Last night, Kilmarnock lost but Celtic fans are salivating at the prospect of facing that Ibrox team.

A quarter of an hour into last night’s game at Rugby Park, I thought we were going to witness something extraordinary.

I thought we were about to see an Ibrox manager have a full-blown meltdown on the touchline. Little Barry’s face was contorted with rage—rage at his team, rage at life, rage at himself for ever being stupid enough to take on such a job. By full-time, he was being hailed as a hero. His side was being praised for having come back from the dead. Some people thought he had proved something.

But all this episode really proves is that we continue to have a media that is about as gullible as any on the planet and an Ibrox support that is about as easy to please as a prostitute taking your £50. And I find myself marvelling at these people and wondering—why do they never learn? Why don’t they get it? Why are they so stupid? Why don’t they see that last night almost went the other way?

I’ll talk more about Ferguson, about last night, and about the Ferguson experiment as a whole a little later on. I wrote about it the other day, and there’s a lot I didn’t get into. But there must already be a collective understanding at his club that he’s in charge of a side that just isn’t that good. A side that simply isn’t blessed with all that much talent.

Kilmarnock took their foot off their throats and let them back into the game. Their players actually seemed more rattled than the Ibrox players did when they made it 2-0. They missed a plethora of chances at that point that would have put the game out of sight and then Ibrox got its goal and they collapsed.

Derek McInnes can complain about the corner before the Ibrox club got a goal, but the simple fact is that his own tactical approach was badly skewed. In the end, all Ferguson had to do was tweak things slightly, and he got the result.

McInnes should carry the can for his own failings. He shouldn’t be pointing the finger at anyone else. He allowed the game to drift out of his team’s control before he started making changes, and by the time he did, it was too late.

A lot of managers do this, and they pay a high price for it. He won’t because he’s at one of those mid-table clubs that are happy to wallow in mediocrity. But it’s exactly why he’s not cut out for a bigger job.

Ferguson, on the other hand, is currently in a pretty big job—at least compared to his stature in the game. And watching that match, two things came to mind. First, if Kilmarnock can do that to them in the first 25 minutes—be 2-0 up and unlucky not to be 4-0 up—then Fenerbahçe in the Europa League are just going to score for fun. And second, if they don’t do it, then Celtic certainly will when they come to Parkhead.

Because that Ibrox backline and midfield are about as weak as I have ever seen. And that makes what happened to us at Ibrox all the more inexplicable, because they are not a good team by any stretch of the imagination. They are not a good team in any way you look at them or by any definition you care to use.

I think about Daizen Maeda running through the middle at that defence, and it makes me feel all warm and happy. I think about Jota and Kuhn terrorising them. I think about big Adam Idah, who’s already proved he likes a goal against them, bullying and harassing those pitiful defensive players. And I think we can give Ferguson a day he will never forget—a day that will expose, fully and in horrifying terms, the scale of the job he has. Or rather, the scale of the job his successor will have.

And that will have knock-on effects, of course. It will affect the takeover. It will affect their summer recruitment and their efforts to entice a halfway decent manager. If we rip them to pieces—as I fully expect—then a lot of what they think they know and a lot of what they think they’re sure about will suddenly be in doubt.

Because I watched that team last night, and that team doesn’t need small tweaks. It needs ripped up and rebuilt from the ground up. And the money for that just isn’t there. I don’t care how many so-called football finance experts crawl out of the woodwork to say otherwise—there is no way to fix this mess without serious cash, and they don’t have it. That club is in real trouble.

Kilmarnock should have beaten them last night, and they should have beaten them comfortably. For reasons beyond understanding, they stopped playing football just when they could have really, really done some damage. But Ferguson shouldn’t be kidding himself, and neither should any Ibrox fan, because their team is a shambles. Their team needs the kind of serious surgery they cannot afford. And they can run from the lessons, but they can’t hide. Those lessons are coming.

Fenerbahçe first. Then Celtic Park. And Daizen Maeda will be waiting.

Photo by Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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