Ibrox fans are so used to crisis they no longer recognise it.

There is some anger on the Ibrox fan forum today over a claim from Michael Stewart and a number of other pundits who claim that their club is on the brink of crisis. I disagree with those commentators only in that the crisis is already here and they are already deep in it. They crossed the threshold some time ago.

I can understand the Ibrox fan’s anger to being confronted with that word and all the horror that goes with it, but in some ways I find it incredible that they would dare claim otherwise because the totality of the mess they are in should be obvious and in seeking to deny it all they are doing is kidding themselves on.

They sure aren’t kidding the rest of us; we can see what they are.

Celtic fans have never laughed so much at an Ibrox club as we have at this one. We have never laughed at an Ibrox boss as much as we laugh at this one. He is a clown and their club more and more resembles a circus. It is ludicrous for them to deny that their situation is critical based on a handful of unimpressive wins.

They are riding on the crest of a wave because they beat Malmo; I have to admit I thought that would have been a tougher game for them than it was, but you only have to look at the reaction of their manager to see how pissed off he was for his side essentially failing to show up for the game, a home match in the second competition of European football. He was raging and rightly so.

But it was not the spectacular Ibrox victory the media would have you believe. It was the kind of match that would get football stopped, the sort that if you showed it to a US sports fan in an attempt to interest him in the game that it would put him off for life and he would never entertain the idea of watching it again.

Their accounts will be out soon and we will get the usual nonsense from over there about how they are “moving in the right direction”; they will be last year’s figures, of course, and so the size of the present hole won’t be known for a while but it will almost certainly be even greater than those accounts will say … so what direction was that moving in again? They pull this same trick every single year, and the media swallows it over and over, even going as far as to report their spun version of the numbers.

For the last two years they’ve even reported that the club was in profit; a barefaced lie which the club told and they repeated entirely without shame.

But I suspect that the next set of numbers won’t be able to lie no matter how much they might want them to. I think they will be horrendous, and they paved the way for the summer in which they had hoped to sell half a couple of key assets and failed to. Their rebuild has been done on the cheap no matter how they might want to dress it up – but only comparatively speaking because they still comfortably outspent every other team in the league but one, and that one was us.

They are the only club in the league, furthermore, who can even claim a net spend. I am tired hearing their manager plead poverty because he can’t spend millions more they don’t have, and have some director write the cheques.

They are back at their own stadium. They’ve told themselves that they are a young side developing into a good one, but the booing at the weekend told its own story, and then Clement had his freak out in front of the hacks which has only served to terrify those fans who were actually still in denial about him.

They are five points behind both Celtic and Aberdeen, and their players are openly at war with the supporters and even each other. Which is to say nothing for what they must think of the manager himself, a man who does not exactly exude warmth or calm. In fact, I’d say he does the opposite. If he was Celtic boss I’d be tremendously concerned.

I understand why they don’t want to face it. But I understand something else too; they have spent so long in crisis that it’s normalized. They’ve spent so long at the centre of one disaster or another that disaster itself is just the way things are over there. They can no longer differentiate between the bad times and the really bad ones.