Clement has been publicly undermined over his Celtic Park narrative. He’s got big problems.

A day or two ago, something thing happened in the White House press room. A journalist – and I use that term in the loosest possible sense, only because the individual in question had a media pass around his neck, which is the sole reason he got a seat in the room in the first place – asked a truly bizarre and outrageous question to the White House press secretary. She greeted it with incredulity, and then the contempt it deserved.

The guy was from Fox News, and he asked about Kamala Harris and her accent, questioning whether the accent she had used during a speech to union workers was authentic, since she had seemingly used a different accent when speaking to another crowd.

The press secretary was flabbergasted. She stared at him, then launched into a well-deserved tirade about the stupidity of the question, pointing out that the previous journalist had just asked a question about freedom, both in America and the wider world.

She highlighted that these were the real issues, along with the economy, the war in Gaza, and the climate crisis that Americans genuinely care about.

The question revealed the gulf between the unprofessionalism of the conservative right-wing media and those just trying to get things done. It reminded me of the unprofessionalism often shown by our sports media when it comes to some of the questions they ask. Rodgers, in particular, has contempt for questions that have nothing to do with our team but instead focus on nonsense in an attempt to create controversy.

Many in the media, including our sports media, are obsessed with creating controversy. Sometimes, there are legitimate questions that are controversial, but nobody in the press wants to ask those. They prefer to create fake controversy, which is usually on a small scale – much like that question from Fox News.

Today, Vaclav Cerny made a number of interesting statements, presumably while on international duty. He spoke about the recent derby and the direction the club needs to go in. He said their objective is now to catch Celtic at all costs – that everyone at the club knows they have to do this.

If that’s the general feeling inside their dressing room and the club, I can only express my amazement at how stupid and short-sighted they are. This shouldn’t be their objective at this moment in time. Their objective should be getting through the next game, then a series of games, putting points on the board, building some momentum, and trying to hang onto the coattails of Dundee United and Aberdeen, stopping them from pulling too far ahead.

Back when Strachan was Celtic manager, as we chased our third title, we went into the final month of the season miles behind Rangers, but their run to the UEFA Cup Final had caused a fixture pile-up. We knew we had a chance, but it depended on us winning every match, something we hadn’t done in a while. I remember Strachan being asked what he was telling the players about our chances.

What he told them was to forget about the gap and focus on winning one game at a time. Let others worry about their own affairs; let them fret over how they’d play so many fixtures. Just focus on one game at a time, on ourselves. Because you narrow a gap like that one point at a time. I thought that philosophy – focusing entirely on ourselves, not worrying about others – was tremendously valuable. It’s the mantra you hear from Brendan Rodgers repeatedly. It’s the mantra of elite managers, and it’s clear they don’t have that across the city.

That in itself tells an interesting story about what’s going on at their club. But Cerney’s comments didn’t end there. He also admitted we outclassed them all over the pitch. He actually used those words: “We didn’t do well at all; they outclassed us in everything.”

There might be one or two over there who genuinely can’t admit the gulf in quality that was so obvious during that game, but this guy isn’t one of them. I doubt many other players see it differently. The advantage with guys like this is that they’re only here as mercenaries. They’re here to do a job, and they don’t care about the supremacist nonsense that surrounds that club or how they interpret the fixture through the prism of the Ibrox “uber-staunch.”

These are professionals, clear-eyed about what they experience. He took no comfort in statistics or anything else. He knew he had been part of a game where they were soundly beaten, and he wasn’t in the mood to sugarcoat it or pretend otherwise.

Like I said, much of their dressing room is likely just as clear-eyed about what they witnessed and took part in. They all know that their club is a shambles and some of them must sense that their manager is in over his head.

I wrote earlier about the sack race between him and Steven Naismith; some at that club must already suspect that Clement is out of his depth. I’m not going to tell the hacks how to do their job – they should know what’s important and what’s not. But the player’s comments are a clear sign there’s a disconnect between what the manager says and what his players believe.

If that were the Celtic boss, and he was flatly contradicted by one of his players after a heavy loss, it would be a news story.

Indeed, credit to The Record for identifying it as one; they are already highlighting it.

But they should not be stopping there.

Clement should be asked about it at the next media sit-down. The press should be asking Clement, “Do you still believe, in light of what your player said, that the game was close? Your player doesn’t believe it was close. He used the word ‘outclassed.’”

That wouldn’t be a frivolous question, like the one from the Fox journalist at the White House press briefing. It would be a legitimate question. It’s a legitimate issue if the manager is telling his players what he told the media – that the game was closer than it looked, that they have nothing to worry about, that if they had scored early, the game would have gone the other way – while the players know that’s not true.

It means he has no credibility in the dressing room.

Conversely, if he’s reading the Riot Act in the dressing room but saying something different to the media, then that only works if there’s perfect message discipline across the club. Everyone has to speak the same language, trot out the same party line. If they can’t even get that right, then again, there are serious questions about his leadership and his ability to impose his will on his players.

Some in the media may not like this, because it means doing their job, and some don’t want to do that when it comes to this sort of thing. Whatever they think, there’s a story here when a player and his coach are so completely at odds about how they read a game, and The Record at least seems to realise that there is a problem with these two conflicting narratives. They should push harder, because that impacts everything that coach does or is trying to do.

There’s such a wide variation between those two points of view that it’s hard to see how that gap is being bridged inside the club.

Clement’s comments have already been widely derided outside the club, with many in the mainstream press dismissing them as ridiculous. Managers can survive that, but they can’t survive when their players have the same contempt for their views and opinions. When that happens, they find themselves in serious trouble trying to motivate those players, leading to crisis and sackings in short order. So this is an opening for a good journalist to probe some.

This is where the ultimate weakness in our sports media lies; they realise there’s something here, but do they have the guts to push on and get to the bottom of it? They should be asking hard questions about whether the Ibrox dressing room truly trusts the head coach, given that they clearly do not see the world the way he does, nor the game the way he does. And perhaps those disagreements run even deeper than that.

He’s in a lot of trouble, perhaps more than it looks on the surface.