Jackson rides again: He is determined to promote the Ferguson revolution.

Today we got the latest piece of nonsense from Keith Jackson, and what do you know? He’s building up the possibility of the Ferguson Revolution at Ibrox as much as he can. You really do hope the Americans are paying attention.

Let’s jump right into it, staring with the headline.

Ibrox takeover king gets close-up look at Barry Ferguson and witnesses wounds begin to heal – Keith Jackson

How will this guy ever be able to hold his head up again if this “takeover” turns out to be a fake-over? Oh wait … the way he’s done every day since the Craig Whyte “Motherwell Born Billionaire” story blew up in his face. That’s the beauty of having no sense of standards or professionalism or integrity; you can survive anything.

Andrew Cavenagh is likely to return to Ibrox on Thursday to check out the second leg of the Europa League showdown with Fenerbahce

Possible future shareholders comes to watch important game. Wow. This isn’t really about him though, it’s a piece about Ferguson.

He won’t admit as much in public. But, then again, he doesn’t really need to.

Since I know we’re talking about Ferguson wanting to be the permanent boss at Ibrox, let me say it now; he actually has admitted it in public. It’s just that Jackson hasn’t listened to a word that he’s said.

It’s ripping out of his every sinew and fibre. Be in no doubt, Barry Ferguson is absolutely bursting to become the next (Ibrox)manager on a full-time basis. And you know what? Over the course of the next six days and against all of the odds he will be given a once in a lifetime opportunity to earn it.

No sensible person would have written this rot. As much criticism as we level at the Ibrox club, one thing is for sure; nobody with Ferguson’s limited experience and zero success rate should be near that job. It’s not a job that can be “earned” in six days, simply by getting through one round in Europe and getting a result of some sort at Celtic Park. This is typical of how Jackson and others see the world though.

Thursday night’s jawdropping Europa League win over Jose Mourinho’s Fenerbahce was the moment the former Ibrox skipper announced himself as a genuine bona fide candidate for the position which he’s currently holding down in the capacity of caretaker. That the American health insurance tycoon who is about to become the club’s new owner was there in Istanbul to witness Ferguson’s landmark victory for himself will, at the very least, have given the incoming consortium a serious curve ball on which to ponder.

What did I tell Ibrox fans when this guy got his “temporary” appointment? Don’t be too sure that’s what it is. There are people in the media who would love nothing more than to see a “Real Ranjurs Man” at the helm of that club. And Jackson is about to give us all a lesson in what they think that means, not that we need one. But those Ibrox fans who are concerned about this scenario, well this is the time to start properly worrying about it because people like this are pushing it hard.

Andrew Cavenagh’s presence at the Sukru Saracoglu Stadium will have been noted by Ferguson and his backroom team even if they had other more pressing matters on their minds as they pitted their collective wits against one of the modern game’s managerial behemoths.

Their “collective wits.” There are barely enough IQ points between them to power a cheap electronic chess game. Listen to these guys speak. They can barely string two sentences together, and of them, and I’m including the ones who routinely work on BBC Sports Scotland, where they bring the average IQ down to single digits.

And if Cavenagh should choose to return to Glasgow for the second leg on Thursday night then he will see and feel for himself how Ferguson’s work during his short time in charge has repaired and restored the relationship between the club and its supporters. The money man from Philadelphia was a guest in the directors’ box on January 12 when Philippe Clement’s side huffed and puffed its way to a 3-1 win over St Johnstone against the backdrop of a bad-tempered fan revolt.

Their club is further behind Celtic than it was when the Muppet Show rolled into town. If you look at their forums you’ll see that some of the fans are onboard with this idea, but that the majority of them view it as some kind of bad joke. But this is typical of the whole media narrative surrounding these appointments; Ferguson and co were part of the media ecosystem not that long ago, and they have plenty of friends there more than willing to push their case. As I said, it’s time for certain segments of the Ibrox support, the bits that aren’t wired to the moon, to be worried.

The militant wing of the Ibrox support staged an organised walk out to protest against the same beleaguered regime that Cavenagh and his cohorts from the San Francisco 49ers intend to overhaul. So he saw for himself how fractured and broken down this relationship had become at a time when things were hurtling towards rock bottom.

He saw a tiny section of the fan base embarrass itself by failing to command widespread support. But the fact that the mood was so toxic that day should stick in his mind for another reason; it’s a glimpse of his own future.

On the contrary on Thursday night, should he return to Glasgow’s south side to see if Ferguson can finish off the job, Cavenagh will get a look at this place at its best and most intoxicating. Ibrox has a tendency to come alive on nights such as these and now that Ferguson has reconnected the supporters with his team and given them hope of salvaging something remarkable from the wreckage of Clement’s car crash campaign, the old place is bound to be bouncing when Mourinho comes to town.

You notice the use of the term “this place”? This is a sports writer gushing like a fan-boy and wearing his heart on his sleeve. Because unless he was writing that from inside Ibrox itself – and let’s be honest, we can’t rule that out – he has no business using such a term in a “neutral” article … not that any of us made the mistake of thinking that’s what it was. It’s pathetic, actually.

That’s something Cavenagh may want to experience for himself now that he’s on the verge of getting his hands on the keys to the front door with his multi-million pound takeover proposals now being given the fine tooth comb treatment by teams of lawyers.

Don’t you love the care and attention Jackson has paid to doing due diligence on this guy and his little consortium? If this was Celtic I wouldn’t let these people near the place until I knew a whole lot more than the Ibrox fans do right now.

If Ferguson can finish what he started last week, find a way through Fenerbahce’s defences for a second time and claim a place in the quarter finals of this season’s Europa League he’ll have nailed down his credentials as a potential serious candidate.

Rodgers was right yesterday when he was asked about this; he pointed out that in fact there’s no real difference between the way the club is playing under Ferguson from what it did under Clement. If these guys have brought an original idea to the table we’ve yet to see evidence of it. They’ve tweaked the tactical plan for European games left behind by the last guy in the building. It’s crazy to get over-excited over that and make Ferguson out to be some kind of tactical genius.

And if he can follow that up with a genuinely competitive performance against Celtic in Sunday’s derby showdown on the other side of the city, then he really will have to be considered for the position on a more permanent basis.

Based on one performance against one SPFL team. They will never get past this, will they? Celtic is their permanent obsession. Managers stand and fall based on how they do against us. They can crash and burn everywhere else, but as long as they can beat us these people are taken seriously. It would not surprise me in the least if Ferguson got the job based on a handful of results … if, that is, he somehow got them.

Not that he’ll admit it of course. Ferguson has never been the presumptuous type and he most certainly won’t allow himself to indulge in fantasies about what may or may not be in the future.

He doesn’t have to indulge it, when jokers like this are happy to do it for him. He doesn’t even need to promote his own cause. The cheerleaders are already out in force.

For him and his right hand men, Neil McCann, Billy Dodds and Allan McGregor, it’s all very much about what they can achieve in the here and the now. It’s reasonable to assume they will have been shocked by much of what they have seen since returning to the inside of a club they knew so well as players.

That’s a dark hint of stuff having gone on behind the scenes. But if this stuff is so well known to the likes of Jackson, why hasn’t he written it before now? You cannot make a claim like that and not explain it. You cannot, as a journalist, claim to be privy to such information and escape the question as to why you never bothered to write about any of it before now. I also love the way McGregor and Ferguson are held up as paragons of professionalism. Ask the SFA about that one.

The accepted standards of behaviour and professionalism which they once took for granted around Auchenhowie have long since been eroded. The general working environment had become gloomy and tired even before Clement arrived at the club. And the Belgian took over a bad situation before making it even worse.

Some of us knew that when he started raving about banning babies and talking to the media about his bizarre personal life. It took people like Jackson way longer to catch up with us than they should have. But here, again, you get this schtick about “standards” as though there were absolutely none over there and it’s only now that Ferguson and his people are telling folk to tuck their shirt in. All this stuff is the same mumbo-jumbo we hear all the time, and about every new Ibrox boss who walks into the building. Clement was the hard task master who had restored those standards this time last year … and look how that all ended up.

That’s what’s been driving Ferguson and his staff since they first walked back in through the doors. In his own mind, Ferguson has a little less than three months to do something about changing it for the better.

Voodoo claptrap. Let’s see how well it works.

The short term plan is to breathe fresh energy and life into a club which has become stale and almost morbidly depressed. To restore the kind of work ethic and winning culture which has been lost along the way, along with so much of the club’s DNA.

Absolute rubbish. Work ethic? Winning culture? Don’t you need to win things consistently to have a winning culture? That sounds like a culture of entitlement to me, and that’s already part of the club’s DNA. The “club’s DNA” is the whole problem over there, this sense that they are somehow better than the last 14 years can testify to, the idea that they should be a much bigger deal than they are.

He’ll very probably see that as a worthy legacy to leave behind even if he’s not going to be back inside calling the shots for the long haul. In many ways, however, it does feel as if Ferguson and his hand picked coaching team might just be the right men in the right place and that they have arrived in the nick of time.

What rubbish! Arrived in the nick of time? The season is as good as finished, and only the vague fantasy of winning the Europa League remains. Arriving in the nick of time would surely have been to have arrived before they went out of the cup and before their dropping more points in the league virtually guaranteed us to win it before the split. What exactly have they saved here? The ruins of a season already over? What good does that do anybody? They are, on paper anyway, a stop gap management team here simply to go through the motions before this disastrous campaign closes out. On top of that, they’ve played, and lost, at home already in the league, a fact that Jackson is happy to airbrush out of the narrative completely.

There’s not a bit of textbook coaching school jargon or a powerpoint presentation between them. Rather, there’s a gritty sense of honesty and an unpolished authenticity which is precisely what this club has been crying out for after being hopelessly misled by a succession of fly by night chancers and managerial imposters.

And you sang the praises of all of those guys when they were hired. Do not think we’ve forgotten that. The bitterness is appalling. So to is the assertion that a little homespun “honesty and unpolished authenticity” makes up for a management style from the dark ages and one which doesn’t account for things such as tactics or preparation.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing they can do between now and May to change the duff hand they have been dealt in terms of the playing squad they have inherited. And yet Ferguson took it to the table in Turkey the other night and still managed to get the better of one of the greatest poker players in the game.

Mourinho is not the manager he was. Not even close. As I said in the piece I wrote after the game, he’s coaching in Turkey, not a top five league, and his star striker is 38. That’s a man on the downslope of what was once a great career. No harm to the guy, but it happens to the best of them. He’s no longer amongst the elite and he’s no longer coaching an elite team. That much was very evident indeed; a bunch of over 30’s and EPL rejects and a couple of expensive loan signings.

A repeat performance on Thursday night, or something very similar, will get Ferguson and his club across the line and into the last eight. Where they go from that point will be down to the decisions made by Cavenagh, 49ers big hitter Paraag Marathe and their new look incoming regime.

Provided any of this actually happens … and boy oh boy what a shock a lot of people are in for if it actually does.

But, for the time being, Ferguson and his men have a chance to make their minds up for them. Given what they did to Mourinho in the first leg, it might seem unwise to underestimate them.

I don’t underestimate them, at least in terms of their getting the gig. They stand a good chance of it. Primarily, I think, because of people like Jackson, who are already leading the campaign on their behalf. Beyond that, people who sink a lot of money into the project over there might view a management team with widespread media backing and a good relationship with a section of the fans as a cheap starting option … especially if they are willing to work under a tightly controlled budget.

Anything is possible over there.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

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