Fear & Loathing in Leith: “Sorrow … Sorrow … Sorrow … Sorrow ….”

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? All the hype and the euphoria, all the joy over Thursday’s result, all the banging on about glory in their future and proving there’s no gap vanished like the proverbial fart in the wind. A rookie boss outfoxed the world beaters despite giving them two goals of a start. Clement, basking in the warm glow of a day or two imagining he’s a better coach that Rodgers has been exposed, once again, as a limited man of little natural talent, unable to cope with pressure.

No Ibrox boss of the modern age would have gotten a Xmas card from me; that club does something to people which makes them paranoid and pumps up whatever ego they have to gargantuan proportions until it veers into utter arrogance.

Very rarely is it remotely justified either.

But Clement, out of all them, strikes me as a man who did not need the malign influence of the Dark Tower of Mordor to break bad … he arrived at the club a bit of a nutjob anyway. He’s undoubtedly gotten worse, but this is not a guy who you could easily imagine yourself sitting down and having a beer with.

The signs of it were obvious even before he started messing up football results. At the time when he was still feted by a media that thought he was the Great White Hope he gave the sort of interview that anyone with a shred of self awareness would have run a mile from. He exposed himself as someone with too high an opinion of his own talents and intolerant of anyone who did not meet his alleged standards.

And that was just the members of his own family.

I cannot imagine any Celtic manager getting away with such a bizarre bit of self-promotion. Who did he think that would impress, except for a few amongst the hack-pack, the sort of people who always accentuate when they say his name, turning into “claymoont” and managing only to sound as pretentious as he is.

These are the same people who clambered up the posterior of Steven Gerrard and didn’t come down until he was in Birmingham putting the finishing touches to the Villa deal.

He too was an arrogant clown, far too enamoured with himself and surrounded by sycophants whose only job seemed to be telling him how good he was.

The Ibrox club made one of them manager not that long after, which ended about as well as this latest experiment will, although it’s lasted longer because Clement was smart enough to get himself a nice sweet contract, making him nearly unsackable.

But of course, he is not unsackable because nobody is. There will come a time when the choice facing his board won’t be any sort of choice at all, and that moment inches ever closer. It becomes ever more likely, and all the good performances against Celtic – the only benchmark he seems to have to meet – will cease to have any effect.

When it’s a case of their survival or his, they will do what anyone in that position would do. They will throw him to the baying pack of wolves in their midst. Van Bronckhorst got them to a European final. He was gone within a year. That’s who they are. Their fans can read the league table just as we can. Many of them made up their minds ages ago. The others will arrive there in due course, and sooner rather than later.

Jackals will follow a sick animal for miles and wait for it to die. Carrion birds like vultures are even more aware of weakness and impending death. You can see them circling Clement right now. I sometimes wonder if he wouldn’t regard it as a mercy killing, albeit one that will fill his pockets with plenty of Ibrox gold.

Just days after riding a euphoric wave against Brendan Rodgers he was tactically outclassed by the hapless Hibs boss who himself is in a job way too big for him.

Gray is the third modestly talented coach to do this to him in the last ten days; this is why Rodgers needs to do a little personal inventory and work out where he came up short. Three other managers have demonstrated that they have this guy’s number. It is surely legitimate to ask, as some of us have, why Rodgers has not.

Fear and loathing then. It’s wafts off the club in waves.

The fear, I’m beginning to think, stems not from the idea that Clement might fail utterly but that he might be able to continue putting off the reckoning by getting the odd big result.

There is a constituency amongst the Ibrox support which so desperately wants to believe that their club may soon right itself that they will grab any shred of evidence they think they see, even if it is contradicted by all the other evidence that’s piled up around them.

They will look at individual players in a purple patch, or a series of good displays – not even good results; good displays. I’ve never seen a side so pleased with itself in the aftermath of losing a cup final – and they’ll draw whatever conclusions help them sleep at night. They may even repeat nonsensical mantras about how “we can’t keep sacking managers!”

Oh but they can, and they will, as long as they set those guys impossible goals.

The fans who can see clearly what has to be done must be terrified of those amongst their number still urging patience and talking about giving this guy time and the freedom to “build his squad.” There is even some talk of not judging him until the end of next season … even they cannot be possessed of such madness as to mean that, but what if they do? Worse; what if the board is listening and willing?

Don’t underestimate how the fear must have permeated the boardroom too. Their manager keeps on repeating the central charge against them; they have not provided him with the resources to properly compete with Celtic.

These guys must be concerned that this idea is gaining general acceptance in the stands. They cannot afford it to, but he keeps on saying it, over and over again, and his comments at the end of the game yesterday where he said that the CEO would soon explain the January transfer window decisions to them sound an awful lot like the manager trying to bounce them.

In the end it’s the loathing which presents the greatest danger to them, and the irony of it is that it’s the club itself which has sharpened the loathing to its current lethal point.

They have pushed the hatred amongst the fans to ever higher levels; did they really not realise that one day that anger and hatred might be turned against them? That the monster they created might one day go rogue?

Yes, they loathe Celtic. Yes, they loathe the SFA.

Yes, they loathe anything that isn’t them.

But what they loathe most of all is life in our shadow, and for most of them Clement is the walking, talking, living and breathing embodiment of that failure and that’s why eventually the club itself will have no choice but to sack him, even if it’s clear that in many ways that’s exactly what he wants them to do.

This mess is all their own. Hell mend them.

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