Derek McInnes: Staunch will not save you.

There he stood on Friday night, taking charge of his first game as the Ibrox boss. Derek McInnes. Mr Staunch himself. The walking, talking embodiment of the club he now manages and, as regular readers will know, that is not a compliment.

He was resplendent in his suit, his club tie and even his brown brogues. It is incredible the lengths these people will go to in order to present an image, but an image of what?

It is supposed to be an image of high standards and tradition, but there are different kinds of standards and different kinds of traditions. McInnes represents a very strange version of both, even taking into account Ibrox’s own standards and traditions of years gone by.

Ibrox supporters are obsessed with small matters and small things. This we already know. But this obsession with dignity, which lies at the heart of the brown brogues mythology, has always been one of the more unintentionally hilarious examples.

The epitome of the brown brogues era was Walter Smith, who they believe exemplified tradition, dignity and class. I would disagree myself, but they are entitled to their little fantasy whether the rest of us accept it or not.

Smith has always been the poster boy for a certain mindset at that club, and the general attitude of Celtic supporters towards all of that has been to let them believe whatever they want. The brown brogues supposedly represent qualities that only their club exemplifies and character that only their club possesses.

That idea may be arrogant and egotistical, but it is entirely their own and perfectly in keeping with “We Are the People”, their slogan of ethnic and cultural supremacy. It is easy to see how they have convinced themselves that they are somehow special.

But Derek McInnes is not Walter Smith, even should you accept the hilarious version of Smith presented by their supporters. McInnes does not represent sophistication, old-fashioned values or dignity, and he never has.

What I am saying is that he wears the uniform of staunch, but he does not fit with the alleged culture which underpins it. He certainly understands that culture and, as a lifelong Ibrox supporter, exemplifies plenty of what it actually stands for, just not in the way the brown brogues and the suit are supposed to suggest.

There is nothing classy, sophisticated or especially upstanding about the version of it that McInnes represents. In truth, there is nothing particularly classy or sophisticated about any of it, but McInnes may be the least convincing man to wear that shabby image in a long time.

Take, for example, the idea that the club is supposed to represent dignity. There was nothing dignified about the way McInnes behaved on the touchline during his first league game in charge, and there was certainly nothing dignified about what he did afterwards.

There was nothing dignified about rushing onto the pitch at full-time to confront an official. It becomes even more ridiculous when you listen to his explanation for doing it. It was not, as many observers initially believed, about the penalty they did not get.

It was about a corner kick.

Only afterwards, when he was sitting in front of the cameras and had presumably been reminded that managers are expressly prohibited from charging onto the field at full-time to confront officials, did he relent.

He did relent, but not convincingly. He sniggered and attempted to make a joke out of it — a disciplinary incident when he is already appealing a four-match touchline ban, three matches of it immediate and the fourth suspended on the condition of good behaviour.

Good behaviour already seems like a hilarious concept.

This was his first league game of the campaign, and he was already on the pitch berating officials. That does not bode well for his conduct in the months ahead when they suffer a cup exit, run into problems in Europe or watch their domestic form fall through the floor while Celtic accelerates into the distance.

Should you be an Ibrox pundit with shares in Derek McInnes, you might already be wondering when they are going to start losing their value.

A great tactical genius he is not. But even should he prove to be one, he will be of scant use to the club while sitting in the stand serving a lengthy ban.

This, they will tell you, is where their club used to shine. It never complained about decisions. It accepted setbacks and simply got on with things. That was supposedly the whole point of the brown brogues, the suit and the staunch image.

It helped, of course, that the SFA was completely in their pocket and there were not many causes for complaint. New technology such as VAR has taken care of much of that, and now the rulebook is applied on something approaching an even-handed basis.

But being dignified in defeat, or dignified in the face of reversals, has never been McInnes’s thing. He has never handled setbacks well. He has never been good at coping with losses and defeats, although his career of gross underachievement has given him plenty of practice. Still, every little thing that goes wrong eats at him.

Put a man like that inside a club already known for its grievance culture, conspiracy theories and catastrophising about Celtic running the game and the Ibrox club never getting a fair shake, and you have a recipe for disaster over there.

For those of us watching from this side of the city, it is a recipe for a lot of fun and games. There may not be enough popcorn in the world for the entertainment this show could provide.

In the end, every Ibrox manager is judged in exactly the same way. Danny Röhl was perfectly happy to don the brown brogues. Russell Martin eschewed them, but that was not the reason he got chased so early. Had Russell Martin been a better football manager, Ibrox supporters would not have cared that he did not dress with “dignity”, just as they did not care what previous occupants of the technical area wore.

Ultimately, all they care about is whether the manager can get the job done.

It does not matter how good he looks in those shit-covered shoes. It does not matter that he talks like one of them or acts like one of them. He can reinvent his image, but he cannot suddenly do all the things he has been unable to do throughout his career.

He can say all the right things for the club’s in-house television channel, just as Brian Wilson can say all the right things on ours. In the end, in the cold light of day, Derek McInnes has to win football matches.

Since that has always been where McInnes ultimately comes up short, I can only conclude that he will fare no better than the men who wore those brogues before him. Philippe Clement and the others discovered the same thing.

The task remains to beat Celtic. The task remains to win enough games for the Ibrox club to stand on the podium at the end of the campaign with the league trophy.

Should McInnes do what he has done throughout his career — flatter to deceive and then fail to achieve — the brown brogues will not save him. Even dignified silence, should he somehow manage it, will not save him.

Staunch will not save him.

That is ultimately the futile thing about trying to be something you are not and pretending to respect some backward and ridiculous tradition in a modern game where there are vastly more important considerations than how a manager looks while standing in the rain on a wet Friday night.

As McInnes sat in front of the media after the game, attempting to dig himself out of the hole he had created through his antics at full-time, he claimed that he had gone onto the pitch seeking an explanation for why his team had not been awarded a corner.

As though that corner was the difference between one point and three. As though it was the difference between success and failure. As though it really mattered all that much.

What we saw was the Derek McInnes the Ibrox supporters should have been dreading: the one who always has an alibi, the one who always has an excuse and the one who can always identify somebody else to blame for his own failures.

He has made a career of that. That is the only tradition he has truly established and the only standard by which he can be judged so far.

He can change clubs. He can change his suit. He can change his shoes.

But unless he changes his results, none of it will matter.

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