GOLDFISH BOWL

There are times when, even almost 16 months into his Ibrox tenure, Mark Warburton seems to present Glasgow as a football city that remains all too foreign to him.

The 54-year-old former City trader is an intelligent man, clever enough to know that coping with intensity and instant judgments are mandatory requirements in the job spec when fronting a brand with a greater profile among a nation of five million than all but one other football club just five miles away.

Warburton’s side have won two league games out of seven. They may not be the spendthrift Rangers of old, but six of these games have come against teams with a fraction of their budget.

With recent improvement, the Ibrox men could have taken another five points from the six games that have yielded only nine points and be sitting comfortably in second place, just two points off Celtic. But they are not.

And the law of the Scottish football jungle dictates that when a Rangers team with self-proclaimed expectations to be title challengers lies seventh after almost a fifth of the season, it is open season. Everything lodged in the dossier for doubters – which also includes a mere eight league

“[With] the media build-up to the Old Firm game when the whistle went, I thought ‘thank God for that’. It drains and drains.”

MARK WARBURTON