Fear & Loathing in Paisley: “I left my hopes in San Fransevco …”

People sometimes ask me on days like this—specifically like this—when we’ve lost and they’ve lost, if their result either makes our defeat easier to handle or cancels it out completely. The truth is that it doesn’t. It never does. The two are entirely separate things.

Of course, in a close title race, you’d be very relieved on a day like this if you dropped points and then they did the same. But that doesn’t change how we feel about our own performance.

What these days are about—what they always come down to—is being able to separate the two into different strands. Is our result part of a worrying trend? If it is, then nothing erases that at all.

Is our result just one of those days? Is there some excuse that can be made for it? Is there a justification that can be offered?

Today, some will tell you it was physical fatigue after the midweek game. Others will say it was mental fatigue for the same reason. I don’t think either of those are excuses because we should have been a lot better than we were. But I don’t think it’s a sign of a deep-seated crisis or big problems behind the scenes either.

It was just a bad performance. The opposition were aggressive, they got in our faces, and they put us off our game. I don’t think they deserved to win, but we certainly didn’t—especially based on that first-half performance, which was all over the place.

Nothing is going to make me feel better about that until Tuesday comes, and the team goes back out onto the pitch and shows us the best version of itself. That is what will get me over this little hump.

No, these articles aren’t about us.

They’re about our so-called rivals. They’re about the mess they’ve managed to get themselves into. They’ve got nothing to do with how I feel about our own performance or our own team. I don’t even see this as a particularly significant day in the title race. I wouldn’t have seen it as a significant day in the title race if we’d won and they’d lost, or if they’d won and we’d lost. The title race is over.

No, this is a humbling and humiliating moment for them. And that’s what I’m writing about. I’m writing about how happy I am that they’ve been humbled and humiliated. I’m writing about how pleased it makes me, especially in a week where they’ve done nothing since Wednesday but crow about us being out of Europe, about how they’re still in Europe, and then, for the rest of the time until today, deluded themselves with mad fantasies that their club is about to be transformed into Barcelona.

These people are crazy. These people are delusional. These people are not right in the head. They have issues, they have problems, and one of those problems is a complete inability to separate themselves from fantastical nonsense.

They can have all their fantasies about becoming San Fransevco as much as they like. They can dream about a £50 million transfer war chest that will never come to pass. They can delude themselves into thinking they are only a sugar daddy away from turning it all around. But then they come back to reality, and a day like today does an awful lot to bring that reality home—and hard.

In the aftermath, their crazy manager said he didn’t know where the performance came from and that he thinks there was a certain amount of fear and nervousness in the air. I hope someone asked him to explain those comments, but in the absence of that, we’ll just do what their fans do—we’ll make up nonsense.

Perhaps one of their players thought he saw Paris Hilton in the stands straddling Will Ferrell, and the excitement was just too great to bear. Boom. Bad result.

He said it was the worst performance he’d seen from the team, and one journalist was so frustrated by that claim that he asked if the manager had not watched the game against Queen’s Park. Oh, how long ago that must seem to them all.

Yesterday, they were trying to ban questions on the takeover. I don’t know if they had any luck in doing that today. But there’s a lot of reality to be had when you actually examine the situation involving Leeds.

The reality is that Leeds spent less money than we did in the transfer market this year whilst chasing a place in the English Premier League. Even a sum like that, spent in a single window, would not turn this abject squad of theirs into a title-challenging team. They are woeful.

The manager will go. He will certainly go. There’s no way any takeover happens—if it does—where they leave him in charge of the first team squad. The whole purpose behind the takeover, at the start anyway, will be to build some kind of momentum towards a mood shift over there, and there’s not going to be any mood shift while he’s sitting at the top of the table.

But he’s not the whole problem, and Patrick Stewart had that right.

The whole club needs a root-and-branch transformation, and that will not be cheap, and it will not be quick. So, what you have over there is a fanbase that is not so much hoping for a sugar daddy owner to lavish his money on them but for someone who can turn water into wine.

One of the planks on which they intend to build this great revolution is a successful transfer-trading strategy. Well, that’s going to have to come much further down the line because the fantasy they were clinging to before this week was that they were going to get tens of millions of pounds for some of these players.

Nsiala is one of the ones who’s been mentioned as a future star for clubs like Real Madrid. Well, he made a shocking mistake today for one of the goals, so that massive multi-million-pound bid for him isn’t coming anytime soon. Nor is one coming for Igamane, who was lucky to stay on the pitch, considering the ref had initially red-carded him and only overturned it after a VAR intervention.

As much as they want to cling to fantasies of tomorrow, they live in the world today. They live in the here and now, just like the rest of us.

I know that is hard for them to accept at times, but they do. And in the here and now, there is only pain. There is only disharmony. There is only a soul-crushing lack of pleasure every time they go to watch their team.

And they cannot pretend that this is not a team that needs a radical gutting, a rebuilding, a ripping-up and starting again.

They can only kid themselves about having the money to do it. And that flies in the face of so many obstacles, so many barriers, and so much reality that I’m happy to see them get carried away—because I know for a fact that the come-down is going to be worse than the greatest hangover they’ve ever had.

After a week of every piece of lunacy being indulged by the mainstream press, even some of them are starting to put the brakes on expectations. Tom English said today that anyone who thinks this will be a rapid revolution that will transform them overnight hasn’t a clue what’s going on. I don’t think he has any more of a clue either, but he certainly understands that much.

And if the Americans are any good at what they do, and their due diligence people are in there sniffing around right now, poking through the files and folders—and they are, because the company doing the external review is very obviously working for them, not the club—then they’re going to see things that will make them very, very concerned.

If they’re being sold on the player trading model, for example, they should run right now, because that’s an absolute non-starter.

Whatever tomorrow holds for them—and I have my own theories, which I’ve shared in pieces over the last few days—today is all about pain. Today is all about suffering. Today is all about a club that no longer functions as a working unit.

And so tonight, even the most avid Ibrox fan, even the most deluded follower of the club, must be sitting in some emotional turmoil and I’m delighted by it, especially considering how many of them have emailed me over the last couple of days to ask if I’m scared—no, I’m not scared. Except that I might die laughing.

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