TIME FOR MURTY TO BUILD ON THE HOPE
Rangers boss must find a way to maintain form shown in derby draw
CELTIC’S rivals see new grounds for hope now. Reasons to suspect the Parkhead club are no longer the Invincibles they were.
The first seeds of doubt were planted with the 4-0 defeat at Hearts. As Rangers pressed for an unexpected win at Parkhead on Saturday, the cloak slipped a little further.
Earning a rare and deserved point at the home of their bitter rivals, the satisfaction of Graeme Murty and his players was justified. Pre-match, nobody gave them a prayer.
Surviving some close shaves and the loss of Bruno Alves to injury, harsh dressing-room words at half-time almost delivered the sweetest of victories. James Tavernier, Wes Foderingham and young David Bates — on for the injured Alves — excelled. The regret for Rangers is that moral victories don’t win championships.
A draw felt right in the end. Just as he did in his previous visit to Parkhead earlier in the year, Murty travelled across Glasgow and got his tactics bang on, pressing, harrying and hustling Celtic to distraction.
Unbeaten in two games as Rangers manager at the home of a bitter rival, there’s a case for the former Scotland defender bowing out now. The respective finances of these two clubs mean this could still be the high water mark of his tenure.
To deliver sustained improvement Murty must somehow solve a strange dilemma. The excellence of Craig Gordon denied Rangers a winning goal in a second half where the urgency, tempo and concentration was exemplary. Yet those qualities were absent when the team in light blue lost to Hamilton, Dundee, St Johnstone and Kilmarnock.
‘We can’t take a backwards step from here,’ said Murty. ‘I said to the players when I walked out of this place last time it was with a sense of “well done”. I sit here now with a real sense of a journey we are just starting out on and we have to use that moving forward.’
Supporters of Celtic remember games like this from the 1990s, back when they were in the cheap seats. Unexpected results at Ibrox raised hopes a corner had been turned. The optimism was usually misplaced.
To do more than compete at Parkhead on a sporadic basis, Rangers have to bottle what they produced here and spend the winter shutdown working out how to unleash it on a consistent basis.
Foiling Celtic is one thing. Finding a way to win games against lesser teams week after week is quite another.
Neither can a blunt, stark truth be denied. Outwith Hearts, it’s hard to think of a domestic game when Celtic have played poorer than this.
Rangers — rightly — must take some credit for that. They refused to give the home team a minute’s peace. Just like Hearts and Anderlecht, the Ibrox side employed a high press and evidence is growing that Celtic don’t deal with it well.
During a bright, determined Rangers start Mikael Lustig — in particular — looked like a man starting his new year early.
The winter break has clearly arrived at the right time for Rodgers and his weary team.
The first half of the season featured 38 competitive games. There were nine in the month of December alone.
Twelve months ago, the reigning champions coped with a similar programme admirably, entering the winter break 19 points clear of Rangers. Back then, the mere sight of Scott Sinclair and Moussa Dembele was enough to bring the Ibrox side out in hives.
Here the two were shadows of their former selves. Last season’s player of the year was withdrawn in an act of mercy after missing two gilt-edged chances in the first half.
Dembele had already left the fray by then, a long, slow applause for the Celtic support as he left the field bearing the look of a permanent adieu. Brighton are expected to bid for the French
Under-21 international in the coming days and West Ham are also admirers. Afternoons like this make the temptation to grab the first offer of £20million a little stronger than usual.
The positive for Celtic is that Rangers caught them on a bad day and still couldn’t win. The gap between the two sides remains a hefty 11 points and the measure of Celtic’s domestic dominance is evident in the way opponents celebrate not being hammered.
Yet none of this obscures a basic fact. Be it down to exhaustion or a simple loss of form the Parkhead side, inevitably, are toiling to maintain the standards of last season.
It’s three months since they last had a midweek without a game and, to cope with the glut of games, Rodgers rotated his squad. The impact of that is most evident in Dembele and his replacement Leigh Griffiths, neither of whom have had a consistent run of games.
Captain Scott Brown ran the midfield. Gordon produced two world-class saves. Kristoffer Ajer was courageous and calm in defence. Elsewhere Celtic barely mustered a pass mark. Surprisingly, Olivier Ntcham — the £4.5m summer signing — began the day on the bench.
The Frenchman was finally called to the fray with 18 minutes left to play and still managed to be one of the home team’s best players in a pretty shallow pool.
Celtic were left to regret the inability to take one of four first-half chances. Edging their way into the game after an assertive Rangers start, Dembele set the tone in the 11th minute when he couldn’t turn a Dedryck Boyata knockdown from a Stuart Armstrong free-kick into the net. Two minutes later, Foderingham produced a superb fingertip save to deny James Forrest after the winger controlled a low Kieran Tierney cross and thumped a left-foot shot towards goal. Another chance went begging when another Boyata knockdown from an Armstrong free-kick was saved by Foderingham. From pointblank range Sinclair blew two glorious opportunities. The winger’s confidence was finally shot after an incredible miss on the stroke of half-time when he only had to hit the target eight yards out from an Armstrong cross. He failed.
The second half was an odd affair. Lacking genuine belief for so long, Rangers and their supporters began to realise the game was there for the taking.
So often a target for criticism from fans, Gordon produced two wonder saves from Tavernier, then Alfredo Morelos, to rescue Celtic.
The Colombian blew the final chance 11 minutes from time. Tavernier, the best Rangers player on the pitch, hooked a fine cross into the middle, the unmarked striker’s header bouncing wide.
Unusually for an Old Firm game the referee barely rated a mention. Credit Bobby Madden for his composed performance; an outcome almost as unexpected as the game itself.