The media knives are already sharpening for the under pressure Ibrox boss.

Obviously, with Celtic winning today, the pressure now switches to Hearts and the club from Ibrox.

I don’t know which of the two clubs is under the most pressure, but it is obvious which manager is under the most. It is the one from our rivals across the city, whose big mouth and overconfidence has got him into a place where he pretty much needs to close this deal.

If he does not, he is in trouble.

Tomorrow’s game against Hearts is not quite do or die for him, but his results over the next seven days may well be make or break. It is entirely possible that they come out of the next week in the kind of trouble a manager finds hard to recover from.

Let no one kid you about Danny Röhl’s survivability if his team finishes third. If that happens to them, the trouble will fall on him like a hard rain.

People will talk about how they were almost out of it completely, and in a hellacious position, when he took over. But that is not really going to matter. What will matter is what happened once they got back in the race.

Once Celtic imploded with the Nancy experiment. Once Hearts started to drop points and saw their mammoth lead cut to the bone.

He will be judged on what he did when the pressure was on. Not what he did when expectations were lower. Not what he did with the second most expensive squad in the country, and quite possibly the most expensive squad in the country, when the chance to win the title was right there in front of him.

Ibrox bosses before him have come in, inherited what looked like a shambles, and put together some early form.

What kills all of them is when they are expected to do more than look competitive.

What kills them, what guarantees their walk to the Ibrox electric chair, is that none of them can make it over the line.

Röhl will not just have failed to make it over the line. If this goes wrong, he will have finished behind Celtic and Hearts from a position where most pundits thought his team would be champions.

Add to that the fact that O’Neill has knocked him out of both cup competitions, the second of them at home with a makeshift team in a match where they had zero shots on target, and you are looking at a guy not just living on borrowed time. You are looking at a guy whose lime pit is already dug somewhere, waiting for his arrival.

The reason I am writing this before tomorrow night’s game is that today, prior to the Celtic result which really sets up a bad situation for Röhl, Gary Keown wrote one of his incredible ranting newspaper articles.

That is the tip of the iceberg.

This guy is already under pressure. People in the media are already talking about when he might get sacked. The moment they start doing that, you are living game to game. No manager at that club in recent years has survived long once that happens.

Keown is not exactly a towering figure in Scottish journalism. He is a clown. He is bitter and angry and so rabid at times that he genuinely makes me laugh. There usually is not much insight in his articles, and there is not a lot in this one either, except in one particular place.

He points out that the person who talks most about the mess at Ibrox before Röhl arrived is Röhl himself. In short, Röhl is asking people to judge him partly on the other guy’s record.

That might sound good to some hacks. It might sound good to a section of the fan base. But serious people, whose job it is to decide what happens to that club next, will see something else. They will see a manager who the club backed lavishly in the January transfer window, far more than Martin O’Neill, and who has failed spectacularly to deliver.

When you ask people not to judge you on the final league table, but only on the games since you arrived, your record had better be stellar.

His is not stellar. His win record at Ibrox is 53%. Most of their managers in the modern age have had a better win ratio than that. He has 36 games under his belt. He has drawn or lost 15 of those matches.

That is the kind of record on which he will properly be judged. Not on the mess Russell Martin made.

You cannot judge a manager by the standards of the previous manager. You judge him on what he does.

The statistics are not impressive. The football is not impressive. A lot of his decision-making is not impressive. Even in some of the games they have won, they have not been great.

The more interesting comparison is with O’Neill.

Earlier today, we talked about O’Neill’s record. He has drawn two and lost two in the league, but he has also put a huge number of wins and points on the board. Of the four league games in which he has dropped points, one was at Ibrox after coming back from 2-0 down, one was with 10 men against Hearts, and one was with 10 men against Hibs.

It is obvious whose record suggests that he is getting the maximum out of his team. O’Neill is doing it without any transfer spending at all.

So Keown has already sharpened his dagger. Keevins, who was singing this guy’s praises only a few weeks ago and confidently predicting that his team would win the league, was sharpening his earlier today as well.

Röhl is being second-guessed by former players, some of whom thought they should have had his job. The overall impression is of a man who is not waving in deep water, but drowning in it. If they lose tomorrow night, he has one foot in the grave.

Next week at Celtic Park, we will get the chance to slam the coffin lid shut.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.