Crazy Clement goes on the offensive … against his own fan media guys.

Yesterday, while most of us were mentally preparing for the Atalanta game ahead, the boss across the city was busy facing the media for what turned into quite the grilling. Yet, it wasn’t the mainstream press sharpening their pencils to stick it to him like they might have done to a struggling Celtic manager. Instead, it was the Ibrox fan media who gave him the hardest time.

Now, I’ve had my fair share of criticism for the Ibrox fan media, often accusing them of not really doing their job. But this time? They weren’t messing around. They showed up for business, properly putting Clement on the spot. They questioned his negative football, his outdated tactics, and his inability to scout talent. In no uncertain terms, they accused him of playing a dull, uncreative game, one lacking any spark in attack.

Last week, Donald Trump went to Detroit and insulted the city during an economic forum. At the time, I thought that would probably be the most foolish thing I’d hear this month. But then Clement outdid him by snapping back at his fan media for daring to question him. When they called out the over-reliance on long balls and sideways passing, he claimed they were contradicting themselves. His argument? If they were passing side to side, they couldn’t be playing long balls.

That kind of response treats fans with utter contempt, and it was clear that’s how he regarded his fan media yesterday too. The reaction was swift – their disdain for his answers was plastered all over their sites for the rest of the day.

I remember reading Dale Carnegie’s classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People about 20 years ago. I think it’s too late for Clement to adopt any of the lessons from it. Spend just five minutes on the fan forums, and you’ll see that he’s completely lost the supporters. They know what they’re watching. They understand that there’s no contradiction between claiming they are watching side-to-side passing and aimlessly lumping long balls up the pitch in the hope someone might get on the end of them.

This is basic, schoolyard football. There’s no finesse, no style, no sophistication. It’s what they’ve been watching for a year now, and they keep being told that things will get better, that the manager needs time, the players need time, that they’re building something.

If the fans saw genuine improvement, they might even believe that. But they aren’t. They see a team that’s floundering, struggling to find any sort of form, defensively disorganized, lacking a proven goal-scorer, and without a shred of creativity.

You can fool people some of the time, but eventually, they wake up.

And that’s where Ibrox finds itself today.

Clement treated the mainstream media with the same arrogance, dismissing their questions by falling back on one of the oldest excuses in the book – “you’ve never managed, so you don’t understand football.”

It’s a classic shield failing managers use. Sure, it’s tempting to agree when it comes to the Scottish sports press, who rarely show even a basic grasp of tactics. But even they know the difference between sophisticated football and the aimless mess Clement is producing. To be lectured by someone who’s clearly out of their depth must be galling.

As I said before, Brendan Rodgers can be equally condescending with the media, but he gets away with it because he has the results to back it up. His career speaks for itself. All Clement has is his record from another club in another country. He talks a good game, but it’s just talk. The Ibrox fans are growing increasingly tired of his words.

He promised them that they’d see results from his revolution in October and November. Well, here we are, and he’s still making excuses – fitness, injuries, players needing more time. It’s rubbish.

Look at Celtic, and you can see the improvement in several players under Rodgers. He turned Matt O’Riley into a £35 million player, transformed Liam Scales, and you can see Nicholas Kühn coming into his own. Where is that kind of progress at Ibrox? Has Clement made a single player better?

For him to sit there and lecture both fan and mainstream media for questioning his failings is mind-bogglingly arrogant, especially considering he’s not delivering. And yes, he’s starting to remind me of Trump – another man who can’t handle hard questions or criticism, reacting aggressively whenever challenged.

The clock is ticking for Clement. I don’t know how much time he has left, but I do know that our result in Bergamo has piled even more pressure on him. He can’t afford to lose tonight after we’ve come home with a result like that. The fans will lose their minds – many already have. They’re simply waiting for the hammer to fall.

They’re in that horrible position every football fan knows all too well – we’ve been there ourselves. When you know it’s over, when you know there’s no putting things back together, but the board refuses to act until it’s absolutely too late. At that point, you’re waiting for disaster to strike because, as painful as it will be, it’s the only thing that will end the misery.

And if that disaster comes in the next six weeks, it will mark yet another managerial sacked in October or November – for the fourth consecutive year. So maybe putting them out of their misery isn’t quite right, because for Ibrox fans, that cycle of misery just keeps on turning.