Russell Martin is behaving like a man who accepts his ultimate fate.

As a history buff, a TV enthusiast and a video games guy, I can honestly say that Band of Brothers ticks all my boxes. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever watched. I remember thinking the book by Stephen Ambrose was also excellent – well worth the time for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the story.

One of the most compelling characters in both the book and the series – and someone who would have been fascinating to interview in real life – is Ronald Speirs.

Speirs, if you remember, is the man surrounded by myth and notoriety. He’s the one rumoured to have shot two of his own soldiers for disobeying orders, the one accused of executing helpless prisoners of war, and the one whose acts of brazen fearlessness in both the show and real life are almost mind-blowing.

There’s a moment when he’s trying to help a young rookie through the early days of the war. What he says to him is what sticks in my mind.

Speirs tells him that the secret to surviving combat is to accept that you’re already dead, and that only then can you truly function as a soldier.

As crazy as that idea sounds, he wasn’t the only one to come back from war and articulate that same sentiment. In many ways, it’s at the heart of military life itself – the unit’s survival is always more important than the survival of the man.

That kind of bravado is almost unheard of in civilian life.

Yet I have to give Russell Martin his due: he’s behaving like a man who’s enjoying every minute of life precisely because he expects to be shot at any moment. He carries himself with the same devil-may-care swagger Speirs did in that show. He has accepted his inevitable fate, and so he’s just going to do it his way until the day comes when he no longer can. I have to admit, I have a strange admiration for that.

At first, I found it disconcerting and weird that Martin didn’t seem to have any sense of self-preservation. I’ve watched him more than once and thought, “What does this guy know that we don’t?” It’s that smirk, that smile, that says let the chips fall where they may. Whether it’s because he’s had assurances from those above him that he’ll get at least a year in the job or not, he simply doesn’t look like a man worried about being struck by an incoming bullet. It’s in everything he does.

His press conference today was another exercise in complete disdain – disdain for the opinions of fans, disdain for the opinions of the media who all think he’s on the brink. None of them can understand why he’s so confident when he’s staring down the barrel of a gun, why he seems so insistent on charting his own course, utterly heedless of the risks.

All around him, the shots keep coming. All around him, the pressure builds. There is no manager in this country – maybe ever in this country – who has had so much scrutiny and so many people actively wanting to see the axe fall this early.

Martin is already widely regarded as a dead man walking.

Nobody thinks he’ll last much longer. Yet he walks through life as if he’s Teflon-coated, as if nothing they throw at him will ever stick.

So yes, it may be that his bosses have told him he’s safe. It may be that they’ve finally decided this endless procession of sackings can’t go on, that someone has to be given proper time. Maybe it’s that simple – a manager working for people who, for once, have a realistic understanding of things.

They’ve funded him, they’ve financed his plan, and now they want to see if he can execute it. Maybe he knows he has nothing to fear.

Or maybe he just doesn’t care.

The problem with becoming a club known for sacking managers is obvious: managers walk in the door already expecting to be sacked.

They negotiate big chunks of compensation up front, secure long-term deals, and make sure their payoff clauses are watertight.

If it all goes wrong, they’ll be fine financially, even if their careers take a dent. That might be especially true at a club where the average managerial tenure is around a year.

Martin may have good agents. The Americans may have been generous in framing his deal. If he’s sacked early, the payoff may be even bigger than usual. Whatever it is, he doesn’t look like a man losing sleep over the drumbeat from the stands – and it is deafening.

Regular readers will know I didn’t do a Fear and Loathing piece after the game in Belgium. I said on the day I had no intention of doing so because our own club comes first, and I wanted to focus on our pattern of failure, our own need for reform.

My focus was always on Celtic, not on the club across the road.

But now that we’ve dealt in detail with our house, it’s worth taking a look at the almighty mess our rivals have got themselves into.

The result in Belgium was an epic humiliation. The kind of humiliation that shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows what that club is – but which always shocks them because of the club they think they are.

It was always coming. A hammering was on the cards. I hoped it would be us. I still hope it’ll be us at the weekend. But somebody was going to do it, and now that it’s happened, their fans have gone over the edge.

Through it all, the man himself is cool as a cucumber in cold storage.

Calm as the proverbial glass of water.

As I said in my spoof Banter Years piece at the weekend, that’s the smile of a man who knows something we don’t. Or maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s just the smile of Ronald Speirs. The smile of a man who knows he’s already dead, and can therefore function as required – not with reckless abandon, but with the freedom to do it his way. Yes, it’ll probably get him fired. But it’s better to go out with your own ideas than to survive doing it someone else’s way.

And I can respect that, even as I laugh at the mess. Even as I marvel that they’ve managed to do this to themselves in a season when we should be the example of how not to have a summer. Even then, I still find I respect this guy a little. I don’t hope for his success – but there’s something to admire in the attempt.