Media attempts to compare Celtic’s former boss to Ibrox’s new one are ridiculous.

As I wrote earlier, the love-in for Russell Martin is underway. And I said that Celtic wouldn’t be complacent—because you just never know. But there are some things I’m going to take issue with.

The most important of them is this: the comparisons to Ange Postecoglou, and why Celtic fans shouldn’t get too excited just because the Ibrox fans were mocking the big Australian when he first walked through our doors.

Those comparisons don’t stand up to even the most simplistic examination. They’re not remotely comparable figures. Martin may want to style his type of football around the Ange approach, but that does not mean it will work.

A lot of managers have attempted that over the years. A lot of them would like to be able to do it. But as I’ve written before, if it was as simple as just copying another manager’s style, you wouldn’t need to worry about who sat in your dugout—you’d just have to worry about whose Pep Guardiola tribute act was the best.

In a world like that, there would be no need for any club to go out and hire the real Pep Guardiola. History records that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest—and came second. It’s not impossible that one of those Pep impersonators could actually outperform Pep himself…

If it were that simple, of course.

But it isn’t that simple. And for anyone in the media to try to promote Martin as some kind of successor to Ange is ludicrous nonsense.

Our former coach has now won trophies in four different countries. He’s won a European title. He’s won an international title with Australia. His record is stellar. It stands up to scrutiny. And the only reason some of us underestimated that record in the first place was snobbery.

The Ibrox fans underestimated it because they always underestimate a Celtic manager. Even Rodgers—who cleaned their clocks the first time he was here—was widely seen as a spent force. Ridiculous, when you consider that he took Leicester to an FA Cup win and almost got them to a European final.

See, the Ibrox fans weren’t the only people who gave Ange a hard time when he was appointed. I thought it was a disastrous appointment and that’s one of the most fundamental miscalculations I’ve ever made doing this job.

I wrote about it in scathing, white-hot terms. And I now recognise that my attitude was based on snobbery and a colossal ignorance of what the man had actually done, and what he had actually achieved.

As soon as I really dug in deep to understand what his philosophy was, and placed those achievements in a proper context, I recognised that we had a kindred spirit here. I recognised that his success was actually pretty momentous.

In short, those of us who slated Ange didn’t ignore his record—it’s that we failed to take it seriously enough. But the record was there.

We really have no excuse. It was there for anyone to see and it was far more impressive than I initially thought. That’s the first point at which the comparison to Martin completely falls down. Ange did have the record. There was verifiable success for anyone who could be bothered to look.

I knew about his record on the day his name was first linked with the job. But I didn’t take titles in Australia and Japan seriously. I didn’t take seriously the fact that he had won an international tournament with Australia. And I should have.

It wasn’t until I read his book and watched a couple of videos that I realised we had a deep football thinker here—and that his success in those places was the mark of a manager of genuine quality. An elite-level manager, as he has proved.

Martin has no success to speak of. He got Southampton into the Premier League via the playoffs, but that Southampton team was already rich, powerful and capable—and had been amongst the overwhelming favourites to go up. Ange’s record makes Martin’s look exactly what it is: modest and unimpressive.

Ange won five trophies out of six in Glasgow.

But he also spent a lot of money to do it.

He rebuilt the team completely, and he had the financial resources to get that job done. He did it by acting, as I’ve said so many times, as the architect. That’s why his success rate with signings was so high. That’s why almost every player he brought to the club in that first campaign was a hit.

Because he knew what he wanted the team to do. He knew the style he wanted to play. Every player he signed slotted into a key position in that system. He built the system first, and got the players to fit into it.

To do that requires total control of the process.

It was the one thing he managed to get for himself before he was even in the door. When Celtic interviewed him, he knew he had to ace it to get the job.

But he also knew that, because we’d been turned down by Eddie Howe in a months-long pursuit that had blown up in our faces, he had a little bit of leverage—and he used it to get what he needed.

So aside from the record he already had—which Martin does not—the control Ange was assured of exercising at Celtic, and the money he was able to spend, there really isn’t much of a comparison to be made.

Martin has a 40% win ratio across his three clubs. He’s going to Ibrox without effective say over who the signings are going to be. He wouldn’t even confirm the meagre £20 million transfer budget the media’s been touting for days—something we’ve pointed out doesn’t really equate to a transfer budget at all.

Their team needs a complete rebuild. Even £20 million would not be enough to guarantee that job gets done properly.

Every signing would have to hit the ground running. That means the manager would need some control over the process. Martin doesn’t have that.

If his brand of football was so great and so sophisticated, why has it failed so dramatically? His career stats are horrendous. He’s lost as many games as he’s won.

I understand the idea that we shouldn’t get complacent—I said that in the previous piece. But comparisons with Ange don’t stack up in any way, shape or form. It reeks of a media desperate to find the silver lining in what is an underwhelming appointment. They should just admit it.

The Ange appointment, by contrast, was an exciting one. It’s just that some of us didn’t get excited about it—not at first.

Looking at it now, the idea that these two are in any way comparable is frankly ridiculous. It’s almost embarrassing to read so many people pushing this line. I said yesterday I wondered how they’d spin it—but this is a remarkable attempt on their part to draw comparisons which simply don’t exist.

One of these guys came to Scotland a serial success.

The other comes to Scotland a serial failure.

Make that your starting point if you want to compare and contrast.