Celtic Fans Can See That Clement Is Divorced From Reality. But His Own Fans Are Loving It.

Here’s a little thought experiment I picked up recently whilst reading something.

Imagine you are driving your car, and you are playing with your phone, and because you aren’t concentrating, you veer off the road and you wind up in a ditch. The car has taken a good knock, but essentially the car is okay.

What lesson would you learn? A day or two later you would probably be sitting around shooting the breeze about how silly you had been.

But imagine you’d hit something solid and totalled the car. Same result a couple of days later? No, you’d be stressed and trying to get insurance to stump up, and you might even be nursing a minor injury. What lesson would you learn from that?

Let’s go again; imagine you wind up in a hospital as a consequence of that lapse in concentration? Car is totally wrecked, and you’re lucky you’re not totalled as well. What conclusion do you draw from that? What lessons do you learn? Harder ones maybe, right?

One last time, let’s imagine that accident.

Only in this one you hit another person and that person isn’t as lucky as you are in the last scenario; it’s no hospital bed for them, but a funeral and a devastated family, and more than one life shattered.

Too late to learn at that point, or is this what education specialists call “a teachable moment”?

Here’s what a certain type of person can’t process; in all those scenarios, the lesson is the same one.

It’s just that depending on the consequences they won’t view it like that. That type of person will not get out of the car in that ditch and think “My God, I could have killed someone or myself just then …”

Most right-thinking people will not draw a different conclusion from the first scenario than they would about the last one.

But those people do. That’s why so many terrible mistakes are repeated until they end in disaster.

This has always struck me as the ultimate absurdity of the Survival and Victim Lies.

They refuse to acknowledge what happened, and if you don’t acknowledge it how can you ever learn from it? How do fans who watched one club die allow themselves to be so incensed by the sight of Celtic players holding the league trophy that they are willing to risk their new club heading in exactly the same way?

Well, if they had actually been made to confront the death of the old club and recognised what killed it, they might not be so inclined towards the same behaviour again.

But listen to them talk, and check their forums, and read the media.

None of them accepts that’s what happened. They all believe the Survival Lie. They all subscribe to the Victim Lie. What lessons can they draw from those? There were no consequences last time, except for those they blame on everyone else. They just don’t get what they let happen.

Today their manager sat in front of the press and told a lie of his own. “I want to win everything and become champion. But at the end we started with seven points behind the first day we stepped into the building and we could not in that period close the gap of taking more than seven points off Celtic. We took one point more until now in that period but not enough so that was seven.”

Ignore his garbled syntax. He’s talking absolute unpardonable rubbish. First, his team didn’t personally take anything off Celtic. We secured seven points out of nine under his glorious reign. So that’s absolute rot for a start.

On top of that, this is the guy who only days ago said there was no gap. And as for not closing it … that’s him pretty much telling their fans to blame the last manager for his own failure. Strictly in terms of the points, the gap did close. It did more than that.

You can decide for yourself how you want to frame that; their fans think they were just brilliant, ours think we needlessly threw points away. You come to the same moment in time regardless; they were top of the league.

How in the Hell did he get away with that today? Who exactly what is in that room with him, putting those questions to him and accepting those answers? Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne?

He doesn’t get to pretend like that didn’t happen. We know it happened. Christ, they rubbed our faces in it for weeks afterwards, and not just their loony fans online. You had people like Kenny Miller and Hugh Keevins and Tom English banging the drum for him and his team at the time, and all but telling Celtic fans not to waste their energy going back to games this season because “Big Phil” had swept in and was going to take our title away.

But he went further than that, of course. He referred to “the end of a cycle” at the club, and told the media that he and the board had the same thoughts on the summer and that they would back whatever he did. And what is that? He wants to keep Tavernier, all told.

So there goes the fabled “Saudi money” – and I don’t call it fabled for nothing of course.

He wants to keep Butland, so there’s another potential transfer kitty there, gone.

He knows players are leaving and that there’s nothing he can do about it, so in some ways the “end of the cycle” is simply something that he’s going to be forced to accept, whether he likes it or not. So some of it is posturing. Their team doesn’t have enough quality in it, and so he has to gut it out one way or another … but he’s clearly talking about spending money as well.

And probably quite a lot of it. So once again, a team at Ibrox gets ripped down and another one is scheduled to be built without any sensible person asking if that’s wise. We can also see that he’s got some very specific ideas in his mind for what that new team should look like; the blueprint is the complete opposite of what Celtic will try to do this summer.

“We are going into a pre-season that needs to be hard,” he said. “We need to build physical to be able to play at a high intensity three times a week and avoid so many injuries. We need to start pre-season strong ahead of qualifiers and the league.”

We need to be physical. So, with limited money, he wants to prize two attributes – fitness and strength – above all others. That is the most sophomoric idea in all of football. Is a guy with his experience really going down that road? The 1980’s English road? The one that almost all elite football has left behind?

And isn’t that what The Mooch spent last summer trying to do?

Notice how he blames the absence of such a culture for his injuries.

He has to be joking.

Look at the players he brought into the club in January to see what his blueprint looks like. One of those players came in and got injured straight away and hasn’t kicked a ball since. Why did he get injured? Cause he was carrying a small knock and Clement threw him into the team anyway.

He’s indulging in a bit of self-parody at the same time. He says that Sima will be back in contention for the Hearts game; a player who has been out three times for weeks on end since Clement came in, and who should never have been rushed back into the team from his last injury. This blog predicted that he would very soon be out again, and suggested that perhaps his parent club step in and stop this guy from doing something stupid with their player.

He’s about to do it all over again. And Ryan Jacks is almost “fit” as well. Wow. If Ryan Jack plays as much as a minute of Saturday’s game or the cup final I’ll be frankly astonished because he is miles away from having any sort of match sharpness at all.

This is what he said about the looming start to next season.

“In the month of August, there are nine games with two qualifying rounds for Champions League and five competition games. That is directly a really tough start. I did it before with Brugge. We had at that moment a core of the group and you could add, implement a few factors to make things better. I think here we need a bigger rebuild so that is even more challenging than it was before.”

So, he’s promising a total turnaround, or something very like it.

With what? Monopoly money?

How are they going to get off the wage bill some of the dreck already on there and which has given them the biggest one in the country?

They have a lot of poor players they could try and shift, but consider that those players – Lammers, Hagi and others – wouldn’t be out on loan if they could get games in this current Ibrox side and he knows himself how poor it is.

So who exactly is going to spend real money on them?

On top of that, he said in January when they signed the deal for Diomande that it was good to get that over the line when they basically had no cash to spend … so where’s the money coming from to spend more than they bargained for in the summer?

He was asked that question as well; “Is this a bigger rebuild than you thought when you walked in the door?” and he answered that with a “yes.” When asked if the will to back that exists at the club, he again answered with a “yes.”

But of course, “the will” is there. We could have answered that.

With the directors they have right now? The supremacist sect? The Übermensch?

God, it kills these Peepul to have to accept second place to anyone, but especially to the likes of us … so of course the will is there. They are driven by their own egos as much as groupthink at this point and so any insanity is possible.

These Peepul are so frustrated and pissed off and scunnered to see Celtic winning leagues and creeping ever closer to rendering the Lies redundant that they would risk it all to stop that … and the Ibrox fans are applauding this like performing seals hoping for a fish.

And they’re doing that because they are coming at it from their own blindspot.

They were never made to confront the horror of what happened to Rangers.

And so they don’t get that when you drive your car off the road because you were playing with your iPhone that is the disaster, that it is the teachable moment, that is the time to learn lessons, and if you don’t reconsider your behaviour in the event that it’s “no harm done” you are asking for disaster some other time.

In the circumstances of total disaster, you certainly don’t lie to yourself and everyone around you about the cause of that and apportion the blame somewhere else.

The lack of accountability at that club is even greater than the lack of it at the top of Celtic, and we have a fan-base where some of us do realise that the directors don’t get credit because they needlessly, foolishly, scandalously, bet the house on odd or even and got their number up.

The madness of having taken such a ludicrous risk in the first place has already cost Mark Lawwell his job, and I’m firmly of the belief that Daddy should follow him out the door.

Their manager sat there today and committed to spending money they don’t have and which we all know they don’t have. Which he, himself, has to know they don’t have, and which the board above his head certainly knows they don’t have.

But then he also made that claim about taking points from Celtic and wanting credit because a seven-point gap is now a six point one as though there was never an intervening period where he got his nose in front.

That whole club floats in a sea of unreality, fantasy and delusion … so why should he be any different?

But if you don’t learn the lessons of history you’re doomed to repeat it … and they won’t even acknowledge their history, let alone learn from it.