Disoriented, Dazed And Doomed. Clement Goes Into Every Game Wondering “Is This The Day?”

Is this the day? Is this the day the Philippe Clement collapse becomes unrecoverable? Is this the day the Ibrox crisis explodes like a volcano and scorches everything around it?

Let me tell you something: when you’re asking that question, it’s already almost over. When every single match you go into as a manager has people wondering, “Is this the day?” then one of these days, they’re going to be right.

In aviation, one of the most feared scenarios is what pilots call the “death spiral.”

This is often misunderstood. It’s not when a plane is nose-down and heading for the ground; the death spiral is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when the plane is descending in a circular motion, sometimes because of pilot error, sometimes due to electrical failure. Although, believe it or not, pilot error is the most common cause.

I’ll give you an example. In the case of the 1963 air crash that killed Patsy Cline, the country singer, air crash investigators concluded that the pilot had become disoriented in heavy cloud cover. Instead of relying on the instrument panel, he tried to fly by instinct, and in doing so, put the plane into a right-hand diving turn at a 25° nose-down angle.

It was as simple as that: the pilot got disoriented, and because he couldn’t see properly and was attempting to find somewhere with better visibility, the right wing collided with a tree, and the plane crashed.

This is called spatial disorientation, and it happens when a pilot loses his bearings completely but tries to fly his way out of it, often with tragic consequences.

That’s how Clement must feel right now. He’s in a familiar place, just like a pilot in a cockpit, surrounded by instruments he understands. But when he looks out the window, he has only a vague idea of where he’s supposed to be.

As John F. Kennedy Jr. found out in a similar crash, if you’re flying at night over water, it can be hard to differentiate where the sky and the sea meet. Or if you’re flying in thick cloud cover or fog, many pilots—especially inexperienced ones—get confused and panic, which is what leads to trouble.

Clement is suddenly unsure of his surroundings.

When he sits in the dugout at Hampden today, it won’t be where he expected to be, and these won’t be the circumstances under which he expected to be there. Things he thought would work, don’t. Ideas he thought would pay off, aren’t.

I bet the feeling of disorientation is really, really real for him.

For one thing, the ground today is going to be pretty close to half-empty. That in itself will be disturbing. The team is not playing as a functioning unit, and for a guy who’s pretty full of himself, that’s also going to be a little bit mind-warping.

I’ll tell you; the whole situation must be disorienting for him.

From the moment he arrived in Scottish football, he was being feted and lauded as some kind of conquering hero. It wasn’t even that long ago—you only have to go back to April. The media were hailing this guy as a genius who had turned around a dead season, and they were tipping him as a potential treble winner.

At that point, he probably thought he’d have Champions League money to spend. He probably thought that the rebuild would be a relatively straightforward task. That, of course, was before Rodgers got Celtic firing again and we swept to the double.

That was before his own club couldn’t get its act together enough to complete a simple upgrade to the stadium. It was before the board finally fronted up and told him that the days of front-loaded transfer spending were over and done with, and that he would have to sell before he could buy.

So, disorientation? Yeah, I imagine he feels quite a bit of it. Although, to a layperson, this should be a reasonably straightforward game today, from his position on the touchline it’s going to feel an awful lot like flying in fog. Everywhere around him, he’s being questioned and scrutinised in a way he has never experienced before in his career.

You see this with managers quite a lot, especially guys who have coasted by on a couple of simple tricks. Those tricks get old, and they no longer have the power they once did. You see it too with certain types of politicians—you can watch it happening in the States right now, as Trump fumbles around for attack lines and tries to make the tactic of smearing his opponent pay off.

But the tactics that worked in 2016 don’t work any longer in 2024.

The thing about a guy like that is once you get past the initial shock and revulsion at what’s coming out of his mouth, it just becomes a drone.

And although it should be unthinkable to say this, he’s become a tiresome bore. There are people who hear him ranting and raving and going on the offensive and they just mentally tune out because it’s the same record on repeat.

It’s the same with managers. When the dressing room is no longer listening to them, when players lose interest in what the guy has to say, and when he’s standing there, he might as well be talking to a brick wall.

Imagine how disorienting that is. Imagine walking into a room full of people who are supposed to respect you and suddenly realising that none of them do. These are the people who hold your future in their hands. They’re getting paid their salary, whatever happens to you. If they don’t think you’ve got it any longer, what are you supposed to do then?

In those circumstances, it would be easy for anyone to lose their bearings. Everywhere—from his own stands to the media who long ago fell out of love with this guy—the question increasingly being asked now is: is this the day?

And you’re in real trouble as a manager when every single game could be the day. He’s not just one bad result away from crisis; he’s already in crisis. He’s not trying to sidestep disaster; he’s in the disaster. It’s happening now in real time, like a plane that’s slowly descending in a death spiral.

If his team goes out of the cup today, he’ll be lucky to make it to October.