No Celtic Boss Would Get Away With The Utter Nonsense Clement Talked Yesterday.

The Ibrox club has the perfect manager. There is no doubt about that at all.

The longer you watch the Belgian Waffler, old Manneken Piss, the clearer it becomes that he and that club fit together like a hand in an Orangeman’s white glove.

He is an arrogant man with a streak of malice. He is either delusional or egotistical enough to think his nonsense will be believed.

Of course, part of that stems from knowing that much of it will be believed, or at least that most of what he says will be accepted and not probed too carefully by the media which here in Scotland eats out of his hand. That he takes them for absolute mugs is entirely obvious.

That they are content to act as his useful idiots should shame them.

I have heard him talk utter rot before; that’s why I gave him those two nicknames.

He’s not like The Mooch, where every word out of his mouth is bonkers, but he’s certainly not someone playing with a full deck.

The media love-in seems crazy to me when it’s perfectly plain that he’s got no respect for any of them, and that some of what comes out of his mouth should be challenged and isn’t.

If a manager doesn’t arrive at Ibrox with a supremacy complex it doesn’t take him long to develop one once he realises that these people are intent on making him a hero figure and blowing smoke up his backside. That would make anybody’s head swell.

His comments in the aftermath of the match itself were absolutely ridiculous. I wrote about them last night in the piece of Fabio Silva.

What I didn’t know when I published that piece is that just a few hours later the print journalists would publish the embargoed details of their own sit-down with him where he talked some of the most obvious rubbish any boss has this season.

For a start, he defended Silva, and that confirms that everything I wrote in that piece was on the nose. He actually has no problem with those theatrics.

Which is a valid position to take and one you could almost respect; “yes, my players play games to win fouls and get opposing players booked.” That would at least be straightforward and honest.

But he actually denied what we spent an hour or more of that game watching, which is that his player dived and rolled around and cheated and tried to get people booked.

He denied it, flatly, and brazenly, and then offered up the most pitiful rubbish about Silva having “stud marks” on him as evidence that he’d been repeatedly fouled.

All I can say is that they must have been self-inflicted ones, because nowhere at any time was there a tackle on him that would have left any.

The notable incidents where he looked like a bad actor attending his first drama class mostly involved him rolling about holding his face.

He did at one point roll around like his foot had gotten hurt, but he must be made of glass if the minor clip he took which provoked that disgraceful scene did him any actual harm. Everyone watching that was mortified on his behalf, even those of us who were disgusted by it as well.

Yet his manager sat there yesterday and actually denied that he had play-acted, that he had behaved that way, even as he was making the pathetic excuse that it was his first big derby, as though this is some wet-behind-the-ears kid who was just out of his depth and not a professional footballer who moved to the EPL for a massive fee not that long ago.

He denied that his player was a diver and a cheat when we all watched it happen with our own eyes, when all the hacks in the room had walked it with theirs, and they let him get away with that. They actually let him off without pressing him on it.

He had a go at Brendan Rodgers for having dared stand up for his own player.

He basically told him not to talk about another team’s footballers, and no sooner had those words escaped his lips but he was talking about cheats at other clubs, but of course he didn’t name a single one of them, but in that sly, cowardly way he has at times he told the media that they knew who he was referring to, which, again, they all accepted … possibly because it allows some of them to go away and hunt for the “evidence” on their own, which is an underhanded, but convenient, way of smearing people without actually having to do your own dirty work.

“There’s some things that need to be taken out of the game and that’s the job of the managers and the referees,” he said when referring to those cheats whose names he wouldn’t provide. And you have to admire the balls of that, to demand that other clubs bring their divers and their charlatans into line even as he defends those in his own house.

He even got away with suggesting that the Dundee game should be moved to a neutral ground; not that this would disenfranchise the home club and help his own team or anything, no, he was speaking, as he always is, as he always does, if you believe in the press he gets, about the reputation of the league and that’s the only reason he’s promoting this idea.

I guess it’s better than simply saying “just give us the points”.

Can you even imagine Brendan Rodgers giving an interview like that and getting away with it?

We had the full-scale inquest with everything but demands for his resignation because he made an off-hand, nothing remark to Jane Lewis at the end of an interview, a manufactured controversy if ever there was one.

And this isn’t a one off. This guy has done this before, and he’ll do it again because the press loves him even as he accuses them of being biased in our favour … an assertion so ridiculous that I actually burst out laughing reading it.

And they lapped it up. There is no shaming these people at all … or him, it seems.