Scottish Football Hasn’t Done Anything To Clement. If He’s Changed, Only One Club Did It.

In the aftermath of today’s game, I find it hilarious to ponder Hugh Keevins and others.

I haven’t read Hugh Keevins today. I don’t intend to read Hugh Keevins today.

There is one part of his article that I am aware of and I can pretty much base this on that section of it. I’m told that his article is a denunciation of Philippe Clement … does Keevins sense a change in the mood music?

Keevins is not the first of the hacks to take him to task for some of the rubbish he’s talked this past week; I’m only surprised that there hasn’t been more criticism of him considering how ridiculous his comments were.

Keevins’ comments are no less absurd, however.

“What have we done to him in the space of six months?” he asks. “Clement came here as a man of sophistication with multiple title wins in Belgium and a spell at Monaco in France adding to his continental lustre. Now he’s babbling on about people having different coloured glasses. Or telling us he has it on good authority that Sky Sports’ referee in residence Dermot Gallagher is more of a Celtic supporter than he is a neutral observer.”

So much of that is sycophantic claptrap that you could easily skip right over the truly objectionable bit. A man of sophistication? Continental lustre? Says who?

I didn’t twig this, but someone told me earlier that he has won two in his last seven games … two in the last seven. Imagine that was Rodgers. Would someone non-media related have had to tell me that? The hacks wouldn’t have stopped talking about it in the last week going into this game.

Clement has won a handful of titles in a small league and his time in Monaco was an unmitigated disaster ending in the sack.

Keevins thought all the same stuff about Van Bronckhorst; it’s almost embarrassing how impressed he is by a well-tailored suit and a foreign accent.

I am not convinced this was ever a “nice guy”: he just doesn’t exude any warmth. He is clearly narcissistic, and that’s fine, but all the media does is continue to feed his ego.

Clement’s instinct after the game today was to walk straight past the manager who had just beat him and up the tunnel; I have no doubt that he was told that he couldn’t do that and reversed himself when he realised how stinking it would look.

But that this was his initial impulse is telling and it says nothing good about him at all.

But Keevins assertion that Scottish football has “done something” to him; it’s cobblers.

Whatever he didn’t bring with him to this country already – and there is much evidence to suggest that he is an abrasive guy who rubs people the wrong way – was done to him by the same folk who turned Van Bronckhorst into a parody of himself, and he really did arrive at Ibrox with a lot of refinement and class, and with a vastly better CV than Clement.

This isn’t Scottish football, it’s that club over there, the one he manages. It gets inside people’s heads. We’ve all talked about this enough times to recognise it.

The second you arrive at Ibrox you have the “cultural types” hovering around you, cooing in your ear. That’s what turns reasonable, sensible people into narrow minded, paranoid loons.

His comments in midweek stunk of the Ibrox mindset. It’s just like Keevins to identify the problem but instead of pointing the finger where it belongs – which might upset them somewhat – he suggests that all of us have some hand in it; we don’t.

It’s the people who work in the environs of Ibrox who did this, people like Alex Rae, who he brought onto his coaching team to provide the “local knowledge.”

Yeah, we know what that means alright.

Someone sent me a brilliant screenshot from a Celtic forum today which identified this as “Phase Two” of the Ibrox “managerial cycle.” The honeymoon is over, and now the mitigation is being offered; “This isn’t his team.” We all know what Phase Three is. The moment when they turn on him and the venom starts to pour in his direction.

We may not be as far away from that as some people think.

From the moment they went top of the league, we’ve been moving towards a day like this. He would have survived, easily, without any rancour, had they just come up short when we were seven points clear. That was someone else’s screw up, after all.

But the second they went top this went from being The Mooch’s disaster to something that could be hung around his own neck … and I don’t think he’s fully grasped how quickly his fan-base, or the media, could turn on him.

He probably wouldn’t believe that if you told him. He probably still thinks the media would continue loving him no matter what, but they care about their club and when they think he’s an obstacle to their “success” they will turn on him too.

Has Keevins caught the change in the wind? I suspect not. He wouldn’t catch that until it reached hurricane force proportions and was uprooting trees in Glasgow Green.

But Keevins, who predicted last weekend that we would get turned over at Ibrox, feels like a mug and realised before today that the victory many of them just assumed is not going to come as easily as they imagined, if it comes at all, and that’s why we’re starting to see the questions being asked.

But Clement’s general attitude, and the stench of paranoia that wafts off him right now, is Made In Ibrox itself. Leave the rest of us out of this, Keevins.