The Celtic Boss Could End His Rival’s Career, And Clement Doesn’t See It.

In his outstanding book Premonition, Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, tells the story of how a “global health readiness report” commissioned in October 2019 put the US first and the UK second in overall “pandemic preparedness”. He compared it to the way sports pundits rank the teams at the start of the season.

Just two months later, “the game was played.”

COVID hit and all those optimistic, some would say delusional, notions went right out the window.

He quoted the famed US football coach Bill Parcells who said, “You are what your record says you are.”

Before next season starts, I can tell you right now that a lot of the pundits are going to tip Phillpe Clément’s Ibrox side, based on no more evidence than was contained in that “global health readiness report.”

Their predictions will be based on half-baked presumptions and tremendous amounts of pro-Ibrox spin.

Perception will trump reality, and a biased perception at that.

They will not pay heed to the words of Parson’s. They will draw the conclusions they want.

But you are what your record says you are, and nothing more.

And what’s Rodgers record? And what’s Clement’s record?

Well, right now that stands at two wins and a draw, in our manager’s favour.

Over three games. Rodgers has this guy beat, and if he wins the next one, on cup final day, that is a record that Clement will not look good standing against, except that standing against it is precisely what he’s going to have to do.

And you know what?

Past history does not suggest that there is a positive outcome waiting for him if he fails in this city.

Hell, even success here in is not a guarantee that you will necessary land on your feet. The Glasgow football landscape is littered with the corpses of the failures; it’s something not a lot of managers realise.

This is not, as some people have evidently surmised, a gentle land of green fields and flowery slopes. This is a debris littered, charred, blood-soaked battle ground. He’s not on the brightly lit uplands here.

If he looks around him right now he’ll notice something strange and disquieting.

He’ll notice that people who had been crowding him not that long ago just so they could say they’d touched the helm of his coat are now standing just a little off him; if he was an Italian he would recognise this at once. It frequently happened to those in the upper crust if they had publicly spoken out against Cosa Nostra.

The brilliant investigative journalist, Claire Sterling, who wrote a best-selling book about the Sicilian mafia, quoted a former magistrate who said that you always know that a deadly blow is coming because everyone steps out of the way; work colleagues shun you, the papers turn against you, other agencies stop taking your calls. This creates around you a metaphorical empty circle; in military nomenclature this is know as a “clear field of fire.”

The other name they have for it is even more literal.

They call it “the kill-zone.”

If Clement follows the media here at all, as we all do, as any manager who comes here should, he will already have seen that it’s happening.

Journalists who were feting him months ago are suddenly subjecting him to all manner of scrutiny and even criticism.

The volume on that will go up all the louder if he loses the cup final and he should not kid himself that the early positive headlines mean that he is something special; these people don’t care about him at all, only what he can do for their favourite club and if he ceases to fulfil a positive function in that regard then he’s as dead as yesterday’s fish and those positive headlines are only the paper that wraps them. He’s already in trouble. If he winds up in the kill-zone he’s going to find that the consequences do not stop with simply being turfed out of the office at Auchenhowie.

Giovanni Van Bronckhorst arrived at Ibrox a Dutch title winning manager.

Look at where the last two high profile bosses from that league ended up; one is at Manchester United and the other is on his way to Anfield.

Winning the title there should buy you some goodwill. Getting the Ibrox club to a European final definitely should.

But the media here, and the reputation they’ve given him, has so thoroughly destroyed his reputation that he’s not landed a management job since, and his successor at Ibrox has already been sacked from that job and another one in the meantime.

The Mooch himself went to Ibrox as the Next Big Thing. He departed with his reputation in such tatters that he wound up at Sunderland, the textbook definition of a basket-case club and with the fly-on-the-wall documentary to prove it. And their fans hated his appointment and made that clear from the off. He never stood a chance. His reputation was annihilated at Ibrox. He will struggle to build any kind of career now.

Clement’s titles in Belgium should be impressive enough to get him some sort of job, but he is coming off a disastrous spell in France where he was sacked at Monaco. If he follows that up with a cataclysmic failure at Ibrox, and especially one where the media here, with no reason to love him, highlights every error and every mad press conference and every mistake that shows he couldn’t handle the pressure … he’s finished.

None of this will make him a better manager, and, of course, I wouldn’t want it to. But he’s digging his own grave with some of the nonsense he talks, and the higher he sets the expectations bar the more chances he’s not getting over it.

I will not lie about what my motivations are here. I want to see his club fail so spectacularly that next season is over before it even starts – as Sun Tzu says “every battle is won before it’s ever fought” – and so I’m trying to put some highly unpleasant facts in the public domain where they will generate enough debate that he’ll hear the drumbeat of them. But that doesn’t mean that what I’m saying is invented nonsense. Nobody in the mainstream press will voluntarily offer this stuff for discussion, and it amuses me that it might be a Celtic site which does it first.

His club is doomed either way. That’s the other reason I can do this; nothing I say is going to change the objective facts, or the situation on the ground. Celtic starts next season as overwhelming favourites to win the league, and unless their magic money tree starts bearing fruit the current situation only suits us.

If he has sense he’ll be honest with their fans …. and he’ll ask for time.

They gave Gerrard time and he didn’t have half the experience this guy did, or any trophies as a winning boss. He will also ask for money, and to keep their handful of good players … contradictory and that’s why it will be hilarious to see how they juggle that.

But he could do worse than to acknowledge that the fans might have to pay for it; it’s the only way UEFA will let him spend over and above what he can now anyway.

Above all else, he should look for an exit door. This doesn’t end well for him anyway, not if he stays there where the only possible end point is the sack … so he should find a way to get out if he can, to another club if one will take him.

Because this job is the footnote to his career otherwise, and that should be clear to him already.

Brendan Rodgers could beat him for the third time in four games, and take two trophies he had a chance of winning.

That’s potentially career-ending.

He may not believe that, but it’s true nonetheless. He can ask other managers who have failed in this city, even good ones like Van Bronckhorst, or even Paul Le Guen, who came here with a better pedigree than any Ibrox boss has had since and left this city a broken man and a busted flush.

Ibrox is a managerial graveyard. It doesn’t speak much to his ability to do due diligence that he wasn’t aware of that already. But he ought to know it now. If he doesn’t then he’s his own worst enemy, and he’ll know it soon enough.