If the Ibrox club hires Gerrard, everyone at Celtic will relish that mistake.

As talk about Rodgers and his future gathers speed, the conversation about who the Ibrox club is likely to appoint gathers pace. The one thing I know about their next appointment is this: he won’t get long if he fails. There’s talk about Gerrard. About Ancelotti. About others of that ilk. None of them has the kind of gravitas to take on Rodgers and have a hope in hell of success.

Steven Gerrard’s name comes up a lot. It’s mentioned repeatedly.

But Gerrard, by the time he left, had drawn three games and lost one in the league—and that only looked good because Ange was still getting his feet under the table at Celtic Park. In Europe, the record was even worse. He played eight games before he departed and won only two of them. The double defeats against Malmö put them out of the Champions League and they were on the brink of going out of the Europa League until Van Bronckhorst came in and steadied the ship.

I’ve said repeatedly that I want Gerrard back over there. I’d love to see Rodgers clean his clock. I’d love to shatter the myth once and for all—and it is a myth—and one of the most pernicious and stupid in the recent history of the game. I don’t think there’s a single person at Celtic Park who wouldn’t welcome that opportunity. The opportunity not just to shatter this myth, but to utterly destroy it.

I look at all the names being thrown around and I don’t see a single one that causes any concern. At the end of the day, the average Ibrox team will drop points in a large number of games over the course of a campaign. If we maintain our 90-point average—and mostly, we secure far more than that—we’ll win the next title. And the one after that. And probably the one after that too.

Their fans are trying to get excited—or pretend to be excited—about what amounts to a parade of losers. Gerrard is a loser. His managerial career has seen him win one title, at one club, during the COVID campaign when every other club in the country was on its knees and we shot ourselves in both feet.

His Villa experiment was a complete disaster, and you’ve seen the improvement at Villa since he left. He went to Saudi, failed utterly. And that was at a team which let him sign a number of European players—who all flopped. His transfer record was dire. His judgement—and some of the people he hangs out with—is highly suspect. If he were a Celtic boss, those pictures of him in The Sun yesterday, of him hanging out with a known gangster, would follow him around until the day he died.

I try to imagine what potential American investors will think of a club that hires a guy like that. A guy with numerous friends in low places, here in Scotland and south of the border. Everything about Gerrard’s behaviour is suspect. Everything about his off-field activities is shady. In a normal football environment, that would all be disqualifying. It may well be why no English club wants to touch him with a 24-foot pole. And that might be reason enough for him to think Ibrox is a good option.

I certainly think it’s a good option for us, because although we don’t know what an Ancelotti might one day do, we already do know what a Gerrard can do.

And it ain’t a hell of a lot.

It’s almost time for their period of posturing to end. It’s almost time for them to do things, rather than just talk about doing them. It’s almost time they started putting in place the pieces of the jigsaw, rather than banging on about how good it’s going to look when they do.

And when that time comes, the man they have in the dugout is going to have to beat us. And the team he puts out on the pitch is going to have to carry them home. If that’s Steven Gerrard, then I cannot wait to clean his clock. Because that’s the ultimate, inevitable result. And in doing so, we’ll end his career as a manager.

One-time loser? People think maybe it was bad luck. Two bad runs and they start to wonder if anyone can be that unlucky. Third time loser? There’s nobody in the world carrying that much bad luck. You’re just a bad manager.

I don’t consider his time at Ibrox to have been particularly successful. That may sound contradictory, considering he’s the guy who stopped 10-in-a-row. But actually, the people who stopped 10-in-a-row were in our own house, not theirs.

He’s gotten a long way on the back of that title. He didn’t get to where he wanted to—because that was Liverpool. But he did get a Premier League job. And he blew it. And because he wasn’t getting another one, he went where the money was.

So now, he can’t afford to miss with his next job.

He’s got to hit it. He’s got to get it right.

You know, I admire someone like Rooney. I admire someone like Lampard even more. Those guys saw their big dream jobs end in disaster—and instead of doing a runner to some foreign climate they stayed. They fought it out.

They tried to build reputations lower down the football pyramid. They did it the right way. They got experience at the sharp end of the game, where you have to learn as you go. Where you have to grow as a boss.

Those guys went to football boot camp. Gerrard went to the football equivalent of a holiday camp. So, we’ll see if he’s got the bottle for it. We’ll see if he has the stomach for the fight. He didn’t last time. He couldn’t wait to get away when it became clear what Ange was building at Celtic.

Rodgers is on the brink of his third treble at Celtic. I think he’d relish the chance to go up against this pretender. I don’t believe Gerrard would ever have won that title if Rodgers had been in the dugout on our side of the city.

We may be about to find out. And if it is him, then so be it. Rodgers will add him to the list of managers he’s seen off the premises over there.