Fear and loathing in Paisley: The nightmare goes on, but the gig is up for the Real Ranjurs Men.

At the end of the game yesterday in Paisley, Barry Ferguson stood on the touchline and spoke to the media. And anger radiated off him. But it wasn’t the anger of a manager, or a leader of men. It was the anger of a spoiled brat. It was the anger of a kid — someone emotionally immature, who wasn’t getting his way. His whinging tone completed a terrible picture.

The impression you get listening to him is one of someone who can’t believe that his sense of entitlement has been so completely thwarted. He really did believe that he and his coaching staff could just breeze in there, invoke the spirit of Rangers, and that the whole club would instantly be fixed.

But they haven’t a clue what they’re doing. They are amateurs, in a job that needs much, much, much more than they are capable of bringing. That they believed in that voodoo approach is as telling as anything is.

It is increasingly cringey listening to this guy. Right from the start, this appointment was an embarrassment — like something from a Celtic fan forum Funniest Ibrox Scenario thread. Indeed, I know that all of us joked about seeing Barry Ferguson in the dugout before the season was out. But that was intended as a joke, a humorous suggestion, and one that would show the complete disintegration of the club as a credible force.

Nobody really expected it to happen, not even those of us who know that the dysfunctionality at Ibrox doesn’t have a bottom level — it can just keep getting worse and worse all the time. Hearing that it had actually happened was hilarious.

Predicting that it would be an absolute disaster verging on cataclysm was the easiest prediction any of us have made this season.

The idea that the “fix-all” prescription that club needed all these years was an infusion of the “real Rangers men” has been thoroughly routed by this appointment and by this disastrous few months. It should never raise its head again — although we all know that it will.

Jackson wrote last week, in an atrocious article, that Ferguson has realised he’s not going to get the job. On Friday at his press conference, Ferguson said he badly wanted it — and he didn’t sound like a guy who thought he had no chance. But yesterday he sounded like a man who knows that it’s not going to happen. Who knows that it’s slipped out of his grasp. And he has no answers to offer, no solutions to bring to the table.

So he stood there, angry and disbelieving that all his shouting and bawling, all his gurning and gnashing of the teeth and stamping of the feet, had come to nothing. He stood there furiously spitting venom at the players for not paying attention to his instructions, as if he’s literally the last person to realise that serious professional footballers cannot take seriously a tabloid journalist-turned-coach telling them what their standards ought to be.

He said on Friday that if he doesn’t get the Ibrox job, he has no plans to return to coaching. I laughed at that, as if there was any suggestion that the offers would come pouring in.

It’s like me announcing to the world that I’m no longer interested in pursuing Sophie Turner, as though there were ever a realistic prospect of that happening.

Of course he has no plans to return to coaching!

He knows no club will touch him with a twenty-foot pole. Why would they? His management style is right out of the “shout at them until they listen” book, and if people stop listening, he’s got no Plan B. He’s got no other approach.

Imagine squealing about how no club fears them anymore. Why should any club fear them? Who are they that they should be feared?

If they were doing fearsome things, then fair enough.

If they were a powerful club capable of inspiring fear, then of course. But the old name and the old colours no longer have the same power they used to. Because whatever you call the club at Ibrox right now, it is a shadow of the one that once was there — and the one that once was there was itself an artificial creation built on a rotten structure.

And Ferguson himself has found that it is no longer enough simply to invoke their name and expect fear to follow. That’s unfortunate for him, and for them, as fear was the only weapon he had. Fear was the only strategy he knew.

He did make one last effort to see if he could provoke a reaction.

He told the players they’re playing for their futures. He said that everyone at the club is fighting for their future right now. But why should anyone care about that? Those players who are on long-term contracts — their futures are secure.

The only way they leave the club is if someone offers them an equal or greater sum of money. Those who are on short-term contracts probably already know where their next club is going to be — and have already decided to leave.

Those who are going have no reason to fear that. And those who are staying know that Ferguson is in no position to decide any of that anyway, because he won’t be there. He’ll be back as a club “ambassador”, scribbling with his crayons and getting it into The Daily Record. In terms of making a call on who stays or goes, he’ll be doing it from behind a desk across from Keith Jackson — and no-one at Ibrox will care.

The Ibrox fans are going through the full gamut of fear and loathing at the moment, almost all of it directed at their own side, and the fear that whatever happens with the takeover won’t happen in time to matter. They’re almost certainly right about that. Not that I think it’s going to matter that much anyway. But at least the fear of Barry Ferguson as manager is one that they can set aside. Those who were still clinging to that fantasy — well, yesterday ripped it out of their hands, and much else besides.

Four games from now, it will all be over for him. Their own nightmare shows no sign at all of coming to an end.

The loathing will have new targets before very long.