Philippe Clement has forced me into revision of Rangers opinion after committing professional suicide - Hugh Keevins

Sir Alex Ferguson had a theory about press conferences and history shows he tended not to get too much wrong about anything involving football.

“For a manager at a press conference, you need to come out as the winner,” he said. “You can kill yourself in a press conference. It’s an important part of the job.” Philippe Clement proved he didn’t understand that when he committed professional suicide on Wednesday night.

For the Ibrox manager to tell journalists that his team had delivered one of their better performances this season was an insult to their intelligence and that of the fan base. It was so inflammatory a comment as to provide grounds for dismissal if the board were of a mind to take account of the outside noise coming from their paying customers.

“It’s not about me, it’s about the team,” Clement also said after losing to Aberdeen. What’s he talking about? Clement is the public face of the club when his team is on the park, and what is happening on it is creating growing unrest because of the manager’s now unfathomable approach to his work. Being third in the league table is not the only unusual position the Belgian has adopted lately. He has become a manager who has passed the point of no return and yet remains in office.

If his team should lose to Motherwell in their Premier Sports Cup semi-final tie at Hampden this afternoon it would be a result fit to enter the Hall of Infamy at Ibrox. It would rank with the defeat to Berwick Rangers in 1967, the loss to Hamilton in 1987 and the Progres Niederkorn debacle in 2017. The only thing Clement has going for him today appears to be the fact that the year doesn’t end in a seven.

When the Belgian arrived in Glasgow, I wrote here that his back story at Club Brugge and