What a moment for us all, right? The moment when Keevins is forced, again, to jump on a passing bandwagon and admit that all his previous comments on a specific subject were entirely wrong, and only then after everyone else has formed a different opinion. I very rarely subject anyone not called Keith Jackson to the full-on Jackson treatment; when I do you know I’m irked and affronted by the intellectual dishonesty of the writer in question.
Today I’m affronted at the dishonesty. There is not, so far as I can see, an intellect to speak of in operation here. Today Keevins almost puts Jackson to shame.
This piece is on Phillipe Clement and why he’s changed his mind about the Ibrox boss not being a genius. He has another agenda too, of course, but I’ll get to that bit at the end. Without further ado let’s get on with it, as I don’t enjoy spending too much time exposed to this guy’s work. It’s like low-grade radiation destroying braincells.
Let’s begin with the headline and work our way through it.
Philippe Clement has forced me into revision of Rangers opinion after committing professional suicide – Hugh Keevins
Other people call that “admitting I was wrong.” But as we’re going to see over the course of this article, what exactly do you ever get you right?
Our man has his say on the Ibrox crisis as pressure mounts on the club’s beleaguered Belgian boss
That’s right. Your man. Might as well embrace the reality of employing one of the worst people ever to work in sports journalism in the country which once had giants in those roles.
Sir Alex Ferguson had a theory about press conferences and history shows he tended not to get too much wrong about anything involving football.
Ferguson made plenty of mistakes. To hold up his every word as gospel is just stupid. The first person who would admit making plenty of mistakes would be Ferguson himself, by the way. You need to not only make them but admit to them and learn from them. There’s a lesson there if it wasn’t decades too late to learn it for a clown like you.
“For a manager at a press conference, you need to come out as the winner,” he said. “You can kill yourself in a press conference. It’s an important part of the job.” Philippe Clement proved he didn’t understand that when he committed professional suicide on Wednesday night.
Hyperbole. He did nothing of the sort. His press conference on Wednesday was no more bizarre than some of the others he has given over the past 12 months and change. Maybe this writer missed the “Don’t mention the VAR!” presser with the funny walk …
For the Ibrox manager to tell journalists that his team had delivered one of their better performances this season was an insult to their intelligence and that of the fan base. It was so inflammatory a comment as to provide grounds for dismissal if the board were of a mind to take account of the outside noise coming from their paying customers.
Managers says stuff like this all the time. It was the stuff about the toenails which made him sound as if he had gone full-on Donald Trump. But again, that’s hardly unique to this guy. He’s been saying weird stuff since he got the job. “I left my wife because she wasn’t a winner” has to be one of the most absurd statements ever uttered by a manager here. He got a pass for that. It’s not for nothing we’ve called him The Belgian Waffler and Manneken Piss on here … he is a loony.
“It’s not about me, it’s about the team,” Clement also said after losing to Aberdeen. What’s he talking about? Clement is the public face of the club when his team is on the park, and what is happening on it is creating growing unrest because of the manager’s now unfathomable approach to his work. Being third in the league table is not the only unusual position the Belgian has adopted lately. He has become a manager who has passed the point of no return and yet remains in office.
His approach is now unfathomable is it? Because you and others in your profession have spent so long with your heads in the clouds trying to come up with something that explains it and have simply run out of patience? Let me tell you; this blog and other Celtic sites have been saying from almost the start that his brand of football was dreadful, that his tactical decisions were inept and baffling and that this was all going to end in tears. It’s as if your entire profession has been in wilful retreat from reality this whole time. “It can’t be as bad as it looks, so there has to be a method to the madness.” No, there was no method. Just madness.
If his team should lose to Motherwell in their Premier Sports Cup semi-final tie at Hampden this afternoon it would be a result fit to enter the Hall of Infamy at Ibrox. It would rank with the defeat to Berwick Rangers in 1967, the loss to Hamilton in 1987 and the Progres Niederkorn debacle in 2017. The only thing Clement has going for him today appears to be the fact that the year doesn’t end in a seven.
What absolute rubbish. Motherwell and a mere three points behind them in the league. It would not even be a great shock if they were to win this game today far less the seismic event this muppet appears to believe that it would be.
When the Belgian arrived in Glasgow, I wrote here that his back story at Club Brugge and Monaco suggested he was the first truly credible Rangers manager that Brendan Rodgers had faced. Time, and circumstances, have forced a revision of that opinion. Clawing back the nine-point deficit to Aberdeen and Celtic might, from this distance, seem unlikely.
I remember that article well. Not just a hatcher job on Rodgers but a canonisation piece on a guy you knew next to nothing about. How did I know then, and now, that you knew next to nothing about him? Because his spell at Monaco was disastrous. His team selections were nonsensical, he frustrated the fans and he alienated half his dressing room. Does that sound familiar? And the whole point of that article was not to praise Clement anyone, it was to accomplish two other goals; first, to make the case that Rodgers is over-rated and to erase your own history of getting things completely and utterly and spectacularly wrong. You praised Gerrard to the heavens. You wrote things about Van Bronckhorst that made me want to retch. The one about how “European” he looked in his good suit was especially nauseating. And you were a big early fan of The Mooch as well … all your wisdom is wisdom after the fact. Hindsight. And it always takes you longer to get there than it does just about everyone else. Your judgement stinks. You are as incompetent as the worst of the Ibrox managers you castigate. Your credibility is non existent.
But there exists the possibility of Gers falling even further behind, given Clement’s erratic progress. If anything goes wrong at Hampden against Motherwell, interim chairman John Gilligan, an honourable man in an impossible position, would need to acknowledge the hopelessness of extending the manager’s tenure. It would not be a case of the club not being able to afford to sack Clement. They would not be able to afford to keep him.
John Gilligan the honourable man who told Graham Spiers that he loved the song The Billy Boys and then conspired, along with Stewart Robertson then the Ibrox CEO, who witnessed that encounter, to pressure Spiers paper to sack him when he ran that story? That honourable man you mean? Scottish football is full of this crap, people excusing the worst sort of bigotry and defects of character which would disqualify you from being a dog-sitter in any other walk of life. This isn’t the first time you, Keevins, have defended people with retrograde views. I remember you telling a story you found amusing about John Brown and green jelly once which made me wonder which of the two of you was most warped. You are a gutless charlatan surrounded by this stuff and you’ve spent a career making jokes about it when he were willing to discuss it at all.
In my professional lifetime I’ve never known one of the two pre-eminent Scottish clubs to be in such a state of disarray. Their finances are in a perilous state. The temporary residency at Hampden is believed to have cost the club £670,000 in rent and their annual wage bill remains huge. Investment on a substantial level, if not a takeover, is clearly required to prevent a worsening of the club’s transparently troubled state.
Is this an admission that you have rejected the Survival Lie? Because unless you, like many of us, are of the view that the Ibrox club is in fact the second one to play out of that ground you’re essentially saying that this is a bigger crisis than the one which put the first Ibrox club out of business. Since I know you do subscribe, fully, to the Survival Lie and the Victim Lie as well you’ve simply proved again that you are unfit to hold your current post because that’s only twelve years ago and it is one of the most momentous events in the history of the game. And you didn’t remember that when you wrote this piece, and nobody at The Mail corrected you. If I believed that this was a rejection of the Survival and Victim Lies I’d applaud it. But it’s just ineptitude.
But if the suggestion made by chief financial officer James Taylor that an improvement in the player trading model holds the key to fiscal recovery then there’s trouble ahead.
Yeah because in keeping with the rest of the herd your own solution to the problems at Ibrox isn’t to radically change course and try and operate sustainably but a “substantial” investment of someone else’s money to spend what they can’t afford. Pathetic. A child could do better than this. A child would be expected to learn not to repeat the same mistakes and the same bad behaviour over and over again and yet our media cannot grasp this simple concept.
Who would pay serious money for any of the team, or subs, who lost to Aberdeen? You might, at a push, put forward the name of Connor Barron, but Rangers haven’t even paid for him yet because the fee will be set by a tribunal.
Some of us have been saying this for months, even when the mainstream media was banging on about eight figure sums for the likes of Butland and Matondo. Am I to assume that this new narrative rejects, utterly, the idea that we’re watching a superstar in Igamane or a future Brazilian international at Real Madrid in Jefte? Again, nothing we’re not already aware of.
Clement consistently asks for players to be given time and yet he is the one who subbed defender Robin Propper because he was struggling against St Mirren then would not trust the Dutchman to play against Aberdeen. The once-serious man is now the object of ridicule. There was a time when a simple “Sack The Board” would have sufficed for disgusted fans. Last Sunday at Ibrox, one banner read, “Your ineptitude is destroying our club.”
Your own is part of the reason for the wreckage that passes for sports journalism in Scotland. The NUJ missed a trick. They could have learned a lot there from the Union Brats. And Robin Propper? Again, nobody except the Celtic fan sites bothered to ask why his club allowed him to sign a one year contract with a £1.6 million release clause in it when he should be a player in his prime, and was actually the team captain. Nobody bothered to wonder why they thought they’d replace him with Gustaf Lagerbielke who couldn’t even get into our squad. You, Keevins, were singing Gustaf’s praises not that long ago as well, eah? Care to be reminded? Back when you had suggested that letting him go and signing Austin Trusty was proof of Rodgers bad judgement. What a joke you are.
The intended target was presumably what’s left of the board but that comment is now being directed at the manager. He is seen as an impediment to progress and coming up with outrageous statements to camouflage the stricken nature of his team is doing more harm than good. Further adversity today would mean doing nothing is not an option.
All of that might be true. In fact, it is true. But the countdown clock on this guy has been running for a while now and as usual certain sports journalists like yourself who were crawling to touch the helm of his toga are the last people in the country to notice that. And there’s something else too, of course; this neatly sets up the next narrative, the next rubbish, that Rodgers has still not been properly tested yet and it’s this and not his quality that accounts for his incredible success here. This neatly plays into the idea that all the Ibrox club needs to do is sack Clement and usher in the next saviour so you and the rest of them can anoint him. What an embarrassment you are.
To work in the mainstream Scoddish meedja you are free to talk any old pish and bollocks (in fact it appears to be a requirement), as long as you big up the zombies while simultaneously slagging off Celtic: supporters players and management.
There is no analytical thinking, having been replaced by wishful thinking, hence the stupid fud on Sportscene last night predicting an Aberdeen – huns final.
Needless to say this cretin is an ex hun player – Quelle surprise!
These people know fuck all about football and are obviously hired to show off their ignorance, and if you pay your licence fee you are paying their wages.
Only in Scotland.
Who cares what Keevin’s says? You are only giving him publicity. He is a non entity who should have been retired years ago.
His claim to fame has been to be barred from Parkhead.
He was probably had Celtic leanings but has to go with the Rangers survival story or risk being out of a job.
Well dissected and all too familiar when it comes tae this auld clown. ALWAYS keeps himself onside with the ibrox support and this ‘admission’ is nae different. Has been a pathetic, cringeworthy, ibrox arse kisser for as long as anybody can remember. His speciality was brown nosin walter smith. Grovellin compliments and constant praisin that made yer skin crawl. Embarrassment of a man.
You know when he hasn’t yet retired its because he cant believe his luck someone will still employ him, he’s happy stealing a wage from anyone stupid enough to keep paying good money for the work of a clueless washed up hasbeen , an embarrassment that constantly humiliates himself and his ego makes him think he’s relevant.
Donkeys would be put down for less ….. he knows HEE HAW.
Keevins has now lost whatever credibility he had. Watching him on SSB I’ve thought for a long time that he should stick to his newspaper column and stay away from attempting to compete with ex players and managers in debates about tactics, formations etc. Now he’s getting it wrong in his day job as a football journalist. Everyone on SSB used to stay silent while he spoke, as though he was some sort of football oracle. Now they’re openly laughing at his comments and slapping him down, as Marvyn Andrews did on Wednesday night when he predicted a comfortable win for Sevco. The only reason he’s backtracking on Clement is that he’s been missing out on the media ridicule around him.