Fear And Loathing In Dundee: Clement Goes All Liz Truss As His Team Stumble Again.

“Two words,” said a furious Ibrox fan last night on one of their forums. “Not f@@@ing good enough.” And that just about summed it up for me.

This morning, the UK political media is convulsing itself with laughter as the memoirs of the shortest serving Prime Minister in the history of this nation goes on sale, and Truss attempts to explain away the utter disaster that was her reign of error.

She lasted just 50 days. That’s why Liz Truss’ book “Ten Years To Save The West” is already the subject of much mockery.

The publicity tour to promote it has been hilarious because you cannot listen to this woman and not recognise that she is off her nut.

Phillipe Clement has already lasted longer than 50 days. He is not yet approaching the point where he is racing against time versus a lettuce, but more and more he sounds like a complete cabbage.

Last night, in the aftermath of that disastrous result for his team, he praised the players, claimed he got the reaction he’d been looking for and said that Dundee had marked them so closely they even followed his players to the toilet.

Surely a joke … although Todd Cantwell probably believes it.

It’s clear though that this man, who actually swore during his presser on Tuesday and blamed the media for it because he is now too familiar with them (I am not making this up) has already gone past Van Bronckhorst style rambling and has entered Pedro Caixinha territory, or Liz Truss country to put it a different way. He sounds like someone starting to unspool.

Ibrox fan forums are divided on this subject; is this man losing his mind, or is he just saying what he has to in public to keep the dressing room sweet? Here’s the problem with that particular theory; if you’ve reached the point where you’re trying to bollock a room full of grown men, multimillionaires all, in an attempt to bully them into playing better, then the battle is already lost and what you say out in front of the cameras doesn’t matter a damn.

Much worse would be if he meant every word and was going into the dressing room and telling the players the self-same thing he’s telling the press; that Dundee “were lucky” and that this was just another off-day or freak occurrence. Is he mad enough to believe that? It doesn’t matter. Whatever he said to those players between the weekend and last night made no difference at all, and anyone who is still playing Fabio Silva deserves what he gets anyway.

I listened to Liz Truss being interviewed by Ian Dale the other day, as she ranted and raved, sounding like someone who had escaped from a secure hospital, and I thought that would surely be the barmiest thing I listened to this month. But I was wrong. Listening to Clement last night, I was struck by how normal Truss sounds when compared with him.

On Tuesday, he was asked about winning only two games from the last seven; he deflected and said it was a “poor use of statistics” because two games against Benfica were folded into that, as if it made him sound better by pointing out that he’d won only two league games in the last five.

Last night he was asked about his recent record and uttered the most bizarre words I have ever heard from a manager whose team is chasing the league; “Yes of course it’s a good reaction but I know for journalists and fans they’re sometimes only looking at results.”

Is there any other element which should matter in a close title race? Is there something more important than results? How else are journalists and fans supposed to judge the team at this stage, and especially when those results have been so stinking? In the space of weeks, they’ve lost to Motherwell and Ross County and drawn against Celtic and Dundee. Benfica have knocked them out of Europe in the same period. Their title challenge has crumbled to dust.

Standing on the sidelines last night, Clement looked a lot like a man who has jumped out of an airplane and only when he reached what the skydivers call terminal velocity discovered that he’d put on a backpack instead of a parachute. That man has no idea how to get them out of the trouble they are in, and you can see it on his face and hear it in his voice.

But worse, if you’re an Ibrox fan, is that like Truss he believes he’s getting everything right, that his judgement is unimpeachable, that he’s some kind of guru.

I talked the other day about his crazy press statements in relation to the run they are on; against Celtic they were brilliant, albeit only for 45 minutes. Ross County was an off-day. Motherwell was a freak occurrence … not only can he not give an iota of credit to the opposition, but he genuinely thinks he’s doing just fine and that his luck will turn.

Truss thought that it was people around her who failed because they didn’t hold their nerve in allowing her decisions to play out all the way. That Britain would have ended up the plaything of Chinese speculators and the IMF appears not to have dawned on her.

Clement thought that was a good performance last night, that they had plenty of chances to score, and that Dundee were lucky. “It’s not easy against a team who play man making all over the pitch and follow you…even if you go to the toilet,” he said, in the most bizarre managerial statement Scottish football has seen since Pedro was in town. Which is to say nothing for how odd it is to hear a manager complaining because his opposite number did his job.

But how many times have we pointed out that other than dead balls and long punts and lucky breaks in the game they just aren’t doing that well?

He talked about scoring three against Celtic; one of those was a penalty and another was a deflection. He talked about scoring two against Ross County; one of those was an own goal, and of course the other was a penalty … they didn’t get one of those last night and they’ve failed to put the ball in the net. Is the pattern starting to become clear?

He says he “still believes.” So does Liz Truss, and that’s the amazing thing. Crazy people do tend to believe their own delusions; there would be no problem otherwise, would there? But as I once wrote, if you live in fairytales, you always have to worry about dragons, and the dragon is not Celtic, it is the rabid element of the Ibrox support which thinks that any manager who fails them does so because he just doesn’t have the right cultural understanding of the club.

And that’s why this morning the fear and loathing is rolling off the forums in waves, and some of them are washing up on Clement’s doorstep for the first time, and this is just the start of it. I said a few months ago that everything changed for him the moment they went top of the league; before that he was the heroic leader who closed the gap … now he’s the guy who threw away a lead against a Celtic side which most of them thought was there for the taking.

Right now, they are still willing to give him some benefit of the doubt, but the doubt is there and it is growing. His Truss-like press conference in the aftermath of the game was frankly incredible and that has somehow scared them more than the result.

The fear is not misplaced. The loathing is directed at the players for now … but the man they call Big Phil will have it coming if he doesn’t sort this out. The thing is … I wonder if he even fully grasps that anything is wrong.