Jackson bigs up McInnes before a potential big fall against Celtic over the next two weekends. Can he survive two derby losses?

This morning, Keith Jackson had a look at Derek McInnes’ first 83 days at Ibrox and decided the man deserves a medal.

Hard hats.

Wrecking balls.

Dynamite.

Bricks and mortar.

You’d think Del had been handed a Stanley knife and told to gut a tenement, rather than handed the job he’s wanted his whole life.

Here is the piece in the Record, and here is the line the whole thing is built on:

McInnes has been ruthless during his first 83 days in charge. But, more importantly, he’s been right.

In other words, perhaps those Rangers fans who were initially spooked into suspecting the worst case scenario was unfolding all over again can now breathe a little easier and maybe even stand more firmly behind this bricks and mortar overhaul.

Breathe a little easier.

Off the back of what, exactly?

But strip away the hard hats and the hi-vis, and what has Staunch Del actually achieved at Ibrox so far?

He sits 5 points behind Celtic in the league.

He has taken his club out of European football altogether, in a summer where they spent the guts of £36 million.

Not out of the Champions League – out of Europe.

Gone, finished, out of the lot of it, in August.

Now, imagine for one second that any other manager in the world had done that at Ibrox.

Do you think we’d be reading about wrecking balls and bricks and mortar this morning?

Imagine Philippe Clement had done it, or Michael Beale, or Giovanni van Bronckhorst.

The Record would have had the man buried by the Tuesday.

Jackson would have been out with the shovel himself.

The last Ibrox manager to fail to qualify for Europe was Pedro Caixinha, and we all remember how that one ended

That was 2017.

A man who is remembered in Scottish football as a punchline, a clown figure in a bush after Progres Niederkorn.

That is the company Derek McInnes is currently keeping.

And yet somehow, this morning, he’s a master builder in a hard hat, doing the necessary work.

Nine years, and only two men at that club have managed to get themselves knocked out of everything before the leaves have turned.

One of them got laughed out of Scottish football for it.

The other one is getting his back rubbed in the Daily Record.

Of course, we all know why.

Del is one of them.

He’s a real Raynjurz man, a bear since he was in nappies, and that buys you a level of patience in the SMSM that no outsider will ever be given.

Martin was a data nerd from down south who didn’t get the club.

Del gets the club.

So Del gets the free pass, and the rest of us get told it’s analysis.

Three wins on the spin sounds great until you look at who they came against and how they were scraped

Because that’s the bit Jackson skips past.

His side aren’t winning games, they’re surviving them.

Saturday at home to Motherwell was the perfect example of it.

One nil.

Turgid, slow, laboured stuff, and painful on the eye for anybody unfortunate enough to sit through it.

That’s not a team being rebuilt, that’s a team getting over the line by its fingernails.

And when did scraping past Motherwell at home become evidence of a revolution?

He’s dropped 5 points from 15 in the league, and Jackson genuinely presents that as a positive.

It compares favourably to Russell Martin, apparently.

Well, so does most things.

Martin is currently dropping 10 points from 15 in League One with Leicester, and Jackson uses that as the yardstick to measure Del by.

Setting Russell Martin as your benchmark isn’t a standard, it’s an alibi.

And to be fair to Jackson, he does concede that McInnes has had rotten luck.

Lawrence Shankland limping off after seven minutes on Saturday is a genuine blow, and if that hamstring keeps him out for the eight games it did at Tynecastle last season, Del is in bother.

Kevin Kelsy at £9.5 million is an awful lot of faith to place in a 22-year-old nobody in Scotland has seen kick a ball.

That’s all fair enough.

But bad luck doesn’t explain being out of Europe in August.

Jagiellonia Bialystok didn’t happen because Shankland pulled a hamstring in September.

That happened because the team wasn’t good enough, and the man picking it didn’t have an answer.

Jackson is writing the man’s testimonial before the two games that will actually tell us who he is

Because here’s what’s coming down the track.

Sunday, a Premier Sports Cup quarter final against Celtic.

Then seven days later, a trip across the Clyde to Celtic Park in the league.

Back to back Glasgow Derbies, and the whole season sitting on them.

Lose the first one and he’s out of a second competition before the nights draw in.

Lose the second one and he’s 8 points adrift with the klanbase already restless.

Do the two, and every hard hat and wrecking ball in Keith Jackson’s column gets quietly filed away.

Would anybody at the Record ever go back and mention this article again?

Would they hell.

So what does Jackson do with a fortnight like that sitting right in front of him?

He writes the glowing review the week before.

Which is either very brave or very stupid, and I know which one my money is on.

Make no mistake, McInnes may well come through it.

He might get a cup semi final and a point at Celtic Park, and I’d be the first to say I got that one wrong.

Stranger things have happened, and this is Scottish football.

But you don’t hand a man his character reference BEFORE the exam.

You wait until he’s sat it.

Was it really too much to ask that he waited a fortnight?

Two weekends, Keith.

That’s all you had to wait…

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