Keevins makes u-turn as he trashes loser Clement after his bonkers Postecoglou comparison

A year ago Hugh Keevins delighted the Daily Record’s Army of Readers with the news that their new manager was the Belgian Ange Postecoglou.

That is the Postecoglou that won five trophies out of six, denied the other by Bobby Madden’s Farewell Party, not the Absolutely Not Good Enough Aussie following his first domestic match as Celtic manager.

This time last year all was well in the world with A Proper Football Manager in place at Ibrox to challenge, expose and end the domination of Brendan Rodgers.

Record readers were assured:

You could hardly call four games a body of work but Philippe Clement, based on the evidence gathered so far, could be Rangers’ Ange Postecoglou.

Ange took six games to work out Scottish football when he arrived from Japan to manage Celtic – then he dominated our game until he left for Spurs. Clement has yet to lose a match and has started to get a tune out of players who were only capable of one bum note after another under his predecessor Michael Beale.

Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Mickly Beale had previously been invested with the hopes of the Record Sports Desk and flopped badly but under Clement all would be fine and dandy.

Until the Dandy Dons of Aberdeen delivered another painful dose of reality to negate the Deludemol that accompanies white smoke emerging from the Blue Room (junk shed) at Ibrox to announce the latest messiah

After being handed £13.4m in the summer to fund his Revolution! Clement has fallen badly short of expectations.

Failure to beat Dinamo Kiev cost his club £5m, three SPFL defeats in 10 matches suggests that third place might be as good as it gets this season which isn’t the message angry bears were expecting as they tucked away their Halloween costumes for another year.

Today, served with humble pie, Keevins confessed to the dwindling Army of Record readers:

When the Belgian arrived in Glasgow, I wrote here that his back story at Club Brugge and Monaco suggested he was the first truly credible Rangers manager that Brendan Rodgers had faced. Time, and circumstances, have forced a revision of that opinion. Clawing back the nine-point deficit to Aberdeen and Celtic might, from this distance, seem unlikely.

But there exists the possibility of Gers falling even further behind, given Clement’s erratic progress. If anything goes wrong at Hampden against Motherwell, interim chairman John Gilligan, an honourable man in an impossible position, would need to acknowledge the hopelessness of extending the manager’s tenure. It would not be a case of the club not being able to afford to sack Clement. They would not be able to afford to keep him.

In my professional lifetime I’ve never known one of the two pre-eminent Scottish clubs to be in such a state of disarray. Their finances are in a perilous state. The temporary residency at Hampden is believed to have cost the club £670,000 in rent and their annual wage bill remains huge. Investment on a substantial level, if not a takeover, is clearly required to prevent a worsening of the club’s transparently troubled state.

Keevins ought to have a word with his chum Graham Spiers before describing Gilligan as honourable, unless of course he also finds The Billy Boys an uplifting, motivational chant.

One of the pre-eminent Scottish clubs found themselves in administration followed by liquidation in 2012 which could be described as ‘a state of disarray’. Google is your friend Hugh, even the Record covered it at the time.

If there was anything exceptional about Clement he’d never have ended up at Ibrox, he’d have bided his time after being sacked by Monaco and taken a job at a non-basket case of a club.

Being an upgrade on Micky Beale was the easy bit, the Brains Behind Gerrard also lost to Kilmarnock, Celtic and Aberdeen last season before getting his autumn pay-off.

Every time a new manager is appointed at Ibrox it comes with a burst of hope and expectation from Keevins that Celtic can be toppled, that the O** F*** trophy sharing that he lived off can be revived, a reminder of happier times when he got an occasional cosy text message from Sir Walter or Coisty to convince him that he was inside the inner circle.

With the O** F*** myth dismantled Keevins could be forced to acknowledge that Celtic are the Most Successful Club in the World Before Christmas, five months later in could be #title55 for the only Scottish club to win the European Cup.

While the Record battles to avoid dropping below 40,000 print sales per day.