Fear and loathing at Ibrox: Phil prepares for his nice long holiday as the directors catch the Hell.

At the crucial moment, in what will almost certainly be his last game as manager of the Ibrox club, the camera cut to Philippe Clement standing on the sideline, trying to contain his emotions.

His team had just been awarded the most predictable penalty kick in the history of football. No other club would have got that decision, but then again, no other club would have found itself in such a desperate state of affairs.

On the day Liverpool have been knocked out of the FA Cup by Plymouth, it is still the result at Ibrox that should send shockwaves around football. That club’s ability to self-harm has been incredible for all of us who’ve spent the last few years witnessing it. Today was a new low for them.

And at the critical moment today, there he was—the man perhaps most responsible for it—standing on the touchline, getting all emotional. But the curious thing is, I couldn’t tell you what emotion he was feeling in that moment. Was it relief? Was it anger? Was it frustration? Was he excited? Or was he thinking, “Another 30 more minutes of this? Another 30 more minutes of nerve-shredding horror”? Was he thinking about his payoff? He certainly wasn’t thinking about resigning.

A moment later, Captain Disappointment had given us all another one for the highlight reel. It was a moment of justice—a supreme moment of justice. A penalty they didn’t deserve at the end of a game they didn’t deserve to win, snatched from them the possibility of extra time and the probability that they would have used that time to grind down the Queen’s Park team, which already looked dead on its feet.

Earlier, while watching the Liverpool game, I pondered how rare it is for a lower-league team playing in a massive cup tie to see it through to the end.

I didn’t think Liverpool would go out today. Even with only minutes left on the clock, I didn’t believe they would fail to get the ball in the net. I felt the same watching the Ibrox club, and when the penalty was given, yeah, I was furious because it was such a controversial, and no club deserves to go out of the cup on a call like that. But there was also a certain kind of grim inevitability that the lower-league club would buckle.

That we’ve seen it happen twice in the space of a few hours—with Plymouth hanging on for a shock victory and Queen’s Park hanging on for theirs—reminds us all why we love football. And it reminds us all why, as we look ahead to Wednesday night’s game, we should do so with a little more optimism than a lot of people seem to have.

This is a beautiful sport. This is a wonderful game we all follow. And on the right day, anything can happen—and everything does.

But the beauty of a shock cup knockout will be entirely lost on those caught in the slipstream of this one. This result is nothing short of a cataclysm for the club across the city. They are still in the Europa League, and they have media cheerleaders who are kidding themselves that they’re good enough to win that competition. But I see no sign whatsoever that that’s even remotely likely. Their season is over, and we’re not even at Craig Whyte Day yet. And that’s on the guy on the touchline.

What this result does to him is, on the surface of it, pretty catastrophic.

It drives a wrecking ball through what was left of his reputation. It will end, for good, any talk about him being the next boss of the Belgian national team. He’ll be lucky to find himself managing in a top flight anywhere in Europe for the next 12 months. But like other managers whose careers have been spectacularly derailed at that club, he at least has the consolation of knowing he leaves with bulging pockets.

He might find it difficult to get a high-profile job again, but he’s made for life, thanks to the largesse of an Ibrox board that gave him a new contract at the start of this season—a contract they did not have to offer. Just one in a long line of those self-inflicted wounds I mentioned earlier.

And for all managers, that is a consolation. I remember Brian Clough talking years later when asked about Leeds United and how he felt about lasting only a handful of weeks at that club. He said they paid his taxes for the next two years and let him keep the company car. That’s what it meant to him. He didn’t consider it a failure on his part; he just took it in his stride. It was one of those things.

For the club itself, though, this is on a whole other level of disastrous. The choice they thought they had managed to dodge is now confronting them all over again—this time with all the fury and strength of a hungry lion. And it will not be satiated by promises of jam tomorrow. No, they’re going to have to feed the beast. And they’re going to have to feed it the bloody corpse of Philippe Clement.

I have to think that this is the end for him as their manager. He cannot possibly survive this. We’ve talked about this on this blog several times—their fans knew it, we knew it, and surely some in the media must have known it too.

It was always just a matter of time before a result came along that was so devastating he could not possibly go on another minute longer.

There are formalities that will have to be taken care of. There are processes and procedures that must be followed.

They’re going to have to find the money from somewhere—God alone knows where—to not only get rid of him but to bring in someone willing to take control of this runaway train for the rest of the campaign. That will not be easy to do. But for all intents and purposes, this is finished. Clement is done.

He sat in front of the media tonight, including raging representatives from fan media outlets and they poured out their fury.

They made it pretty clear that they expect him to be gone before they next play a major match—Sunday against Hearts at Tynecastle.

He repeated the mantra that he will not resign, that he will not walk away, that he is not going to go voluntarily. And why should he? Why would he?

He can dress it up however he wants—talking about believing there’s still a chance in the league, that there’s work to do, that progress has been made—but this is now a cold-blooded calculation about nothing but money. He wants paid off in full, and he won’t settle for a penny less.

So, they’re in a truly wretched, truly dreadful state. And I like to think that when their goalkeeper saved Tavernier’s penalty tonight and the certainty of crashing out of the cup hit home with all its force and effect, there was just a little bit of relief in Clement’s mind. Relief that, finally, it has come to a point where they can no longer keep up the pretence. That they will now have to find the money stuffed in the mattress to pay him off and let him go so he can pursue a career somewhere else.

Because I don’t think he’s a great manager. I don’t even think he’s a very good manager. And he’s just a strange guy, with weird beliefs and even weirder ideas.

But let’s be fair here—comparatively speaking, he’s been dealt a terrible hand. Whatever promises were made to him to get him to take the job have one by one gone by the wayside as the reality of life at that club has sunk in. And not just for him, but for those on the board of directors as well.

They must feel under siege, like men in a sinking boat, throwing buckets of water over the side while knowing that no matter how hard they work, more is coming in than they can ever hope to get out.

None of this is what was promised to him.

Working under austerity is not what he signed up for. And so, as the final whistle blew today and the sound of booing rang in his ears—what little booing there was, because most of their fans had already left—it must have been clear to him how little faith they had in their team mounting some last-ditch comeback. I think, in that moment, he was ready to accept his fate. Not ready to plunge the dagger into himself, but ready to welcome it when someone else came wielding the knife.

There’s a moment in The Godfather—the book, not the film—which I’ve always found fascinating. It’s when Michael Corleone is being driven to the boat on which he’ll be spirited off to Sicily after the murders of Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. In that moment, he thinks back to when he was a Marine in the war against Japan and was evacuated from a major battle. As the noise of the battle receded, he felt a strange elation. And that’s the same elation he feels as he escapes the chaos about to descend upon New York’s mafia families.

That moment in the book is alluded to in the film when Clemenza tells Michael, as he’s teaching him what to do with the gun, “You’re gonna take a long vacation, nobody knows where, and we’re gonna catch the Hell.”

Whatever happens next, Clement won’t be part of it. Whatever crisis—and it is a big one, almost too immense to properly quantify—is about to engulf that club, in a very short time, it will no longer be his problem. As hard as it is to contemplate your own sacking, that must be some consolation. That, and the money.

The club itself has no such escape hatch to disappear through. The crisis facing them is acute. The damage doesn’t stop on the day they cut this guy loose. Their problems are just beginning.

He’ll have his nice, long holiday. They’re going to catch the hell. And hell is all he’s leaving behind.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

Tonight we’ve put up our latest podcast. Recorded just after they went crashing out, we’ve called it They’re Simply Depressed.