IF you’re going to challenge Jose Mourinho to a pee-the-highest contest over how to win trophies, better have a right good pair of waterproof trousers handy.
But if your team then goes out and gives a performance as p***-poor as Philippe Clement’s did yet again on Saturday?
A 2-0 defeat to St Mirren at Ibrox meant Philippe Clement’s time was up[/caption]
But not before starting a bizarre spat with Jose Mourinho[/caption]
Sorry, monsieur, an all-over tarpaulin won’t protect you from what’s coming next.
Because no matter how much the Rangers board have tried to avoid the moment, it really IS time to Rinse & Repeat.
The day in January new CEO Patrick Stewart harnessed himself to the Belgian waffler by saying that sacking managers hadn’t worked in the past, I wrote that he might as well have hooked a great big ball and chain round his ankle.
When he then came out a few days back and, in the same breath as describing their Scottish Cup defeat to Queen’s Park as “disastrous”, doubled-down on his sort-of support for a managerial dead duck, that ball became the size of the one that chased Indiana Jones.
And now, here they are, less than 48 hours on from losing their first home game after that humiliation and it looks like Stewart’s support was all just so much hot air.
If, as our back page predicts, Clement’s finally a goner then Rangers will at once have done the right thing, but at the same time will look weak and indecisive – because what they’re ready to do today could have been done before Ne’erday and might still have given them a chance of winning a trophy.
Binning him off the back of those festive debacles away to St Mirren and Motherwell, as I wrote at the time they should have, wouldn’t have changed the job those consultants have to do; plus, it might also have brought enough stability on the park to keep the selling price up for if and when the 49ers deal gets done, rather than their market value dropping by the day.
Instead, though, hanging on to a guy who anyone could see was finished only served to make things worse, partly through results but also thanks to a waterfall of press conference drivel that proved beyond doubt he really DOESN’T get the environment he’s working in or the demands made of him.
I mean, how deluded do you need to be to go from trying to justify defeat to a mid-table Championship side on the basis of how bad your strikers were to suddenly deciding you have a right to diss one of the greatest coaches of all time?
What goes through his head?
He’s been asked a thousand different ways about whether his own jacket’s on a shoogly peg and has found a thousand different ways not to give an honest answer.
Try to wheedle a nugget out of him about the impending takeover and he goes more neutral than Switzerland.
Ask for his thoughts on Jose, though?
A guy who’s won two Champions Leagues, three English Premier Leagues, two Serie As, one La Liga, two Portuguese leagues, an FA Cup, four English League Cups, a UEFA Cup, a Europa League, a Europa Conference League, an Italian Cup, a Spanish Cup, an Italian Super Cup, a Spanish Super Cup, a Portuguese Cup, a Portuguese Super Cup and two English Community Shields?
A man-management genius whose achievements across the past 22 years have seen him named World Coach Of The Year with four different clubs?
And suddenly, he’s ALL opinions.
“Mourinho? Not my cup of tea. I like attacking football, his is boring; that yawn-inducing habit he has of getting his teams to score more than the opposition.”
Philippe Clement on Jose Mourinho
Seriously, someone should have wheeled him out of the media room there and then, still in his chair, because it was a statement as embarrassing as it was bound to come back and bite him on the backside; which, of course, it did within 24 hours.
Not that it matters now, of course, seeing as it seems he won’t have to look Mourinho in the eye come the Fenerbahce tie; pity, because it would have been fun to see him explain why he prefers HIS teams to have 28 shots in one home game, then 17 in the next, get fewer than half of them on target, score hee-haw and be bullied into defeat on the break both times.
If Mourinho bothered to read those comments, he’ll have laughed at them as much as the rest of us – yes, maybe even Rangers fans, who must be at the stage where if they don’t find some black humour in the state of their team, they’ll cry until all that’s left are lots of little piles of salt on tens of thousands of empty plastic seats.
Probably the most damning thing that can be said about that 2-0 loss to St Mirren, who hadn’t won at Ibrox since 1991 and hadn’t beaten Rangers back-to-back since 1980, is that as much as it dismayed those fans, it didn’t shock them any more than it did you or me.
In fact, you know what?
Off the back of Celtic losing to Hibs at lunchtime, it felt almost INEVITABLE that Clement’s side would find a way to cock up even worse. Because that’s his legacy, losing a litany of games Rangers should be winning with their eyes shut.
The one piece of silverware he led them to, the one Old Firm victory he managed, a handful of upbeat European nights? They all feel like blips in what will surely be remembered as a nightmarish reign.
So hell mend the Rangers board for sleepwalking to where they find themselves today.
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