Second place is now a long shot for Rangers
ABERDEEN aren’t so much coming to get Rangers as leaving them in their joyful wake. ballsy-but-basic Dundee team have just played them off the park.
If the imminent return of Alex McLeish as interim manager may stiffen sinews, lift morale and inject at least a modicum of defensive organisation into a team in a state of chaotic collapse, it’s worth remembering that the former Ibrox boss is no miracle worker.
There is something rotten at the heart of this Rangers squad. A weakness too easily exposed, a flakiness that makes all their pre- season puffery — all that chat about challenging Celtic — seem all the more tragi-comic, at least in retrospect.
And s o Dave King, t he absentee Rangers chairman with a penchant for lengthy, revisionist, self- congratulatory statements, may just have to accept that sights already lowered from the summit need to be readjusted once more. Second place? A long shot, at best.
Anyone who saw the havo crid den visitors fail to cope with even moderate pressure at Dens Park yesterday must accept that even the most gifted, inspired and respected stand-in boss might struggle to salvage much f rom this train wreck of a season. The problems run too deep, the ineptitude i s too thoroughly embedded, for any mere mortal to effect a complete turnaround.
IN tandem with the longterm reorganisation of the entire football department, of course, there i s an immediate, pressing, screaming need to appoint a stand- i n capable of giving an order with authority. Someone who expects their instructions to be carried out.
Yet all at Rangers must accept this still might not be enough to c atch an Aberdeen t e am chasing down that runners-up position with all the subtlety of Mark McGhee seeking a quiet word with the fourth official.
Yesterday at Dens, as Dundee recorded a home win over Rangers for the first time in nigh on 25 years, visiting f ans witnessed the utter humiliation of a team purportedly built to finish a ‘comfortable second’ behind champions-elect Celtic. It felt like a natural nadir in a season always played on the edge of the abyss.
Ultimately, of course, this r emains a mess of Mark Warburton’s making, the latest loss merely a culmination of every bad recruitment decision made, every moment of defensive ineptitude or dogmatic insistence on Plan A, witnessed during his time at the helm.
It shouldn’t be f orgotten, however, t hat Warburton botched this job with the tacit approval of a board who might easily have spotted some pretty obvious flaws in his performance. Hence the new i dea — f or Rangers, anyway — of installing a director of football.
It’s increasingly difficult to understand why so many are opposed to such a move. Equally tough to comprehend why some remain adamant that only a young, and by i mplication impressionable, coach can work ‘under’ someone with a more strategic long-term view of the football department.
Don’t you think taking a more measured and balanced approach to recruitment might have paid off for Rangers at, oh, just about any point during the past five years?
It’s a no-brainer of a move, putting in place a structured plan with clear goals, with the head coach retaining his ultimate power over recruitment while the director of football worries about squad size, length of contract, budgets etc.
Now, as for how many astute signings — and how much tactical/motivational mastery — it might take to get this Rangers team in a position to challenge Celtic, even allowing f or a drop-off of ten-per-cent on the part of the reigning champions, that’s another question.
Ten-in-a-row is already being spoken about on both sides of the divide as, if not quite an inevitability, then at least a strong probability. When you think of how much ground Rangers have squandered in assembling a squad sure to be gutted — quite possibly in one bloody revolution — by the new men at the helm, it’s hard to argue with such thinking.
Right now? That ‘best of the rest’ tag is disappearing off into the distance. Taken away by an Aberdeen team beginning to strut and swagger. While the club with by far and away the second biggest budget in the land continue to stagger and stumble.