Barry Ferguson jumps to the defence of Staunch Del. It kills him that Celtic fans are revelling in his pain.

Barry Ferguson was out in the Record this morning, and he has brought the cavalry with him.

All of it.

Every last man.

Because Staunch Del is three games into his Ibrox reign, and Barry has decided that the problem here is the critics.

Not the results.

The critics.

I wrote last night about the corner Derek McInnes has managed to paint himself into inside a fortnight, and I stand by every word of it.

Barry, it seems, read the mood in the same way I did, and reached for the fire extinguisher.

Here is his opening gambit, and I’d like you to read it twice.

Three games in and it’s starting to feel as if the critics are queuing up for Derek McInnes already.

Three games.

Three games in which his side have been beaten at home by Hibernian with the last kick of the ball, gone into a European tie they are already trailing, and found themselves 5 points adrift of us before the middle of August.

But it’s the queue of critics that’s the injustice here.

Of course it is.

And Barry’s actual evidence that McInnes is the right man is that none of this will have surprised him.

And, as ridiculous as that is, do you know what makes me even more certain that he’s exactly the right man for Rangers? It’s that none of it will have taken him even remotely by surprise.

So the case for the defence is that Derek knew it was going to be bad.

That’s it.

That’s the whole thing.

He knew.

Is that seriously where we are with them now??

Read that back to yourself and tell me it isn’t the single lowest bar ever set for a manager of that club.

They’ve lowered it so far it’s now a trip hazard.

Then Barry writes the passage that gives the entire game away.

He goes on at length about the fear factor, about how no player in the country should be looking forward to going to Ibrox, about how it should feel like an ordeal from the moment they walk through the front doors.

Terrified in the dressing room.

A knot in their stomachs on the way out for the warm-up.

Suffocated by the intensity of it.

Lovely stuff, and then he adds this:

That’s what I wanted to change during my time in charge – I was very clear about it.

Aye, Barry.

You were very clear about it.

You had the keys to that dressing room, you had the badge, you had the lifelong-supporter credentials that you’re now transferring onto Derek McInnes like a warranty, and the fortress never materialised.

We all watched it happen.

So did you.

That’s the bit that makes this column so hard to take seriously, because the man telling you Ibrox should be a place of dread is the man who couldn’t make it one when it was his own name above the door.

For a defence lawyer, he does have a habit of tabling the prosecution’s evidence.

Buried in there, presented as a compliment to McInnes for his honesty, is this line.

He said, after one title in 15 years, he shares their frustrations.

One title in 15 years.

Barry drops that in like a weather report.

He genuinely does not notice that he has written the indictment of his own club in a subordinate clause, and then moves straight on as if it were a throwaway detail.

And what does he ask for immediately after it?

Time.

The same kind of time he wasn’t willing to give Russell Martin this time last year.

Because he wasn’t your stereo-typical staunch Ibrox manager, no he was a nasty vegan who wouldn’t wear brown brogues.

The travesty of it.

The judging, he reckons, should wait until the start of next month when the window shuts and the business is all done and dusted.

One title in 15 years, and the request is for another three weeks’ grace.

Meanwhile, look at what that manager is being handed while he waits on the fear factor arriving.

Couhaib Driouech of PSV will be the tenth signing of the summer.

Andrew Cavenagh told his shareholders the other day that another four or five could follow before the window shuts in three weeks.

That is close to £20 million spent over there already, with about £7 million of it recouped.

Ten in, five more coming, and they are 5 points behind us in the second week of August.

Now imagine Michael Nicholson being asked to sanction that in one window.

Imagine the phone call to Barbados, and how far into it he’d get before the golfer told him to wind his neck in?

Every pound is a prisoner at Celtic Park, and the man in charge of the purse strings is a double billionaire.

They are being backed to the hilt and losing.

We are being starved and winning.

But none of this is really about Derek McInnes, and I think Barry knows it.

You don’t write 1,000 words defending a man who has been in the job a fortnight because you’re worried about his job security.

You write it because you can hear us.

You can hear the laughing.

You can hear a support who watched their own club get picked apart for years now sitting back with their feet up while yours comes off the rails at breakneck speed, and it is absolutely killing you.

That’s what this is.

Not analysis.

A man flinching.

Enjoy Thursday night against Jagiellonia, Barry.

We certainly will.

Because whatever happens at Ibrox this week, you’ll be back on Saturday to tell us it was somebody else’s fault, won’t you?

You will, won’t you?

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