Fear and loathing at Ibrox: Celtic fans in stitches as the Ferguson revolution comes crashing down.

I always feel like I want to begin these pieces these days with the soundtrack of violins playing low, sad music. Not because I feel particularly low myself, but just to set the mood—because we are, after all, talking about fear and loathing, and those sentiments suit the violin vibe.

I’ve always been a lover of certain pieces of classical poetry, and I’ve always found Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade absolutely fascinating.

It’s essentially a poem about a military disaster. To this day, it’s still disputed whether it was a bad order, a badly understood order, or a completely misunderstood order—because the guy who brought the order to the troops was killed in the first minute of the attack. Apparently, he was attempting to alert another officer to the possibility that the whole thing was a gross mistake.

Six hundred and seven men rode into what Tennyson called the valley of Death. Fewer than 200 came back. A shattering defeat. And I’m guessing that the survivors must have felt a little bit of what the Ibrox fans felt yesterday coming out of that ground, having thought they might see their former captain get a tune out of that feeble, desperate, awful team of theirs. And they were wrong.

He’s no more a tactical master than the British officers at Balaclava who, whether through miscommunication or sheer incompetence, sent the light cavalry into a free-fire zone. I wrote yesterday that I hoped he would do just enough—but not too much. Just enough to be taken seriously as a contender for the job, but not enough that he looked as if he might actually be good at it.

I’ve never thought he would be good at it.

That’s why I want him to get it.

But that hope died with much else yesterday. He’s not going to get near it. All he’s going to do is prove how feeble he is. All he’s going to do is prove how absolutely out of his depth he is sitting in a dugout at all, anywhere. It was a disaster for him yesterday. A disaster for his team too—but mostly for him, because that team is beyond shaming. That team is beyond salvaging.

But in his arrogance Barry Boy really thought that he had a shot.

Regular readers will know that I never thought Clement was a particularly good coach. But a coach with far greater skills than him would struggle to get a tune out of that side. That side is awful. That side is so lopsided and imbalanced, and the quality available to its coaches and managers so poor, that a manager ten times better than Clement would struggle to make anything out of them.

And Buckfast Barry is not even a passably good coach.

That whole team needs to be torn down and rebuilt. And who has the money for that? Nobody. The Americans certainly aren’t going to put up that kind of cash, and UEFA would never let them do it even if they wanted to.

There’s not a single part of that team that looks in any way functional. People will say that Dessers is still scoring goals, and he is, but he’s no better than the rest of them. Igamane got hype briefly but has done nothing since.

Hagi continues to make me laugh uproariously every time I watch him because he plays one good game in ten—and if he was at Celtic Park, he wouldn’t get near the training pitch, far less the first-team squad. Danilo is £6 million flushed down the drain. I see nothing whatsoever in Bajrami that suggests he’s worth having around. Diomande gets a lot of praise at times, but he wouldn’t get near our midfield.

There is nobody in that team who looks like a major saleable asset. The idea that Chelsea are after Jefte has been absolutely mocked mercilessly on our fan forums. Now it’s being mocked mercilessly on theirs.

The idea that the goalkeeper is ever going to fetch any significant fee is ludicrous when you watch the mistake he made yesterday—and not for the first time. There was all sorts of talk about Nsiala becoming some kind of £20 million player that Real Madrid and the like were going to queue up to sign. He got dropped yesterday after his fantastic performance against Kilmarnock.

And the reality is, this is their team now. And since nobody who has looked at this properly, who has looked at it reasonably, who has looked at it sanely, really believes that the Americans—if they come in—are just going to throw money at this problem, the only logical conclusion is that it’s going to be this team again next season, or one not terribly far from it.

But it’ll be these players. It’ll be this basic unit. And someone is going to have to come in and try to work some kind of miracle with them, and let’s be honest—a miracle is exactly what it’s going to take.

In fact, at this point, you could make an argument that they’d be no worse off keeping Ferguson in the building because no other manager is going to do much better with those resources, something that must now be painfully obvious even to the most optimistic pro-Ibrox media stooge.

No one is talking about fetching eight-figure sums for these players anymore. Nobody’s talking about a major summer sale, because it’s not going to happen. None of these guys looks worth that kind of cash.

A few of their fans over on the forums appear to grasp this horrible fact, even if the full implications of it are still kept at a moderately safe distance. They don’t want to accept what it means—that their club is in much worse trouble than they think, or than they are willing to acknowledge publicly. They all know that if the takeover doesn’t happen, all manner of hell awaits them next season.

The fear of that is very real. They are increasingly concerned about the prospect of taking on Celtic next season with this same team, without real strengthening being done. What hasn’t dawned on them yet is that strengthening is unlikely in any case. And so the fear is that the takeover proves to be a fake-over, designed only to sell season tickets, and that it will never see the light of day.

There’s fear of what happens if the takeover does succeed but the new owners decide to play a game of wait-and-see with the squad—to find out if a new manager, a better manager, a manager they pick, can do something with this team short of simply buying a whole new one.

But there’s no more fear that Barry Boy is going to get the job. Those who were afraid of that are at least no longer living through that waking nightmare.

The loathing is at its most extreme—perhaps the most extreme I’ve ever seen it. The sound of booing was all around Ibrox yesterday again, and that is the soundtrack of the future—not just for the rest of this season, but into next season too. Because a lot of these guys are going to be there. And since we know they’re not going to improve, there will be a lot more loathing to go around.

It’s tough for football fans when they reach the point where they actually hate so many elements of their own team, when they actually hate so many aspects of their own club. But these people do now. It used to be that their loathing was reserved for everyone else in Scottish football. Now it’s reserved for the people inside their own walls.

And I don’t know whether American due diligence is being done to the degree that they’re examining the fan forums and the mood in the stands. But if I were them, I’d be taking note of that. I’d be listening and learning about the customer base and how unhappy they are—all the time. And I think, based on that, I’d be considering whether or not this game is worth the candle.

It is not a pleasant place to be at a time like this. And these times might be as good as it gets for a while. Which means the mood is only going to get uglier. Frustrations worse. The anger more palpable. Who would want that in their life if they didn’t have to have it?

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

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