Retaining or sacking Clement will change nothing. Ibrox has to lose before it ever wins, and they can forget about stopping Celtic

Often, we Celtic fans joke about Ibrox fans being stuck in a time warp.

We usually refer to them as being stuck in 1690, and around July every year, that’s a pretty accurate assessment.

But, all jokes aside, that club really is stuck in a time warp, or at the very least, stuck in a cycle it can never get out of.

Scottish football is a strange place, and I guess because I just focus solely on Scottish football, I can’t say whether other leagues are as repetitively self-destructive as ours.

For all of it’s idiosyncrasies, madness, and downright inability to get it’s shit in order, I love Scottish football.

It is a chaotic, madcap, batshit, roller coaster ride of a league in which we reside, and it is never boring.

It has spirit, and it has soul.

And it has HEART.

It even has a club called Hearts, so there.

In order for an organisation to be mad, you have to have some loons residing within it.

And boy, do we have our fair share.

Now, we’re not exempt from being mad at Celtic either.

Just reference this summer’s transfer window, an almost quarter century old boardroom, and you get the gist.

But the leading light in all of the madness, the ultimate fruitcake club, is the one that resides at Ibrox.

Well, Hampden at the moment, but you know what I mean.

Now, there’s no doubting that this club desperately wants to be sane.

They try so hard at it, but they fail miserably, because unfortunately for them, the lunatics took over the asylum a long time ago.

And that is the crux of the problem at Ibrox.

No matter how hard you try to be sane, the lunacy within the walls of Ibrox always permeates everything.

And eventually, everyone.

Sane people walk through the door there, people who were steadfastly level headed before they ever entered the building, and strange things happen to them.

I firmly believe the loving cup has a big part to play in that.

It contains an elixir of derangement.

For a while there, Philippe Clement struck people as a fairly level headed, straight thinking guy.

I even wrote articles after he took over, questioning how long it would take before he succumbed to the madness of Ibrox.

For a couple of months, he had me almost believing he might buck the trend.

Then came the moral victory.

What followed was the descent into the Ibrox malaise.

It was nothing, if not spectacular.

One thing is clear now though, it appears as if the Ibrox hierarchy are going to stick with their man.

In a desperate attempt to break the vicious cycle of insanity the club has been locked it since it’s inception in 2012.

Well, there’s that, and I would imagine they’re sick of paying managers out of their contracts at this point.

They have now come to a point where that is unaffordable, and unsustainable.

Bearing that in mind, I will quickly circle back to my point earlier, where I said the lunatics took over the the asylum a long time ago.

We jokingly refer to Ibrox fans as Zombies, because they support a dead club, and firmly believe the club they now support is the same club.

There is enough in that sentence alone to use it to change the definition of insanity in the Oxford dictionary.

So, the big question here is this; when you desperately want to embrace sanity at Ibrox, how do you cure the multitudes of Ibrox insane?

The answer is simple, you can’t.

Therefore, you will lose them.

You have to lose before you win.

I believe this process is already well under way.

This was clearly in evidence at Hampden Park last Tuesday night where swathes of seats were empty for a crucial Champions League qualification match.

I wrote extensively on that in an article on Wednesday.

The fanbase is becoming apathtetic.

Apathetic, because austerity and living within your means is something they clearly cannot comprehend.

Or refuse to comprehend.

Because they are stuck in a time warp.

One full of hubris, where they believe they reign supreme, and they are the peepul.

But they haven’t been the peepul for a long, long time now.

They rave about the fact that winning is in their DNA.

Whose DNA?

They achieved their 9 in a row in 1997.

That is almost 30 years ago.

A generation ago, so winning is not in this generation’s DNA.

Apart from a few brief periods of success, including the 3 in a row which acted as a prelude to the old club’s death, both clubs have been absolutely overshadowed by Celtic for quarter of a century now.

Yet the support still believes success and winning is their divine right.

And that is an insane belief.

So, while the Ibrox board faces the music, and the realisation that insanity is no longer sustainable, the Ibrox support is struggling to come to terms with that.

And if you think insanity is an extreme word to describe their way of operating up to this point, it isn’t.

Losing £10 million annually is insane.

No other word describes it.

John Bennett realises that now, and he said as much in his address to the Peepul recently.

So, while the peepul might start baying for another sacrificial lamb in the form of Clement soon, its unlikely to happen.

Retaining or sacking him will change nothing.

In fact sacking him will cost them more than retaining him will.

Because if they do that, the next guy is on a hiding to nothing anyway.

The cycle has to be broken.

They have to lose to win.

Up to this point, they have been trying desperately to win, but failing miserably in that endeavour.

So what difference will it make if they continue to lose, but it doesn’t cost them a fortune to do so?

And that, I believe, is the way forward that the Ibrox board is going to embrace.

For two reasons.

One, they can no longer afford to continue to throw good money after bad.

Second, they have resigned themselves to the fact that this is now the time to reset.

John Bennett and his boardroom know it is inevitable Celtic will over take their imaginary trophy haul.

So why keep up the pretence?

Why kill their club trying to stop the inevitable?

When you cannot stop a juggernaut like Celtic?

It is better to step aside and allow it to happen.

Yes, the pain and the misery of that will reverberate throughout the club for a while.

But its short-term pain for a possible long-term gain.

That is, if the insanity up to this point, combined with the stadium debacle, hasn’t already caused too much irreparable damage.

This season has just become about survival now for Ibrox.

Anything after that is a bonus.

There is a reason Clement has been given a long-term contract, and that’s because the Ibrox board are committed to breaking the cycle of listening to the insanity of the fans.

Somebody with a brain realises constantly sacking managers doesn’t work.

In the Record this morning, Barry Ferguson is buying into this new philosophy.

He isn’t quite grasping it though.

While he believes Clement should now be given time, he still believes he should be winning trophies.

Has he any inclination of understanding what his club is up against?

Here’s some of what he had to say:

What I would say, however, is that, while implementing those changes, the club also has a responsibility to remember what it’s always been there for in the first place – what it’s always been built on.

And that’s to win games of football and deliver trophies for the fans. No amount of imaginative projects or big plans for the future will cut it in the here and now if they’re not watching a winning team performing on the pitch. And that’s why the next couple of weeks are so important.

To win games of football and deliver trophies for the fans.

Don’t get me wrong, Bazza couldn’t exactly say, to lose football matches and hand all of the trophies to Celtic, but he needs to have realistic expectations.

For this current Ibrox side, to win trophies is going to take time, something they’ve never given a manager.

Maybe they need to do some soul searching?

Maybe they need to go back 30 years or so and look at what we did?

Because ultimately, that is the template to success.

We went through a period of nine years where we won just one trophy.

In the early nineties, we had crowds of 16,000 at Celtic Park.

Less than a decade later we were selling 55,000 season tickets.

And we started on the path to where we find ourselves now.

At the outset of this article, I said Scottish football was a madcap place, but maybe its all coming full circle again?

We went to Hampden, the Ibrox club is at Hampden.

Maybe this is the beginning of a more sustainable Ibrox operation?

Or maybe its the beginning of the end of this Ibrox operation?

Who knows?

One thing I know for sure, is that football has had a tendency to change drastically over the years.

Therefore it is inevitable the Ibrox side will change drastically at some point too.

Just as I live in the hope that we will some day have a young forward thinking board at Celtic Park.

One that will see way beyond the parochial rivalry the current board is fixated on.

Its time to let them go their way, and we will go ours.

Maybe some day, they’ll challenge us sustainably, respectfully, and professionally.

Right now, that day is a long way off.

It will take huge changes for that to happen.

By the end of this season, we will have a very clear picture of the direction Scottish football is headed in.

Whether that picture contains an Ibrox entity remains to be seen.

One thing we know for sure is that it will contain the same Celtic side it always has.

One that will most likely be the most successful in Scottish football history.

We have Fergus McCann to thank for that.

A visionary, and a true Celtic man.