Barry Ferguson is so entitled that he can’t see why he’s failed.

The Ferguson family don’t do irony, do they?

At the weekend, after dropping more points—and after he had seemed to realise that the job he had hoped for, and thought for a while was his, is never going to be his—Barry Ferguson gave a ranting, raving press conference where he seemed more pissed off that people aren’t listening to him than he was about anything else.

I sometimes wonder how people who are in a hole can just keep on digging long after it’s become obvious that they’re going nowhere good, and nowhere fast and last night, Derek Ferguson, his brother, went on another rant on Barry’s behalf and inadvertently held up the real reasons why no one listens to him.

The sense of entitlement in Derek Ferguson’s comments was unbelievable—and there’s little doubt that this is exactly how his brother feels. He cannot understand why his message isn’t getting through.

It hasn’t dawned on him for a second that he’s a former tabloid columnist pretending to be a football manager and that’s how the players see him.

There was one surefire way to know that the Michael Beale experiment wasn’t going to work at Ibrox, and it was that Michael Beale was not a serious candidate for that job.

In a normal environment, in a sensible environment, he wouldn’t have gotten near a job that size with no managerial experience at all, so the idea that he was going to walk into a dressing room and command immediate respect from players who knew he didn’t belong there was ridiculous. And he proved it in his other jobs.

In contrast, Van Bronckhorst and Clement went to that club having won league titles in their native countries. They had records to fall back on and even they eventually ran out of road. Those two men had backgrounds sufficiently impressive that people in the dressing room took them seriously at first. It still didn’t save them.

How are they ever supposed to take seriously someone like Barry Ferguson? Someone preaching voodoo and phantom blah, blah, blah. That’s all Ferguson had. That’s all Ferguson brought to the table.

One title in 14 years.

That’s what their club has won.

And because that’s the record, he was always going to find it incredibly difficult to convince that dressing room that the club should be doing better than second place.

For him to be banging on about how that isn’t good enough—when it’s pretty much been their record for a decade and longer—and for him to try to invoke some magic from the jersey and the word and the King’s picture on the wall … they must have thought he was crazy. Their response was never going to be much more than derision.

And the amazing thing is that the more he goes on, the more his brother goes on about the “disrespect” that he’s being shown, the crazier he’s going to look.

Now I know this might not matter to him, because he’s not going to be a coach again. He’s already said that he has no interest in pursuing a coaching career beyond this season—not that he has much choice in that.

But really, how do you want to be remembered?

How do you want your players to remember you?

How do you want the staff around the ground to remember you?

How do you want your peers—the people you were hoping to join on the touchline—to remember you?

As a ranting maniac who proved that he doesn’t belong in that very small group of ex-players who can really, genuinely cut it as top-class managers? I think not.

But of course, right there is the operative word, isn’t it? Think.

There’s a word that explains it all. Right there is the word that matters most here; not much thought has gone into any part of this so far.

Not much thought went into taking the job.

Not much thought went into offering it to him on the part of the board.

Not much thought went into whether or not a strategy based on voodoo and shouting at people until their eardrums burst was really a good idea.

Let’s be honest here; we’re talking about the Ferguson brothers.

We’re not talking about quiz kids here.

We’re talking about people who are about as dumb as any who’ve ever had jobs in Scottish football. And it’s instructive to note that both of them work in the mainstream media—which should be a sure indication of how low their standards are in this weird little part of the world that we live in.

I just think that sometimes it’s better to stay silent about this kind of thing. Ferguson really doesn’t have all that much to be ashamed of.

He’s a limited guy with limited intellect.

He’s very limited as a coach.

And it’s not his fault that he’s ended up here.

He took the job, yes—but anyone might have taken the job if offered it in his circumstances, and especially if told by the the people who get paid to make these decisions that they were sure he had the right tools to do it.

Besides, as I said earlier, Van Bronckhorst and Clement both came to the club with winning records as managers and the job chewed them up and spat them out. He really doesn’t have anything to be particularly ashamed of.

He’s failed in a job that is much bigger than him, and that has eaten much bigger managers than him. If he only had the sense to realise that, he would stop making a fool of himself.

If those around him only had the sense to realise that, he could emerge not with managerial cachet or credibility, but certainly without shame.

But they seem determined to go off on an orgy of blame-casting and general whining. And that only ends one way—your own disgrace, your own embarrassment, and humiliation.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand the guy and I welcome his misery … but really, even he and his brother ought to have more sense than this.