Gerrard would be a disaster at Ibrox. Celtic has nothing to fear from him.

So the talk is that it will be Gerrard. Oh what fun we’ll have.

Across the city they face another of those big decisions, and yet it has become so routine that it barely feels big at all.

They have to appoint another manager. Again. At Ibrox this is now such a regular occurrence that it hardly raises eyebrows anymore. They go through managers like confetti. Sometimes they’ve had to go through two in a single season.

It has reached the point where you almost expect it. You can circle the calendar.

You get the appointment and the euphoria. That is followed by the crisis. Then comes the sacking and the inevitable unveiling of the next great hope. You get the declarations that this one, finally, is the man to lead them back to the promised land.

And then you get another collapse, recrimination, and the cycle starts all over again.

Today reminds me of that House of Commons exchange between John Prescott and William Hague, both standing in for their party leaders. Prescott, with his usual blunt humour, joked that it was good to see Hague back on the front bench again because it proved that the Tories had gone green — they were recycling their leaders.

The chamber roared with laughter. That same line could be dusted off for Ibrox tomorrow. Recycling managers is their stock-in-trade.

The only thing you’ll never call them is genuinely green.

The name being recycled is Steven Gerrard.

That, frankly, would be a grossly retrograde step. It is hard to fathom what they see in him. The myth of Gerrard the manager is one of the strangest and most persistent in recent Scottish football history. His defenders point to a title win. They whisper about his aura. They cling to his name. Yet strip away the mist and what you find is a record as poor as any boss they’ve had in the past decade.

Let’s put it plainly. Gerrard won a single trophy in three and a half years. That trophy came in the Covid season, the strangest campaign any of us have lived through. Every club in the country was playing in front of empty stadiums. Budgets were being slashed. Squads were being gutted. Celtic, meanwhile, were imploding in the most self-destructive manner possible.

That was the context, in a bizarre environment which we’d never seen before and haven’t seen again.

The numbers expose the myth.

Gerrard’s win percentage is lower than Philippe Clement’s. Lower than Mark Warburton’s. Lower, by some distance, than Michael Beale’s. Every one of those men was sacked. Gerrard, however, had far greater resources than any of them. He was bankrolled to an extent no other Ibrox boss since 2012 has enjoyed. Yet his results were worse. These are not Celtic fan fantasies. They are facts, publicly available and easily checked.

Why, then, does the myth survive?

Because Gerrard left mid-season. That created the illusion of unfinished business. It gave him an aura of being “the one that got away.” But the truth is simple. Gerrard saw the writing on the wall. He knew what Ange Postecoglou was building and he didn’t want to stick around for the beating that was coming.

Gerrard also had one eye on the exit from the moment he arrived. He never saw Ibrox as a long-term project.

And look what he’s done since.

At Aston Villa he was a catastrophic failure. He lasted just eleven months, leaving them hovering over the relegation zone. He fled to Saudi Arabia for the money. Contrast that with Wayne Rooney or Frank Lampard.

They went to smaller clubs, took tough jobs, and were willing to graft to build reputations. Lampard, for all his flaws, has done more to prove his credibility than Gerrard ever has. Gerrard has never been prepared to put in the hard yards.

For years he floated on the assumption that Liverpool would one day hand him the keys simply because of his playing career. That was always a fantasy.

Liverpool is a club of hard-nosed professionals. They don’t hand out one of the most demanding jobs in world football to a rookie on sentiment. Gerrard at Ibrox was supposed to be the shortcut: win something in a two-team league, add a trophy to the CV, and march into Anfield. It never happened. I doubt it was ever going to happen.

What he actually revealed at Ibrox was that he is a chequebook manager.

All he ever did was demand more money. He wanted bigger budgets, bigger signings, bigger outlays.

As if throwing cash at problems is the only way to solve them. And not just a little money, but eye-watering amounts, far beyond what the club could realistically afford. That was the constant refrain during his time there, and it will be again if he goes back.

The Record and others are already spinning it. They suggest the big attraction is that the new American investors will open their wallets. Gerrard, they claim, is the man to spend that cash. Yet this is built on the ludicrous notion that Financial Sustainability Regulations don’t apply to Ibrox. They do. And the club is already sailing close to the wind. Handing Gerrard the cheque book again would be the fast lane to disaster.

Why would the board consider this? Would the fans want it? How can anyone with sense think this is a good idea? Desperation. That has long been the story at Ibrox. Desperate people do desperate things. In moments of maximum crisis, they reach for maximum stupidity. This would be exactly that.

Hiring back Gerrard would not be a bold move. It would not be a masterstroke. Gerrard’s return would not be a romantic homecoming. It would be a retreat into the past, a blind stumble into a mistake they’ve already made once before.

And let’s not forget: this is a man who, in three and a half years, won less than Callum Davidson did in one. Davidson’s St Johnstone side lifted both domestic cups in 2021. He should have been Manager of the Year. Yet the mythmakers gave it to Gerrard instead, proof that hype can outweigh reality if your name is big enough.

Since Gerrard left, Celtic, under Ange, won a double and a treble and Rodgers has added two doubles. The fantasy Ibrox clings to is not that this was simply restoring the natural order but that we only did that because he was no longer there. This is the logical fallacy we call post hoc ergo propter hoc; after it, therefore because of it.

But it was his title win that was the fluke. The dominance has been reasserted. The anomaly has been put in its proper context. That one title now looks exactly what many of us said it was at the time: a freakish blip, a season out of sync with the norm.

So, if Ibrox really do turn back to Gerrard, we should not fear it. We should welcome it. It will be a disaster dressed up as ambition. A move so absurd that even some of their own fan media are pleading against it. But desperate people do desperate things and this might not only be the best gig Gerrard could get but he might be the best manager that they can get.

Across the city, in their hour of need, they may just make one of the most backwards facing decisions in years.

And if they do, Celtic fans will be sitting back with popcorn, shaking our heads, and laughing at the sheer madness of it all.

So will our board. If people wonder how we ever got this complacent, look across the street. That’s why right there. This would double down on the insanity.