Pleasing some of the Peepul none of the time. Why Martin is doomed at Ibrox.

Let me tell you a story about how fickle and how crazy people can be—and how it’s most often not the big stuff that sets them off, but the little things.

Let me take you back to 2009. In Colombia.

At that time, the country was gripped by a wave of violence as drug cartels fought each other for supremacy. It was around the time the cartels were being squeezed out of the trade by the Mexicans and reduced to mere suppliers instead of the wholesale organisers they once were. Still, the violence was extreme.

Over 1,000 civilians were being murdered every year in the ongoing war.

And then the death of Pepe brought people out onto the streets in rage. Protests erupted across the land. The anger was off the charts.

And who was Pepe?

Pepe was a hippo. A wild hippopotamus, shot by the government as part of a cull because the number of hippos in Colombia had swelled to dangerous proportions. And how had that happened? How had Colombia ended up with too many hippos?

Well, back in 1978, when Pablo Escobar bought the vast tract of land that he called Hacienda Nápoles, he decided to stock it with exotic wild animals.

When Escobar was eventually killed by Colombian police, Hacienda Nápoles fell into ruin—though he hadn’t lived there for years, having spent that time on the run. Authorities moved in to deal with his private zoo. Most of the animals were sent to local zoos.

But, because it was going to be too difficult to move them, the authorities left behind four adult hippos—three females and one male. After all, how much harm could they do? Well, that turns out to be quite a bit.

They bred, and their offspring eventually struck out in search of their own territories. Before long, there were little pods of them roaming up and down the river.

By the time the police shot Pepe, there were two dozen hippos living in the water and lands around Medellín. And in a country where 1,000 people were dying each year in an ongoing drug war, it was the killing of Pepe that pushed people onto the streets, demanding that the state stop its violence—against animals.

Colombia now has over 200 wild hippos living in its rivers.

The point is, you never know what will set people off.

You never know what single moment, what seemingly trivial thing, will pierce the public consciousness and trigger a fury nothing else has.

I was thinking about that last night as people started sending me clips from the Ibrox fan forums about Russell Martin and his views.

Why were they sending them? Simple.

Because of the article I wrote yesterday on Martin—and how he didn’t seem like the sort of personality to go to that club and get sucked into the hatred and the bigotry and all that cultural nonsense. Or at least, I hope he’s not.

But if you look at those forums, more and more of their fans are coming to the conclusion that he’s just not their kind of person. And I’m starting to suspect that either he’ll pander to them in more ways than just talking up the character of Jimmy Bell… or he’s going to have serious problems the moment things take a downturn.

And I wonder—if this guy had a more conventional background, if he was more like the prototypical Ibrox manager, would he be getting less stick? Or to put that another way, would he be getting more support? Would the fans be more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt? That might be important.

Because if the answer to that is yes—if his background would have made him more palatable—then he’s already in trouble. His biggest problem wouldn’t be his form or record, but the person he is. And even a strong start wouldn’t fix that.

Some of the media coverage is of the same sort. While it’s refreshing that this is one Ibrox boss who isn’t getting his arse kissed by every major outlet, the fact that he’s not tells its own story. I genuinely cannot remember the last time one of their managers wasn’t met with a full-throated welcome from the media pack.

Like I said—Colombians had endured a thousand murders a year, but it took the shooting of a hippo to get them out protesting. Cut-through, they call it. The moment a single thing pierces the public consciousness in a way that no amount of background noise ever could.

Here’s another example. I’ll tell you the moment I knew Boris Johnson was screwed—that he was doomed and wasn’t going to survive a full term. It was the photo of the Queen, sitting alone in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of her husband, during Covid. Sitting alone in grief. Socially distanced. Following the rules.

And then, right next to it in the newspapers, a photo of Johnson’s staff drinking, laughing, partying inside Number 10 during lockdown.

That single image crystallised the disgrace of it all. For Middle England—the people who had put him there in the first place—that was the breaking point. It wasn’t the policies. It wasn’t the scandals. It was the photo. The monarch, grieving in silence. And the clowns in government pissing up the office curtains, on his watch.

That’s when I knew he was done.

I listened recently to Ed Miliband talking on The Rest Is Politics. He said he doesn’t believe the bacon sandwich photo cost him the election—but he admitted it codified something. It cemented the image of him as awkward, geeky, not-quite-normal. And he said it was up to him and his team to shift that perception.

But he gives himself too much of a hard time on that one; once a perception like that takes hold, you’re in real trouble. You’ll never get it shifted.

Same with Biden. I just finished Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin.

It’s a great piece of work on how the Democratic Party covered up the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline. I don’t know why they bothered; the public could see what was wrong and the damage was done even before the disastrous debate. Poll after poll after poll had shown the US electorate didn’t believe Biden could do another four years.

So when that debate happened, it didn’t change anything. It simply turned suspicion into certainty. Because a man’s age is a fact. You can’t campaign it away. You can’t spin it out of existence. That debate could have gone swimmingly; the public perception of Biden wouldn’t have moved one millimetre.

The same goes for Martin, I think. The damage is already done. He is starting out with no established support base in that fan community. Even in the posts that don’t slag him or his record, there’s almost no warmth. No enthusiasm. No faith.

The most supportive comments are along the lines of “Well, he’s the manager now, so we just have to get behind him.” Much of the media coverage echoes the same sentiment. That’s not confidence. That’s resignation.

It won’t protect him in a crisis. It won’t get him through a bad run. He’s not one of their own. And I think that bothers them more than his credentials. They’re used to a certain type of guy in the dugout. If not part of the club’s cultural bubble, then a certain detached arrogance. Martin doesn’t fit that mould at all.

If this guy runs into trouble—and I mean even a couple of bad results—nothing is going to save him. Not the media. Not the fans. Maybe not even the boardroom. And bear in mind—it’s Americans in the boardroom. Americans who don’t have a lot of patience when it comes to perceived failure.

He has to start well. He may, in fact, have to start very well.

If he doesn’t… he’s done. The more I read online, the clearer it becomes. He’ll need to be brilliant even to last the standard twelve months—that cursed average lifespan of an Ibrox manager since 2012. Because they are already sharpening their knives for his back, not just on the forums but in the newsrooms too.