The Americans are set to count the cost of Ibrox failure.

Another day, another series of hysterical claims from Ibrox, each one more pathetic than the last. To listen to the online chorus of Ibrox nuts, from Johnny McFarlane to Jamie Bryson (the only person ever to increase his waistband whilst on hunger strike) you would think it was the officials who decided yesterday’s game and not Daizen Maeda.

It really is something to hear them wail.

This morning, Paulina delivered one of her best pieces on the blog when she wrote about how the Celtic lion is awake again and prowling through the domain of Scottish football. The roar of the lion is in stark contrast to the wail of its prey, and it has been fascinating listening to these people look everywhere for external sources of their problems instead of looking in-house, where the problems actually are.

Foremost among those problems are the people at the top of the house.

Because they really have made one hell of a mess.

Every now and again, I will write a piece and someone will challenge me on the grounds that I am telling the Ibrox club and its fans too much about what is wrong. The inference is that they might be able to fix it if they could only identify the problem.

But the truth is, first, I have no influence over what they do over there. Second, they would not listen to people like me even if I did.

I have lost count of the number of times we uppity Fenians tried to warn them of impending disaster and they ignored it. They are certainly not going to pay attention to Celtic sites which give them a blueprint for getting out of their problems.

I am not going to offer them a blueprint anyway.

I am simply going to point out that the Americans have not exactly set the world on fire with an uncompromising success story. In short, the Americans have been an absolute disaster at the Ibrox club from the moment they walked through the doors.

They have authorised spending, for sure.

But on what? Nothing that has made them a better team.

The fact that they are presently third and will finish the season in that position should tell you everything you need to know. They have gone backwards.

Today, the media is full of stories about how they need to make big decisions. Well, on this side of the city, I can tell you I welcome any decisions they make, because their decisions have been dreadful so far.

Hopefully, that is the path they continue on.

They do not seem to know how to pick a football boss. They do not seem to know how to buy players. They do not seem to know that some fan organisations should not be hugged tightly to the club’s bosom in the way the Union Brats have been.

Their decision-making is not just flawed. Some of the decisions they have made have been downright stupid.

Yes, there has been a little more accountability over there than there has been at Celtic Park. Executives have been removed for failure. But the man at the top of the house, Andrew Cavenagh, has questions to answer about his own performance.

Let us not kid ourselves here.

The media is rightfully having a go at the Celtic board. It is rightfully pointing out that the Celtic board has made colossal mistakes. Not one of us would disagree with that. But over at Ibrox, very little attention has been paid to the people who have moved their club from one that was challenging in second place to one stuck in third.

I refute some of the more outlandish claims about how much money they have spent, but they clearly took a gamble in January which has not paid off.

That gamble is what really interests me, because they obviously looked at the state Celtic were in. They obviously looked at the possibility that Hearts might start to lose their way, that Hearts might not have the staying power.

In short, they made the same calculation a lot of us made about Hearts, which was that Hearts could not possibly maintain their form.

Based on the belief that Hearts would not have the mental capacity, the fortitude, the discipline or the will to get through to the end of the season, and based on what they could see at Celtic Park as we struggled to get back on any sort of professional footing, they figured they could get away with it.

They figured it was not a gamble at all.

They thought they only had to throw a little money at the problem, bring in some players, strengthen the squad a bit, and the Champions League riches would come falling from the sky. It has not turned out like that.

Now they have to decide what they are going to do.

They have to decide whether to give this guy another year, or whatever it may be. They have to decide whether to give him more money to spend. They also have to find a way to bring that money into the club in the first place.

I will tell you right now, I think they are going to struggle to do any of it.

If they sack him now, they look like an absolute basket case. They will spend much of the summer scrambling around, trying to find someone to replace him.

But their options do not get any better if they keep him.

The way this league structure and fixture list work means they will have to go to Tynecastle, Celtic Park and a handful of other difficult grounds in the first part of next season. They will have massive European qualifying ties to play, and those games will have an enormous impact on how the rest of their campaign goes.

Either Rohl is still manager for those ties and that early spell, and he hits the ground running, or he is done. But if they bring in a new manager, they are asking him to come in and tackle that early spell cold. If he does not hit the ground running, his card will be marked right at the beginning.

These are just a handful of the choices, all of them bad, that the Ibrox club will have to reckon with over the course of the summer.

Yes, we have a rebuild to do. Yes, we are facing our own set of problems. But our rebuild, at least, will be done from a position of strength and with some money behind it.

We will be a Champions League team, albeit one that has to qualify, something we have not managed to do in the last five attempts. Thank you to the board of directors for that.

But doing that rebuild from the position we are in is a lot easier than doing it from the position they are in, and this is to say nothing of what Tony Bloom and Hearts come up with next.

I said last night that their club now faces a choice between reality and denial.

If there were any sense over there at all, they would face the fact that they are a third-place team and start reckoning with what that means. Imagine the money they have spent on that squad had not been spent at all. Where do you think they would have finished?

Still third? I think they might have been scrambling around trying to challenge for a European place at all.

If they do not sort themselves out in a big way, that might be exactly where they find themselves this time next year.

The tantalising thing is that the people who got them into this mess are now tasked with getting them out of it.

So, keep making those decisions, Cavenagh and the rest.

You have done a bang-up job so far.

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