounding. He doesn’t believe his side is supposed to drop points. He sounds, to me, like someone who has been sitting on a beach for a month and has just remembered, as a giant wave comes towards him, that he was meant to be watching out for tsunamis

I remember years back reading Graham Spiers excellent book on Paul Le Guen.

He thought that Le Guen, with his measured, calm, rational, laid back and friendly approach not only to management but to all the ceremony surrounding it, including meeting the media, was grossly at odds with the kind of club he had found himself at; formal, insular and with that arrogant sense of superiority. Spiers thought he’d have been more suited to Celtic.

And I understood that because almost every Ibrox boss in my living memory – with Van Bronckhorst being the notable exception – was an egotistical clown who really did think he was a Special One until it all went wrong. This guy fits that club like a glove.

Part of the problem is the media.

Whatever ego these guys arrive with is fed over and over and over again until it has swelled to enormous proportions, and that is always worse if these guys go on a half decent run at the start. Look at The Mooch; Christ, he’s still up his own backside right now and that was a contributing factor in his sacking at Sunderland. Before he can even start to rebuild his coaching career, he’s going to have to reorient himself in reality.

Part of it is Ibrox itself, of course. I read a great article about a former Trump campaigner recently, and he said that it’s taken him years – actual years – to rid himself of some of the crazy ideas he was exposed to within that ecosystem. Imagine what it’s like inside Ibrox.

Imagine being surrounded by that all the time. That would mess with your head in a big way. Terry Butcher is a famous case in point; his wife staged an intervention to snap him out of it.

This guy has got it all already, he’s deep into it. He certainly arrived with an Ibrox arrogance, but what that club does to people goes way, way beyond growing the ego. It poisons it and he is already starting to sound like a bitter, bitter man.

More than that though, he’s starting to sound like a guy under pressure, and not just under pressure but beginning to crack. He’s been wobbly since we beat them at Celtic Park, but you know what? I think he’s been worse since they went top.

That’s when the reality of what I said in a piece the other week – that he’s now in the box seat and if this goes wrong, he can no longer hide behind the failure of his predecessor – started to dawn on him.

And he’s crumbling under it. He’s actually flaking out. If we win today I hope the media starts asking him some of the sorts of questions Rodgers has been getting these past few weeks, because I can only imagine how he’s going to answer them.

He has history of this, of course.

Whatever went wrong at his other clubs – and particularly at Monaco, where he crashed the dressing room – the media’s never really been interested in finding it out. But I’m getting the distinct feeling that stuff is going to be important, because not only does it let you understand his past but gives you a hint about how he’ll handle the future.

Today, we can bring that one step closer. Let’s do it Bhoys.