Jackson blames Clement for his “Celtic are in a title race” nonsense. But he only fooled himself.

This morning, Keith Jackson has penned a second piece in two days about the Ibrox situation. In that article, he has repeated his belief that Philippe Clement had a very simple task in front of him to make the title race competitive again. And I marvel at anyone who thinks Clement’s task was simple or straightforward.

I am always amused by people who think that highly complex tasks are easy just because, from the outside, they look easy.

I remember the first time I stood in front of a full-sized snooker table. To me, no game in the world ever looked easier than that. You’ve got your big stick. You aim at the white ball and try to hit the coloured ones. If you describe snooker to somebody, it sounds simple—and I suppose it is, if all you really want to do is hit the balls. Then I tried to play, and the lesson has stayed with me ever since.

Anyone who’s ever tried to play snooker without the requisite skill knows how incredibly difficult that seemingly simple task actually is.

And I can’t believe so many people who write about football view it as a simple sport with simple concepts, full of simplistic solutions to its problems. They still think winning comes down to who has the most expensive squad or whose name carries the greatest weight. But no one fears the Ibrox name anymore.

I marvel that Jackson is talking today about the task Clement faced as if it was easy and uncomplicated when Clement himself is clearly not well-equipped to do the job he was hired for.

There was nothing straightforward or easy about going to St. Mirren and then Motherwell. But Jackson and others have managed to reduce that task, in their minds, to a handful of variables—and they’ve missed some of the more important ones.

The Ibrox club’s form away from home this season has been atrocious. Where did anyone get the idea that they would simply turn up at St. Mirren and win or turn up at Motherwell and win? As I said on the podcast last night, and as I wrote in a piece at the weekend, there was a presumption that those six points were already in the bag. All they really had to do, apparently, was turn up for a home game in front of a 100% partisan crowd, beat Celtic, and the gap would be cut.

Jackson did a mea culpa yesterday, holding up his hands and admitting he was wrong about the title race.

But it’s not just that he was wrong—that’s not the problem. The real issue is the underlying belief system that caused him to be wrong. It wasn’t a judgment based on evidence or anything we’ve seen so far in this campaign. It was part hope, part overconfidence, and part arrogance—the arrogance to think that all the other teams in this country exist to roll over whenever the Ibrox club rolls into town.

The club is mentally weak. Its players are mentally weak. By and large, they’re just not good enough. Their defence is dreadful, made up of players who wouldn’t get into our squad. They have a goalkeeper they got for free, who was overhyped and is now proving that zero was pretty much his value in the first place. The manager’s tactical decision-making is baffling, and his organisational skills are virtually non-existent. Jackson himself admits that the so-called form of the last few weeks might have been Clement accidentally stumbling onto something that worked.

So where did all this confidence come from? It’s the kind of confidence you find in someone sitting in front of a word processor for the first time, having read a couple of books, and thinking, “That seems easy, I can do that.” Or standing in front of a snooker table with the wide-eyed innocence of someone who’s never actually played the game and thinking, “I’ve watched other people do it. How hard can it be?”

I can’t believe the gall of Jackson to have sat there this morning and written about this as if those six points were just going to magically appear in their account. I cannot believe the arrogance of the man not to realise that he was taking for granted points the club hadn’t won yet—including the three against us—because his entire “the title race is back on” theory depended on winning nine points out of nine. Of the first six, they’ve managed to win one.

Yeah, he was wrong. And yeah, he’s admitted he was wrong. But he still doesn’t understand how he got it wrong.

He blames Clement for making him look like a fool. But let’s be honest: Clement is simply doing what Clement has been doing since the end of last season. Clement is not a good manager. And if you were one of the people who bought into the revival talk, then you’re the one who’s made you look like a fool—nobody else.

There was no reason to believe that their revival was going to last.

In fact, there was every reason to believe that it was another false dawn. And we all said that’s exactly what it was.

Jackson is talking today about the medical department doing team selections for the manager, and I sort of understand what he means. It does seem like the sports science department across the city has a lot more influence than it probably should. On the other hand, they do have a smaller squad, and they need to find ways of managing it over a tough and lengthy fixture list. These guys are knowledgeable in their field, and Jackson is completely ignorant of what it is they do.

But again, from the outside, this looks simple and straightforward. And so he treats it as if it were simple and straightforward—although it’s much more complicated than he will ever understand.

It apparently hasn’t dawned on him that, having already blamed referees for his travails, and having blamed his own players for things that have gone wrong, Clement himself might now just be using sports science as yet another excuse.

Jackson’s final crazy contention today is that a win for the Ibrox club on Thursday might muddy the waters in terms of what the club decides to do with its manager. This is even more remarkable because what Jackson has done here is take a simple and straightforward issue and actually make it into a complicated one.

The ability to make complex issues sound simple whilst making simple issues sound complicated is remarkable. Because to me, and to most other observers, there really isn’t anything complicated about the Philippe Clement situation. He is not going to be a success. There is no evidence to contradict that view.

His tactics didn’t just become incomprehensible—they’ve been incomprehensible for a long time. His man-management skills didn’t just tank in the last week—they’ve been dreadful for almost the entire year he’s been in charge. If players continue to regress under him, how much of that is down to the players … and how much is down to a manager who has not improved a single one of them?

He will be sacked eventually. It’s a matter of time. He will be booted out of that club and branded a failure because he is a failure. But typically, Jackson—and so many others too—have shrunk this guy’s survival prospects to a single game of football and a record against one specific club.

As I said in a piece earlier in the week, it’s almost as if they need our permission to take a decision that shouldn’t be difficult at all.

This is the reason that club is in such a mess. It is surrounded by this sort of magical thinking—stuff that is not tethered to reality in any way. And it is why 2025 will be the year of the full-blown crisis.

Our fifth podcast episode, The Back Of The Net, is out tonight. Please like, share and enjoy.