McInnes has reached the limits of denial and reality is crushing him.

There is a line in Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, about the last years of the Labour governments of 1997-2010, which has stayed with me for years.

It comes from the period when Gordon Brown, having spent so much of his political life wanting to become Prime Minister, was watching the thing he had coveted begin to disintegrate around him.

At one particularly dark point, according to Rawnsley, Brown said to a colleague: “For this to happen to me, it eats my soul.”

There is something almost unbearably sad about that sentence. Not because Gordon Brown was the first political leader to discover that getting the job you always wanted and actually being able to do it successfully are two completely different things.

History is full of ambitious people who spent years climbing towards the summit only to discover, once they finally reached it, that the air up there was too thin for them to breathe.

Theresa May wanted to be Prime Minister and the job destroyed her. Liz Truss spent years constructing herself as the ideological leader she wanted to become, finally reached Downing Street and was annihilated by reality in a matter of weeks.

Boris Johnson must surely have imagined himself occupying Number 10 for years, perhaps long enough to overtake Margaret Thatcher and write himself permanently into British political history, yet the premiership he had dreamed about ultimately consumed him too.

Brown’s story is different, though. It is somehow more pathetic, and I mean that word in its proper sense rather than as an insult. There is something genuinely pitiable about a man spending years believing that one particular office is where he belongs, finally obtaining it and then feeling it slipping through his fingers like sand.

That is what makes those words so haunting: “For this to happen to me.”

Not merely that it was happening. That it was happening to him.

Brown had spent years convinced that he was ready. Others were not so sure. In all his years believing that he understood the job, that he could do it, that perhaps he could do it better than the man who was actually occupying it, there were doubters all around him. There will people who had seen the reality up close. When he finally became Prime Minister, there was nowhere left for the dream to hide from that reality.

And now, watching Derek McInnes, I keep thinking about Gordon Brown.

Because McInnes has finally got the job.

Not merely a job. Not another managerial position. The job.

This one has hung over his career for years. He was offered it once before and turned it down, and from that moment onwards there was always something unresolved about Derek McInnes and Ibrox.

Every time the position became vacant, his name floated somewhere around the conversation. Everything he did elsewhere (there wasn’t much) added another layer to the question of what he might do if he ever finally got the opportunity.

Now he knows, and that may turn out to be the cruellest part of all.

Not for us of course. We have been the hardcore realists in this all along. We knew he wasn’t up to it. We said it was folly for them to hire him. No, it’s cruel for him, and I write that without a trace of sympathy at all.

There is a freedom in wondering what you might do. It last only as long as the imagined version of yourself is never tested. You can picture the unveiling, the first big victory, the roar of the crowd. All of it occupies space in your brain. Anyone who has ever suffered a serious professional or personal disappointment knows what happens if the time comes for you to actually step up and take your shot and miss.

Reality, you see, has no obligation to follow the script.

I think a lot about Gus Caesar at times like this.

He occupies a section of Nick Hornby’s superb book Fever Pitch. For years, as he came up through school teams, academy teams and then into the Arsenal first team he must have been absolutely convinced he had the stuff to make it big. He breezed past all those early obstacles, and as Hornby points out, he must have genuinely been streets ahead of his peers for the majority of the journey.

But right at the end, he hit the limits of his talent. And considering where he was at the time, the fall was precipitous and awful almost beyond comprehension.

Imagine what that’s like. To find that all your confidence and self belief had been misplaced after all. To find that everyone who wrote you up or talked you up was cringing with embarrassment at how wrong they themselves had been. To see your options thereafter shrink to virtual nonexistence.

McInnes must have spent years imagining what managing that club would feel like. He knew its expectations, knew its history and knew exactly what the job meant in Scottish football. Whatever anybody thinks of him as a manager, nobody can seriously believe he walked into Ibrox without understanding the magnitude of the opportunity he had finally been given or that the job would come with pressures he’d never seen.

This was his shot. And already it is running through his hands like sand lifted from the beach. That is the part I find fascinating, because there comes a point in every collapsing reign when the problem starts becoming psychological.

At first you believe the solution is obvious. Change this player, alter that shape, make another signing, work harder on the training ground and eventually everything will click. Then it doesn’t. So, you change something else. That doesn’t work either. Then you change again. And somewhere in that process a very dangerous thought enters the room.

“What if I cannot fix this?”

Once that thought gets inside your head, everything changes.

That was what struck me watching McInnes the other night. The endless adjustments, the changes of shape, the three substitutions at half-time and the frantic attempt to find some combination which would make the team respond; it did not look like a manager calmly solving a football problem.

It looked like a man in an emergency situation, wandering into a massive control room, and searching desperately for a lever which worked. Pull this one. Nothing. Try another. Nothing. Change the players. Nothing. Change the shape. Still nothing.

Eventually the circumstances themselves start answering the question for you, and the answer becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. You have tried everything you thought might work, and the disaster is still escalating around you.

That must be terrifying.

It is one thing to lose a match because a goalkeeper has a nightmare or a defender makes an individual mistake. It is another thing entirely to spend the game making repeated interventions and discovering that none of your ideas make the slightest difference.

Because then the problem starts feeling personal, even if, like McInnes, you can usually find someone else to blame.

He has spent years being told, and presumably telling himself, that he deserved an opportunity at a bigger club.

People have wondered what he might achieve with real resources. They have wondered how he would perform with a larger budget, better players and expectations which extended beyond simply making one of the smaller Scottish clubs competitive.

Well, now he has the resources. Now he has the bigger budget. Now he has the players. Now he has the job.

There is nowhere left for this hypothetical Derek McInnes to hide. He’s either as good as he thinks he is or he’s the third rate fraud some of us said all along.

That is what happened to Gordon Brown too.

For years, Brown looked at Tony Blair and believed that the job ought to have been his. Whilst in the Treasury he could believe that he possessed the seriousness, intelligence and strategic ability required to run the country, and that when the opportunity can that he would finally demonstrate his superior qualities.

See, Brown always knew it would come. So did McInnes. These men were never in any doubt where their personal roads were leading them. They doubtless thought long and hard about what they would do when they arrived at that place. Yet for all Brown’s calculations he never set out a long term strategy and ended up a pale imitation of himself reduced to a tactician reacting to events instead of controlling them.

Suddenly every problem belonged to him. Suddenly he was having to answer a dozen problems a day, all coming at him at light speed. That is the brutal thing about finally reaching the summit. You lose the luxury of imagining what you would have done differently because now you are the person who has to do it.

The fantasy becomes measurable. The answer becomes visible.

And if that answer is not what you expected, it must create a sick feeling unlike almost anything else in professional life.

You wanted this. You fought for this. You imagined this. Perhaps you organised a large part of your career around someday getting this. And now you can feel it disappearing.

That is where I think Brown’s words become almost hilariously relevant to McInnes: “For this to happen to me, it eats my soul.”

There is an enormous amount contained in that sentence. The disbelief, the self-pity, the fear and the desperate awareness that something you believed was finally going to validate you is instead becoming the thing by which everybody will judge you thereafter.

I wonder how much of that Derek McInnes is already feeling.

Watch him in press conferences now. This does not look like a man enjoying the greatest opportunity of his managerial life. He looks ground down.

He looks like somebody who has been handed the thing he wanted and discovered that it weighs considerably more than he imagined.

None of this means I feel sorry for him in any sense; I can’t stand McInnes, something I believe I’ve made pretty clear.

Anyway, he wanted the job, accepted the job, spent the money and made the decisions. This is professional sport and the responsibility comes with the salary. But I can still recognise what must be happening psychologically.

Because the danger for McInnes now is not simply that the Ibrox board decides he isn’t good enough. The really corrosive possibility is that McInnes himself starts wondering whether they are right to question it. Whether we’re right to question it.

That is when things can fall apart incredibly quickly.

Confidence is not simply something managers install in players. Managers need it themselves. They have to walk into a dressing room and convince 20 professional footballers that the plan they are presenting will work.

What happens when the person giving the instructions starts doubting the instructions himself? What happens when every tactical decision is haunted by the last tactical decision which failed? What happens when you make three substitutions at half-time because you know the original plan has collapsed, and then the replacements don’t solve anything either? What happens when every decision becomes an attempt not merely to win the game but to reassure yourself that you still understand what you are doing?

That is where decisiveness becomes frantic intervention. That is where flexibility becomes panic. That is where adjusting the team becomes repeatedly rearranging pieces because standing still feels even more frightening.

And everybody around you can feel it. Players know when a manager is certain. They also know when he isn’t.

Once that uncertainty enters a dressing room it becomes incredibly difficult to contain, because footballers already under pressure begin looking towards the touchline for reassurance and discover that the man standing there seems just as frightened by what is happening as they are. That is when the darkness enters the room.

And once it does, I genuinely wonder how many people recover.

Some do, obviously.

Football is full of managers who survived horrific periods and emerged stronger. Political history contains leaders who appeared finished and somehow recovered. But there are not many of them because there is a difference between enduring bad results and losing faith in your own conception of yourself.

That is the really dangerous threshold.

McInnes can recover from losing football matches. Can he recover if he begins wondering whether the job is simply beyond him?

Because that doubt attacks something much deeper than tactical judgement. It attacks the entire story he has spent years telling himself about his career.

“If I ever get that opportunity, I’ll show them.”

Now he has it. That sentence no longer contains a shred of comfort.

There is something almost cruel about ambition in that respect. Sometimes being denied the thing you desperately want allows you to preserve the belief that you would have succeeded if somebody had only given you the chance.

Getting the chance removes that protection. Now everybody gets to find out what you’re really made of, and you get to find out right along with them.

That may be the worst part.

I wrote earlier about why I thought the Ibrox club could sack McInnes extraordinarily early, and of course they could.

But there is another question underneath that one which interests me much more. What condition will McInnes himself be in if this keeps going? What does another defeat do? What does an eight-point gap do? What does walking into Ibrox with the support already furious do? What happens after another press conference where every question asks, in one form or another, whether the biggest opportunity of your career is already disappearing?

At some point you stop sleeping properly. At some point every newspaper headline feels personal. At some point every mistake made by one of your players feels like another grain of sand running between your fingers. You grip tighter. And more of it escapes.

That is the horror of the metaphor.

You cannot hold sand by squeezing it harder.

Perhaps that is what McInnes is already doing tactically. More changes, more interventions, more attempts to impose control on something which increasingly looks uncontrollable. The harder he tries to seize the situation, the more obvious his lack of control becomes.

And then he has to face the press afterwards. He has to explain it. He did an appalling jo of that last night, as anyone who watched him will attest.

In the aftermath of it, he has to pretend there is still a coherent path through the wreckage because that is part of the job too. But imagine what that must be like when the private thought underneath it all is becoming harder to suppress.

“For this to happen to me, it eats at my soul.”

Brown’s anguish was precisely that he knew what was happening at it all came apart. Ignorance might almost have been easier.

He could see the premiership he had waited years to inherit becoming associated with failure. He understood the historical judgement which would almost certainly follow, and he knew that the institution he believed would complete his career was instead threatening to define it in completely different terms.

“For this to happen to me.” There is the wound.

McInnes may never say anything remotely as revealing, but he doesn’t need to. Sometimes you can see it. There is not even anger in his demeanour any longer, just a sick kind of acceptance that it’s getting away from him.

A victory no longer simply earns three points. It buys temporary relief. A defeat is no longer simply a defeat. It becomes further evidence for the prosecution.

That is an exhausting way to live.

Brown reached a stage where the premiership appeared to consume practically every waking part of him. The thing he had wanted became the source of his misery. Perhaps that is ultimately why the phrase has stayed with me.

It was scream of anguish from the deepest part of his soul. It was not really a sentence about politics at all. It was about his dreams colliding with reality. It was about the sickening moment when somebody who has spent years climbing towards something suddenly realises that reaching it has not completed him, that it has in fact destroyed him because all the self-belief that propelled you on the journey was all just empty bluster, that all the evidence you thought you had accumulated in your life was nothing but a trick of the light.

And that is where Derek McInnes finds himself today.

There is no longer any argument about what he might done if given the chance. We are watching what he is doing with that chance.

It is not for nothing that one of the darkest of all aphorisms is “When the God’s wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

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