I need to paraphrase a line of dialogue from a television programme watched by over twelve million people on Wednesday night in order to sum up Rangers’ prospects of winning this season’s league title.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, if you can’t beat St Mirren? When I coined the phrase “A draw’s a disaster, a defeat’s a catastrophe” to sum up the need for the Old Firm to realise every game they played was crucial it was, admittedly, for dramatic effect on the radio.
Now it sums up Sunday's match at Motherwell in a nut-shell for Philippe Clement. There was a chink of light, a feeling that the tide had turned in the manager’s favour because the fans at Ibrox had undergone a mood swing and re-assessed his coaching capabilities in a favourable fashion. But now it appears the light at the end of the tunnel was actually that of an oncoming train from Paisley.
Rangers in general, and the Belgian in particular, suffer from cultural difficulties. The club is too caught up in a blame culture off the park which makes them play the victim card whenever anything goes wrong, such as the loss of the Premier Sports Cup final to Celtic on December 15.
And Clement is on his way to becoming the latest casualty of the culture of failure on the park which has lasted for over a decade and created a managerial merry go round at Ibrox as a consequence.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Scottish football’s appetite for suspicion is, and always has been, insatiable. This has been the year when clubs and supporters stopped talking about football altogether and focused on decisions and the people who make them, exemplified by Rangers’ letter to the SFA in the aftermath of the cup final lost to a penalty shoot-out against
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