Fear & Loathing In The Champions League: Meltdown At Hampden As Skintco Suffers Another Blow.

There is a fantastic chapter in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal when the good doctor, lying low in Florence, visits an exhibition called Atrocious Torture Instruments. He is not there to observe the items but to watch the crowd, because it is there that he knows the true monstrosity lives. People drooling over the rack, the wheel, the starvation cage, the whetted edge … there is a part of all of us which lusts after the darkness and which gets a kick out of seeing people suffer.

There are few things in life more satisfying than watching that suffering brought about by someone’s own stupidity, avarice or arrogance. And there is, too, something profoundly glorious about watching someone with the cup of glory within their grasp only to have it snatched from their scrambling reach just as their fingers look set to close around it.

You would not have thought it, but one of the finest examples of people being subjected to torment for the viewing pleasure of a vampiric audience used to happen on Saturday night television in the UK, on a series of otherwise harmless game shows.

In the most enjoyable of them, the main prize would stay hidden until right at the end, when a joyous winner would be presented with it, and that was kind of fun to watch, but believe me when I say this, it had nothing on those occasions when the unlucky loser was taunted with the glittering prize.

“Here’s what you could have won,” the host would say, often in barely concealed glee.

And that was the moment audiences up and down the country lived for, and at least in my family they were very upfront about admitting that.

It may well be that sentiment, that abiding love for that moment, which made last night so damned wonderful to watch, and in particular those repeated references from the BBC commentary team, all through the game, but particularly at the end, about how nearly £5 million was riding on the result, and how much the club from Ibrox needed that cash.

“That’s what you could have won,” they seemed to be saying, taunting their fellow fans. “Now, here’s your set of steak knives.”

At half time, I caught sight of Ewan Murray on Twitter, complaining about the BBC which, for the second week in a row, was comprised of ex-Ibrox players doing the “we” and “us” bit. I hope that at full time he was taking the same pleasure in watching those same unbearable idiots gurn and gnash their teeth and spit their fury and demand that the official who sent off Jefre never gets another Champions League game again.

Because their pain, their torment, their suffering, was as fine to me as those long-ago Saturday nights where we watched as Jim Bowen or some other game show front man showed off an entire gleaming kitchen set to a couple who had not quite made it, and were taking home, instead, a rubber cartoon bull and a measly set of darts.

I was initially furious at the composition of that studio panel, who are supposed to be there to offer insight and provide analysis but who from the opening moments were clearly there just to act as a cheerleading section for the Ibrox club.

They were dreadful from the opening minutes until that moment when the red card was flashed at the Ibrox player and he made his way, moaning, up the tunnel. At that point their commentary veered so wildly between bitterness, anger and moments of hope where the edge of hysteria in their voices could have cut glass, that I was almost convulsed with laughter.

Then the goals went in, two in quick succession, and all hope was lost and they started with the clutching at straws and the making of excuses. At full time listening to them was almost as pleasurable as Bach’s Air on a G String played to perfection.

So, no £5 million. No rubber bull and a set of darts either. Just rubbernecking Celtic fans going onto their forums to look at the crash site.

And the pain is glorious. This is our own exhibition of Atrocious Torture Instruments, only instead of just seeing the steel blades and the hanging ropes we’re getting to watch the actual flayings and lashings and slicing and dicing as it’s taking place amongst them.

I know that after last week there were some of them who imagined that maybe things weren’t as bad as some amongst their number have maintained. They clung fiercely to hope, in part because hope’s all they had. Last night, even those fans faced their deepest fears and the realisation dawned that this is going to be a long season, trudging through Hell, like Dante’s pilgrim trying to navigate the Inferno, visiting each of the Nine Circles in turn.

In the aftermath, Phillipe Clement faced the media and complained bitterly about the red card, and claimed that his side had been much the better team until that point. It’s a bizarre boast, considering the poverty of the football on display from both sides. It was torturous to watch. I quipped at half time that the saying goes that after a nuclear war the living would envy the dead, and that anyone who had watched those first 45 minutes could fully understand that sentiment … and really, that summed it up for me because it was dreadful sitting through it.

And yet that half was not without some drama; in one fantastic moment, Cyriel Dessers finally snapped after weeks of provocation at the hands of his own fans, by gesticulating furiously at them and shouting back in a rage. BBC Scotland caught the lot of it, and an incredulous Derek Ferguson suggested that he had “lost the plot.”

It must be catching, because by the end he was far from the only one unspooling. Not only were the studio team spewing forth their fury and their bile but Clement himself was visibly unravelling during that presser where he said some things that were just daft, and others which must have sounded good in his head when he was forming the thoughts but which came out sounding like the worst ramblings and rantings of Donald Trump.

For the record; he claimed that the ref had cost his team the game.

Which is obvious rubbish. His team had 51 minutes in front of their own fans, when the two sides had eleven men apiece on the pitch, and they could barely register a shot on target.

It was a toothless, gutless display and he knows it too because he made a half time substitution, a like-for-like swap which in no way changed the tactical approach which was so stupefyingly awful to witness and which has most of the fans pulling their hair out. Even with ten men on the pitch, they could have won the game … Kiev are not a great side; I would be very confident of us beating them home and away if they made the Groups and we got them.

But look at what happened late in the match; Kiev recognised their opportunity, and Clement played into their hands by making his own changes. The match was finely poised. One manager made the right calls, the other one did not. It was two of Kiev’s substitutes who scored the goals, and so I can completely understand why there are a lot of people who would prefer to be talking about one bad decision and not the series of them the Ibrox boss is responsible for.

It is typical Ibrox deflection. If Clement is blaming the referee that’s convenient. Because if it was the fault of the officials then it wasn’t in any way down to him.

But over on the forums the fear and the loathing run riot. They saw that performance even with eleven men on the park and they know that even making progress in the Europa League is not in the cards unless they seriously improve that squad. The empty seats all around Hampden were a sign of how disgusted their fans are with their state of the club.

And they listen to the manager and they know.

They know what no amount of spin and sleight of hand can hide; that this guy has started to crumble.

They have one win in their first four games of the season and they’re already out of the biggest competition without so much as a whimper. All the signs point to a disastrous campaign … and he doesn’t know to fix it.

The loathing speaks for itself. If the fear is fully justified, then they believe their petty hatreds are too, and they look at a team which is still too full of losers and a management structure which has brought no real improvement and a board which keeps them stuck in the mud and they see no signs of hope for the future; indeed, the club has virtually admitted that there are none, because as far as they are concerned, spending to keep up with Celtic is over, and these fans, so long removed from reality, so far distant as they are from acceptance of that, are casting around for someone to blame and the targets for their rage are everywhere.

It’s the fault of Scottish football. It’s the fault of UEFA. It’s the fault of the Unseen Fenian Hand, and that conspiracy that never stops putting them down. Italian officials, by God? Definitely proof of the Dark Arts at work.

But they also look within their own walls; at Dessers having the cheek to shout back at them, when he has less composure than the Donald Trump sniper; at Tavernier, the notorious loser masquerading as the captain, lost to the world for the opener, and tied in knots more than once during the game; at the manager who got all the big decisions wrong, from his opening team selection to the side that closed out the game; to a new series of injuries and bizarre stories about undeclared ones, summed up in a video of Danilo limping towards his seat in the dugout prior to kick-off … and yes, to the guys who run their club and have allowed the “standards” to slip and who can’t even do a simple stadium renovation without it ending in disaster.

If Celtic has a perception problem, where do you even start with this lot? It reminds me of something from another game show, this one from the States where the catchphrase goes, “You did not tell the truth … now you will have to face the consequences.”

I am always tickled by a line from the great Chuck Barris, whose life story – fact and fiction – was immortalised in the brilliant film Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind; he was the creator of the Gong Show and The Dating Game and in a moment of dark genius once said, “The ultimate game show will be one where the losing contestant dies.”

Football managers don’t suffer that ending, and we can all be grateful for that, but as this season rolls on Phillipe Clement is more and more going to feel like a victim of the Atrocious Torture Instruments. Yet in the end, he’ll leave with a smile on his face.

For all the ignominy and shame of his eventual sacking, he’ll leave with his pockets bulging courtesy of a club which is skint but keeps on conspiring to lose yet more money.

His is a better fate than those who recently handed him a contract extension will face, and if their fans are gripped by fear and loathing this morning, it’s because those people keep making those sorts of decisions, and those sort of crazy mistakes.

One thing might have offered them some respite; cold, hard cash in the form of Champions League qualification.

Last night, they flogged that … and that £5 million was only the start of “what you could have won.”

This morning, they don’t even have a set of steak knives to show for it.