The Ibrox club wants to trump Celtic in the PR war. This is why we laugh at them.

This weekend, as we hopefully hoist the Scottish Cup, the Ibrox club is going to try to spring a little PR trap on us. If they can. They want to announce their new manager to take away our headlines.

Even if they manage it, we will be laughing at them.

Let them have their managerial coronation if they get there. Let them argue on forums, phone-ins, group chats and fan media channels about whether this is the arrival of the saviour. Let those of them who believe get all giddy about it, let them parade it like it’s a cup win in and of itself … and let them fight amongst themselves.

Let them call it a “statement” and a “fresh start” and a “bold appointment” and all the other buzzwords that they roll out with tiresome frequency. Let them think they are off to a great start in the Close Season Cup – the only thing they ever seem to be good at, the only one they ever seem to win – and let them slap each other on the back and talk about how the corner has finally, finally been turned.

Meanwhile, we’ll have won a treble.

An actual treble. An historic one. It would be our sixth in short order. Let that sink in for a second. Six trebles. Eighteen trophies right there, not even counting all the doubles. A level of sustained dominance that has no equal in this country, ever.

I’ve written this before; let it sink in. This is the club Murray wanted Rangers to be. This is the club King dreamed of building. Imagine, for a moment, all the money they have spent over the decades, at Rangers and now at the NewCo, and the result of it is that Celtic has overtaken even the trophy lies to sit proud at the pinnacle of the Scottish game in a way they cannot dispute.

That’s what we’ll have achieved. And they think they can trump this by rolling out the name of the guy who will be sitting in their dugout in the middle of July, and who the chances are will be replaced by someone else this time next year?

Honestly, this is why we laugh at them.

Because they do this every year. Every single year. When the curtain falls on the season and the sun sets on another campaign where they’ve either won nothing or been blown away by the sheer weight of Celtic’s momentum, they immediately pivot. They look away from the wreckage, turn their eyes to the horizon, and start dreaming up futures that have never once materialised.

They always win the Close Season Cup, don’t they?

They always get the pats on the back, the wee puff pieces in the press, the hopeful punditry about how they’re building something, how “this coming year will be different” how “there are signs of encouragement.”

They’ve been encouraged into the abyss more times than I can count, yet the narrative persists. Hope sells, especially when it’s based on vague promises which allow everyone to see and hear exactly what they want to see and hear.

But here’s the thing: you don’t get trophies for having a “good summer.” There is no silverware for signing players with double-barrelled surnames from obscure European clubs. No prizes for PR. The game is won on the pitch, over the course of a season, and we’re the ones doing that while they keep failing at it.

We are champions. We are cup winners. We want to be treble winners. Again.

This club just finished one of the most emotionally and physically testing league seasons in recent memory and emerged from it with all the domestic honours on offer. We did it with a manager who returned under scrutiny. We did it with a squad that had been doubted. We did it with questions being asked, constantly, about our key players. Some of them, like Idah, continue to have doubters.

We rallied when it mattered. We stepped up when the pressure was on. We proved ourselves in every single department.

The League Cup final wasn’t a classic. It didn’t need to be. It was a job done, a trophy lifted, and a season started with the first triumph. Nobody will remember in five years how many shots the Ibrox club had or how they thought they were unlucky, or whether we should have won by more. What they’ll remember is the result, the medals, and the fact that Celtic once again stood tallest when it mattered most.

The league campaign was just a procession towards the prize. There was a moment or two towards the end where we were shaky and looked off the game; we got over that. We crossed the line in style. 92 points. 112 goals scored. Eat our dust. Don’t try to keep up. Except they will, of course, and they will promise “jam tomorrow” to a fan base which never quite learns that this is all about us.

That’s why they will pretend that this somehow resets the clock. That it gives them a free pass on another year of failure. That everything that came before it – the bottle jobs, the sackings, the humiliations – is all wiped out by a managerial PowerPoint presentation and a press conference full of buzzwords.

The current front-runner? Steven Gerrard.

Oh, how we laugh.

The man who won one trophy in three and a half years. And even that one was during a Covid campaign with no fans in the ground and no pressure from the stands. A league win, yes, but one that’s aged about as well as milk in the sun.

No cup wins. Knocked out of every tournament bar that one season when nobody else could leave the house, never mind go to the match. The moment the pressure returned, the moment he looked across the city and realised what we were busily constructing, he vanished. Mid-season, off to Birmingham, chasing the Premier League dream and that fabled shot at the Liverpool job. It ended up with him in Saudi Arabia contemplating his money on a boulevard of broken dreams.

He’s been on holiday, this guy. He’s been hiding from pressure, and he said so himself on a podcast not that long ago. He wasn’t looking to return to management. His missus and his kids are happy in the land of sand, milk and honey. Asking them to come back to Glasgow to surround themselves by those up to their knees in fenian blood again … even if they agree to it, how happy are they going to be?

The media is talking about him like he’s a returning messiah, a legend, a proven winner. It’s honestly bizarre. Gerrard’s time in Scotland was marked by one strong campaign in a really weird year and a whole lot of underachievement. One trophy out of a possible nine; he fled before a League Cup game he’d certainly have lost.

He was there for a long stretch, longer than most of their managers. And he still came away with practically nothing.

That’s the kind of record that gets celebrated over there. That’s their level. They dress it up, of course. They talk about the “invincible season” like it happened in a vacuum, like it wasn’t helped by empty stadiums, a calendar thrown into chaos, and a Celtic team dealing with Covid call-offs, Lennon’s decline, and the infamous Dubai debacle. As if every other club hadn’t slashed and burned their wage bills in order to simply survive.

Even at his best, Gerrard’s side could only manage a single honour. We had an off-year and they barely scraped over the line. When normality returned, so did the natural order. We got Ange. They were left with an empty throne. Again.

And that’s the context for this nonsense.

They’re drooling over an out-of-work coach who is going to take over a team that chews up and spits out managers faster than a high-speed paper shredder. The average lifespan of a recent boss at Ibrox is ten months. One bad derby loss, one cup exit, one poor run of form and the whole place turns. It’s a poisoned chalice. It always has been. No money, huge pressure, a fanbase with delusions of grandeur, and a board that couldn’t run a raffle without sparking a civil war.

They have critical European qualifiers to play. The potential for disaster – real disaster – is clear in all of them. If they slip into the Europa League and get the wrong draw there before a Group Stage place is confirmed there is no drop into the third tier competition; this year they’d be gone, out of Europe entirely.

The consequences of that will be enormous.

Gerrard would be mad to come back, and if he does, he’ll get exactly what he deserves. And if it’s not him, well, it’ll be someone else who gets cheered in and booed out before the season is done. They’re locked in that cycle. I don’t believe for a minute that Gerrard is the choice of the Americans … that alone has his card marked.

That’s what their weekend will be about. They will attempt to steal our headlines by celebrating the next guy to strap himself into their managerial electric chair. Brendan will be standing by to throw the switch when the moment comes along.

All the noise from Ibrox, all the media speculation, all the clickbait headlines – none of it mattered these past few years and it won’t matter here. Because when the football starts again, we’ll still be the team to beat. We’ll still be champions. We’ll still be the side that won everything there was to win in Scotland, again.

And I suspect the Celtic team will be even stronger than it is right now.

If we make it then it puts all of their off-season posturing into perspective and whatever announcement they make, if they can, and whatever messiah they bring in, it’ll be dwarfed by the sight of Celtic lifting yet another trophy, celebrating yet another successful campaign, and doing it all in a manner that must drive them absolutely crazy. As I’ve said before, this isn’t easy. We make it look easy.

This is normal for us now. This is the standard. This is what Celtic does. We win. We set records and then beat them ourselves. We dominate. And them? They hire another guy, pretend he’s the one, and go right back to waiting for us to slip.

And all they’ve got is hope. Empty, recycled, increasingly desperate hope. A new messiah. A fresh start. The challenge. “The Ranjurs are coming.” Again? Christ, how many years is that now? Over and over and over …

This is why we laugh at them.