Yesterday was another day in Ibrox’s disastrous news cycle that just won’t end.

I can barely believe that the last week or so has been an endless parade of negative stories over at Ibrox, one after another, all hitting squarely on the bullseye.

I’ve seen occasions when our club was under siege, but I’ve never seen anything like this involving their club or ours. The thing is, they aren’t even really under siege—they just keep creating their own problems, and some of these problems are so glaringly obvious, so incredibly stupid, that it forces people to keep talking about them.

The last thing the club captain needed this week was a flood of stories about how he’s getting sold. Are they really so desperate to offload him that they don’t realise how risky this strategy is? And what if they do sell him? Can they really do without it? Are they really planning to bring in some short term signing on a free? Are they mad?

It doesn’t matter how the club and its media allies try to spin it—talking about “bracing themselves for a bid”—they are clearly encouraging these bids, and everyone knows it.

Everyone inside the club knows it, everyone outside the club knows it, and most importantly, the captain himself is 100% aware of it.

You have to laugh too at the numbers involved; one report has the price-tag set at £5.5 million, as if any side anywhere is going to pay that for Captain Disappointment. Even in his prime he wasn’t worth that, and he’s a long from being able to say that he’s in that bracket now.

But it’s not just the Tavernier story.

The Hagi situation haunts them like a demon from beyond the grave. Remember Dorin Goian? He was in the papers the other day, going to bat for his fellow Romanian, insisting that Ibrox’s fans are desperate to see Hagi back in the team.

I didn’t believe it at first, but then I read some of their forums and articles, and it turns out a lot of them do want Hagi restored to the side and can’t fathom why he isn’t playing. The £6,000-a-week wage rise isn’t convincing anyone; it’s seen as an issue that could be easily resolved.

Last night, the club was rocked even further when Football Scotland ran an article about how good he was after coming off the bench for Romania against Lithuania, winning a penalty and “proving he can play at the highest level.”

Laughable. But for the Ibrox boss, not funny in the least.

And all this does is put the manager under a new wave of pressure, even as he and his board are subjecting the captain to pressures of their own. How the Hell did they get themselves into such a state? That whole club is coming apart at the seams.

So, in fact this situation isn’t so easily resolved, and in fact, there’s now no happy ending. Hagi isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future because he’s on too high a wage, and no club wants to take him on. First, he’s not that great a player, and second, he brings with him a circus-like atmosphere, exemplified by his father’s constant criticism of clubs that don’t play him and his agent now agitating against his own manager.

No club wants to take on a player as limited as he is with all that baggage.

The issue isn’t just that Hagi isn’t leaving; it’s that his future at Ibrox boils down to two possibilities. One: he rots on the bench on over £20,000 a week because they won’t eat another £6,000 by playing him. That’s a preposterous position for the club to take, and for the manager to maintain it is ridiculous. The people inside the club must be tearing their hair out over it.

The second possibility is the manager relents and finds a way to spin his return to the fold. But that won’t fly, because everyone knows what’s happened. You can’t have all this internal and external pressure swirling around the manager and expect anyone to believe he just changed his mind of his own volition. Nobody outside the club will buy that, and, crucially, no one inside the club will either—which means nobody in his dressing room will.

His authority is in the bin if he does it. Has that even dawned on the supporters who are clamouring for that course of action? They are practically putting the noose around his neck, which is all well and good but if he goes, what then? Who replaces him at this stage, and under these circumstances? A Derek McInnes is the best case scenario for them here.

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation this bad at any club.

I’ve seen us in a mess, I’ve seen them in a mess, I’ve seen Rangers on the brink of going out of business entirely. But this is the first period I can remember where every day just brings more negativity and more bad news, and the whole club seems trapped in a hurricane of it they can’t escape. At least liquidation offered a respite and a chance to start fresh—a chance that, of course, they squandered as only an Ibrox operation can.

But there’s no fresh start to be had here, no respite from the crisis that now threatens to envelop them and drag their whole season down with it. The manager increasingly looks like a man living on borrowed time, and the players are known to be disengaged. There were stories yesterday too about John Souttar’s recent press conference, where he didn’t appear to have faith in the manager. That story is at least a week old; that the footage is now being re-evaluated to increase the pressure on everyone over there seems like madness.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And all this comes as they prepare for a spell that could define much of the rest of the campaign. They’ve got Dundee United away on Saturday, then a cup game against Dundee—back at Ibrox, but only in front of three stands instead of four. The atmosphere will be muted, especially if they drop points in the league game beforehand. From there, it only gets tougher, with European games coming hot on the heels of league fixtures and Thursday night kick-offs meaning they’ll be chasing us every week until January.

We’ve talked before about how managers, once they reach a crisis point, go into every game wondering if it’s the one that will get them sacked. Once you’re in that cycle, it’s very difficult to break out of it, and that’s where Clement finds himself. His troubles are escalating, with threats coming from every direction—inside the dressing room, from the boardroom, the media, the fans. He doesn’t know from which direction the deadly blow might come.

But it’s clear his room to manoeuvre is now virtually non-existent.

The next bad result and the pressure gauge will be turned all the way up, and then he’s just one more bad result away from the whole thing blowing up. Looking at the fixture list, he knows that danger is acute and that the deadly moment could happen anywhere, anytime.

But at least he has the benefits of that recent contract to fall back on. Quite what his bosses were thinking about when they gave him that, God only knows.