Plenty in the Ibrox inbox for Gerrard’s first day in the job
IT’S now just five days until Steven Gerrard officially starts work as manager at Ibrox. It should take him less than five minutes to figure out the first thing that needs to change under his watch. Rangers are a bunch of losers. They are perfectly comfortable with failure. They’ve been riddled with the loser mentality — and all its attendant excuses — since they made it back into the Premiership two years ago and it runs from top to bottom.
They have a dressing room full of mediocre, self-absorbed players who live in a bubble, seemingly unconcerned by the consequences of their words and actions and unable to grasp what their remit is, aided by a failing boardroom short on self-awareness and some pitiful attitudes from coach after coach after coach.
Michael O’Halloran in the Celtic end at last weekend’s Scottish Cup final was just the tip of the iceberg, the final insult.
Confirmation, if any were needed, of the lack of professionalism around the place and the failure to insist upon discipline and standards in word and deed.
A wholescale culture change is required at Rangers and Gerrard and his assistant Gary McAllister need to insist upon it in every facet of the club — from recruitment to expectations to accepted codes of conduct.
Perhaps the hardest thing of all for them, though, will be to change the long-standing default position that exists behind the gates of Auchenhowie — that competing for second is, somehow, doing pretty well. Not actually coming second. They can’t even manage that. Just being somewhere in the hunt.
It became a central part of Mark Warburton’s self-consuming whirlpool of gobbledygook in those final months of floundering around, out of his depth, as manager.
While claiming Celtic could not be hauled back because of their financial advantage, he suggested Hearts and Aberdeen were pushing his side so close because they were ‘battle-hardened’ in Europe.
Hearts had, of course, been knocked out of the Europa League by Birkirkara of Malta ahead of ripping up their team.
In the end, it was a blessing Rangers sacked him via Sky Sports News.
He was surely only days away from appearing on it, live from the training ground, staging a one-man rooftop protest against the ‘outside sources’ doing him down, armed with nothing other than a spraypainted bedsheet bearing the words ‘Be Respectful’ and a tinfoil bodysuit to protect him from bad thoughts.
Yet, much of his gibberish remains. Ahead of the final day of the season just gone, Jimmy Nicholl, brought in after the desiccated husk formerly known as Graeme Murty had been removed from public life and booked into the Warburton Suite to recover, was still going on about coming second being ‘a massive achievement’.
He had clearly been listening to director Alastair Johnston, who insists, with a straight face, that the club are ‘ahead of the curve’ even making it into the top three.
If these are the messages filtering down from on high, perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the playing staff think nothing of responding to another shambolic campaign by posting carefree photos of themselves on Instagram, enjoying the holidays while their supporters step up the medication to stop those flashbacks of Neil Lennon swooping around the pitch at Easter Road in stoppage-time.
They are part of a staff divorced from reality. No one would suggest that Rangers should win the league against a Celtic side rolling in Champions League cash. However, they have spent millions on this project and their players earn multiples of what their counterparts at Aberdeen and Hibs pick up.
They have to come second. By a distance. Aberdeen manager Derek McInnes claims it is embarrassing for them not to finish runners-up — and he is dead right. Rangers are an embarrassment and have been for a while.
When Warburton’s team lost 4-1 to Hearts — and Ian Cathro, no less — in February 2017, the birds in the trees knew the manager’s time was up. Well, everyone other than those in the dressing room. James Tavernier, now the captain, referred to it as ‘a speed bump’ in the worst show of judgment since the Spanish Armada styled themselves as the first ‘Invincibles’.
Little has changed, though. Rangers are humiliated in the Scottish Cup semi-final by Celtic in April and what does Murty call it? Another ‘speed bump’.
At Pittodrie after their penultimate league game, Tavernier responds to a 1-1 draw that left them still in danger of finishing fourth by describing himself happy with the point.
Small mistakes, yes. Fairly minor transgressions. The kind of things that make you sound like an old fogey when you complain about them individually. But they all add up.
They combine to create a whole, a picture of why this Rangers side fails time and again. There’s Josh Windass raising a finger to his lips and telling his own supporters to ‘shush’ at Firhill in February.
Shame he wasn’t as fired up when pulling out of a 60-40 tackle in his favour ahead of Progres Niederkorn’s first goal in the most shameful evening in Rangers’ history. There’s Wes Foderingham uploading photos of himself in an Old Firm defeat on to the internet and then getting involved with an angry fan, tweeting: ‘I will post what I want. I’m a grown man.’ There’s Carlos Pena blowing his nose on a pair of Rangers shorts before signing for Cruz Azul, lacking the foresight to understand he is a waste of space destined to return to Glasgow when his loan deal is cancelled.
There’s Alfredo Morelos, sitting in the huff on the bench against Hearts and sloping around the pitch at half-time like a five-year-old who has just had his Kinder egg taken off him for not eating his lunch.
The list of infractions goes on, speaking to a widespread lack of understanding of — and lack of respect for — what the club represents.
All ending, of course, with one of them in the Celtic end at Hampden for the double Treble.
That has to be the turning point. For all his mistakes, the chairman Dave King has been one of the few voices insistent in demanding that ambitions have to go way beyond just coming second.
Gerrard, his man on the ground, must now find a way of making
everyone buy into that. Dave King, eh? The voice of reason. That, alone, tells you how bad things have become.