Allen holds the key to Rangers’ rejuvenation
HOPE has been in desperately short supply around Ibrox for what feels like an eternity. Now that this most elusive and fragile of qualities has been coaxed into life, a tiny spark amid the darkness, it won’t be easy to maintain and encourage growth.
Over to Mark Allen, then. And a board who absolutely must get more right than wrong in a transfer window where there is more, so much more, than just half a season at stake.
Allen is now the most powerful employee of Rangers. As many will testify, at unnecessary length, that’s exactly how it should be in the modern game.
Although Graeme Murty will ‘rubber stamp’ new signings, the director of football is the man with the strategic vision on all things recruitment.
Congratulations to the former Manchester City academy director, then, for reaching a senior pinnacle of sorts.
And for accepting the burden of responsibility for rebuilding a patchwork squad of variable quality.
Because, over the next 31 days, Allen has to do something even more difficult than running Celtic close for 90 minutes.
In a campaign teetering on the brink between acceptable and awful, Rangers have to show both wisdom and ambition — just to keep pace with the best of the Scottish Premiership’s also-rans.
Straight out of the blocks, you have to say that making a signing half as good as Niall McGinn’s return to Aberdeen would be like winning a bag full of Rolexes.
As for the notion that Preston could pinch Josh Windass for even double the half-million bid already knocked back? Show a little gumption, Rangers.
Never mind what Celtic are doing. Pay no attention to their multiple millions winging in and out. That’s not your target, Mr Allen.
The Dons are your nearest rivals. Given your financial advantages — and we’re assuming here that there are no more nasty shocks, court rulings or out-ofthe-blue demands in the offing — it should be easy.
OK, not easy. This is football, a business requiring more skills in alchemy than chemistry.
But follow the basics and, without guaranteeing that lead will be transformed into gold, you at least give Murty a chance to regularly produce the kind of gritty performance shown at Celtic Park on Saturday.
Clearing out the dead wood is, of course, the hard part. But it has to start with Niko Kranjcar.
Just pay whatever it takes to get him off the books. Assuming you can’t find a doctor who recommends retirement on medical grounds.
Allen will have to wheel, deal, and schmooze like Del Boy on his best day at the market to offload some of the other duds without costing the club serious money.
But needs must. And Murty has inherited a group of players in desperate need of something. The boot, in many cases.
That the board owe fans one more major round of investment, at least, should be clear.
These fans have invested many millions in their club — and it is their club, regardless of the name above the door — not because they expected instant gratification, but because reasonable signs of steady progress seemed like a pretty fair demand.
With a chairman being chased by the Takeover Panel and a lack of clear leadership from on high, Allen won’t have it all easy.
But a one-off show of strength against an exhausted Celtic team, with Brendan Rodgers’ men having played 11 more competitive fixtures than the visitors on Saturday, some stat when you consider we’re only halfway through the season, can’t be the high point of any sustained Rangers revival.
It’s a make or break month, in a year that will go a long way to determining how the rest of this decade pans out. No pressure, then, Mark.