The Celtic manager is right. Ferguson hasn’t changed anything. He wouldn’t know how to.

The other day on the podcast, I pointed out that Rodgers had said he wasn’t convinced that all that much had changed in the Ibrox club’s approach.

He’s now had a chance to watch them in another game, and yesterday, he repeated the assertion. And you know what? Rodgers is absolutely right. Not a lot has changed, and not a lot was ever going to change.

“For me, if I look purely at the coaching aspect of it, over the course of four games, I don’t see great change,” Rodgers said. “I see the team go 2-0 down against Kilmarnock and come back and win. I see the team lose at home to Motherwell. I see the team go away and get a fantastic result at Fenerbahçe, and then I see the team lose last night 2-0 over 90 minutes but win the tie.”

A short-term manager doing what they’ve been doing all season long. But most important is that Rodgers doesn’t detect any changes in how the team is actually being set up, the style of football they’re trying to play, or anything that would fall into the realm of a genuine and dramatic change in approach.

Ferguson is getting the credit for getting them through in Europe, but he’s using Clement’s tactics. He’s getting the blame for not doing so well in his first two domestic games, but maybe the blame’s not entirely his.

Ferguson is about as limited an individual as has ever sat in the dugout over there, and we know there have been some rollicking mediocrities in that seat over the last ten years or so. But even allowing for the old club’s history, he is one of the worst individuals ever to grace the touchline.

He has no real managerial pedigree or quality to speak of.

Ferguson’s entire mantra can be summed up in all this talk of staunchness and players “getting what it means” to play for the club. That doesn’t mean anything. When Brian Clough took over Derby County, they hadn’t won anything in years. When he took over Nottingham Forest, they were even further from success. You build a legacy—you don’t invoke an ancient one and hope it rubs off on people. You give them goals to shoot for. You don’t tell them to try to emulate days gone by.

A lot of people in our media seem to believe in this kind of voodoo as well. I wonder what sport they’ve been watching all these years because it certainly isn’t the one I watch. Good managers and good players make teams better.

That’s the only way to improve. You either bring in a coach who can reorganise a team into a better shape or one who can make players into better footballers. Or you buy new players. Those are the options.

You cannot come into a club, big up its past—especially when that past belonged to another club—and try to instil in the players some sense of pride in achievements they had nothing to do with.

It almost makes me laugh when I hear people over there talk about how this result or that result or that performance is “unacceptable for this club.” As if these things are not supposed to happen to them. As if football wasn’t a merit-based business when, in fact, that is all it is.

Of course, Ferguson hasn’t changed the tactics. He wouldn’t even know where to start dismantling and rebuilding whatever Clement had that team doing. I don’t see any difference at all in their approach to games. The counter-attacking tactic that won the game in Istanbul is exactly the same counter-attacking tactic Clement used to get them through the Europa League groups. No difference at all. And that’s why you can tell the tactics he’s going to use against us—they’ll be no different at all.

Only two things are really going to change in their approach. They will be “stauncher,” and Ferguson will tell his players to be more aggressive. By more aggressive, you can judge that easily based on the performance against Fenerbahçe at home—seven yellow cards in that match. Seven. As a result, two of their players—Diomande and Souttar—are automatically going to miss the first leg against Bilbao. Five more of them are one booking away from missing the second leg.

When you listen to the people around Ferguson—the ones who know him, the ones who know what changes he’s trying to make—they’re all talking about “raising standards.” They’re all talking about “reinstilling a sense of what the club is about.” None of it is about tactics. None of it is about changing the way they approach games. None of it is about improving individual players, one-on-one coaching, or any of that stuff. It’s all hocus pocus, vague mumbo jumbo.

And evidently, a lot of their fans believe in that. A lot of their fans believe in this voodoo, and a lot of the media seems to believe in it too. They seem to think that all that club has needed, through this whole season of failure and disaster, is someone who “understands what being at Ibrox is all about.”

Well, recently, being at Ibrox has been all about being second best. And when I say recently, I mean 13 times in the last 14 years. And I wonder when that number gets so big that you can stop referring to it as “recently” and start using words like “traditionally,” “usually,” or “ordinarily.”

I would have loved to have seen Ferguson get the job. The average lifespan of an Ibrox boss is just over a year. I think he could have been gone in half that time, and we would have laughed all the way through it. I think we should make the most of what is left of this season because he won’t be around for long.