It’s pretty clear now that Philippe Clement is at a perilous juncture of his Rangers reign.

After that beautiful honeymoon period which included a trophy, his tenure at the club has crumbled aggressively and now Rangers are clear second-best to Celtic again.

The reality now is Rangers are back in the same place they were under Michael Beale – he too was shown up against Celtic, and Clement’s been there twice now.

But the comments Clement is now making in the press really haven’t washed well, and this nonsense about basically blaming Dens Park for what happened at Dingwall is the latest in an increasing line of disquieting quotes from Clement showing he’s lost a lot of the acumen he’d gained over his first 4+ months.

But the first sign of it was there in October, in comments Ibrox Noise chose not to red flag at the time, but noted with concern.

29th of October, and Rangers faced Hearts – we played disgustingly, following the incredible high of what remains to this day Rangers’ best display under Clement – his excellent debut v Hibs.

It took a late Danilo sub goal to scrape a win, but what Clement said afterwards was the same kind of tripe he came out with after that rotten 3-3 loss of points:

“The most important, it’s a deserved win if you see the game, if you see the statistics in every sense. I’m still in an observation period. You saw today all the players that came in, they gave something extra for the team.”

After Ibrox Noise fully anticipating him being honest, scathing, and brutal to his players who had been so bad that afternoon, because we took him to be deadly direct given how he’d presented himself in the press, instead he gushed with praise.

Fans bought into it too, talking about the mentality, offering no concern that he seemed to be backing up and praising a god-awful display.

We kept quiet about it, because we were winning, and that remained the case until we lost to Celtic. He even got that League Cup, without of course facing them.

But with his conduct lately falling well below the standards we expect of our manager, we think it fair to call things out.

We’re not happy with Clement at all. He’s talking p*sh in the press, making a muck of tactics, getting selections wrong, offering useless substitutions and even ignoring opposition managers’ handshakes.

The real him seems to be coming out at the moment, and the crest of the first 5 months’ wave appears to have crashed.

This is where we see the real bottle and mettle the man has.

Will he recover this huge blip he’s suffering with the team, or is this already the beginning of the end for him?

For Rangers’ sake we clearly hope this champion manager can retrieve the situation. We need our Rangers back, and he has a winning CV that shows he can.

But it could just be he’s bitten off more than he can chew at Rangers.

And time will tell if he can salvage what is becoming a very precarious moment.