IT SEEMS, dear reader, we are not alone in our perception Philippe Clement and a few of his misguided Light Blue acolytes have parted company with the plot.
The Belgian is fairly expressionless at the best of times. Stone-faced, he delivers implausible sermons on the displays of his team that utterly bewilder anyone trying to decipher something meaningful amid the wreckage of his enigmatic statements.
The observations are so off the wall you begin to wonder if Msr Clement possesses a well-disguised sense of humour. Even the astute Hercule, Agatha Christie’s famous creation, was allowed a wisecrack every now and again and a small smile beneath the waxed moustache.
Did Big Phil really talk up his team’s performance in the first ten minutes of Sunday’s derby and forget about the remaining 80 minutes-plus in which the champions netted three goals, had another chalked off in dodgy circumstances and saw the normally-reliable Reo Hatate and Kyogo Furuhashi blow two sitters?
ME AND MY SHADOW…Philippe Clement has been eclipsed five times by Celtic rival Brendan Rodgers.
Did the Ibrox gaffer really witter on about two great opportunities for his players to score goals in that brief opening period? We are talking about two chances where both Cyriel Dessers and Rabbi Matondo were offside.
Even if they had managed to get the ball behind Kasper Schmeichel the efforts would have been disallowed.
Did he actually make a bizarre reference to his side’s 6-0 win over Ross County the previous weekend and insist it had been the club’s “best result in four years”?
Was that the same Ross County who had been ejected from the League Cup seven days earlier by the minnows of Spartans?
The utterings coming out of Govan are all getting a tad incomprehensible.
I have to say I had my doubts about Big Phil before the turn of the year after some folk, overtaken by delirium, were discussing “a siesmic shift” across Glasgow.
I said at that stage the observation was “as hysterical as it is hilarious”.
HEAD CASE…Philippe Clement in the dug-out.
Phil arrived mid-October when the equally-deluded Michael Beale was given the boot and the incoming team chief celebrated a 1-0 League Cup Final triumph over Aberdeen at Hampden on November 17.
Preposterously, some people were claiming the Ibrox club were now on the cusp of a domestic treble.
It got even more comically grotesque when there was talk of a quadruple with some bizzarely-bullish, overly-optimistic critics throwing the Europa League into the mix.
Do you ever think you have gone to bed and wakened up the following day in a parallel universe, folks?
The Everest of dreams crumbled, rock by rock, until there was nothing but debris piling up outside the Ibrox front door.
The harsh realities of life have followed Phil and his team into this season. The £40million Champions League goldmine was shut off after failure at the first qualifying hurdle.
The Premiership kicked off with a scoreless stalemate against Hearts, a band of strugglers who have lost all six of their matches since that draw and the sequence of pain will almost certainly continue with a trip to the home of the champions a week today.
Big Phil’s inability to get one over his adversary Brendan Rodgers was his fifth failure against the Irishman.
The former Coventry City defender is now on a par with Graeme Murty in the underachieving stakes.
BRENDAN AND THE BIG MOUTH…the Celtic manager celebrates Celtic’s 5-0 league title success at Parkhead on April 29 2019 while his dug-out foe Graeme Murty is struck dumb.
Remember dear, old Graeme? What a kooky funster he became after being giving the onerous task as interim manager on umpteen occasions once the firing squad had removed the previous occupant of the brown brogues in the dug-out.
He stated live on TV that his players had cheered when they learned they had drawn Celtic in the 2018 Scottish Cup semi-final. That was the Hampden encounter on April 15 in which the holders rattled in four without reply.
There were no such absurd statements from the caretaker chief before the teams met again at Parkhead in the league a fortnight later.
Maybe just as well he remained shtum on this occasion; Celtic pulverised their way to a 5-0 success while clinching their seventh consecutive title.
Unsurprisingly, Murty was relieved of his duties two days later.
Big Phil is mixing in dodgy company.
ALEX GORDON
