Tavernier’s the tip of the iceberg at a club where no one is up to the job...
JAMES TAVERNIER has never seemed all that big on learning from his mistakes during five years of defensive negligence at Ibrox. He’s picking up an important lesson now, mind you. That telling the truth about Rangers is a dangerous game.
Sure, it is a little unconventional to use the pages of the official match programme to concede that the most successful football club in the entire history of the universe is full of bottle merchants who can’t handle the bottom-feeders in their league actually having a go at them.
What followed Tav’s address to the nation in defeat to Hamilton Accies on Wednesday, though, was certainly a compelling way of evidencing a theory.
His manager Steven Gerrard’s less-than-supportive remarks about him afterwards — you know, all that stuff about judging his mental state and refusing to say if he had the minerals to remain skipper — suggest it may soon see him sacrificed on the altar of pacifying angry punters ahead of a fire sale in the summer.
It is easy to see why Rangers fans want blood. They know — and have always known — that Tavernier is not a captain.
The fact he is knocking around in a Lamborghini, having never won anything of any note, suddenly seems to have become a major problem, too.
The reality, however, is that Tavernier is just the tip of the iceberg at a club in which no one in
any position of power appears to do their job properly.
It is all very well using the 28-year-old as a scapegoat, or spitting fire over how he spends his money, but the fact he is in this position and earning such exorbitant wages surely poses wider questions about those above him in what is a basket case of an organisation.
Who gave Tavernier the armband in the first place?
Who signed off all the big contract extensions, two within seven months in 2018, that cover his lavish lifestyle?
Don’t they deserve a spot under the microscope, too?
THROWING improved contracts at people who barely deserve them is something Rangers specialise in, mind you. The grandstanding behind giving new ones to Gerrard and his backroom staff in December, having failed to win a trophy, has now left them with their backs against the wall.
Apologies for banging on about it for four weeks now, but Gerrard, no matter his honesty and authenticity, cannot stay at Ibrox beyond this season. Not after this. Each week becomes more cringeworthy than the last at a club which looks to possess all the strategy and va-va-voom of a slug clambering into a Venus flytrap for a look around.
When a manager is given huge funds to build his team and then can’t manage them, motivate them or even get the most basic results against tiny, poorly-resourced rivals, he’s toast. That applies in any industry. Particularly football.
Where Rangers have an issue, though, is that they can’t really afford to sack Gerrard.
Just consider what the severance packages would cost a business that has recorded combined losses of £35million since 2015 and, at the last count in November, needed another £10m simply to see out the season.
If, as he says, Gerrard doesn’t do walking away (copyright, Alistair Murdoch McCoist MBE, 2012), Rangers had better hope someone from England or elsewhere regards the current Europa League campaign — where would the club be without that income? — as reason enough to take a gamble on him and cough up compensation.
Much the same could be said about Alfredo Morelos. Before he veered off the rails again, there was talk of Rangers offering him yet another wage hike.
Although when it comes to the errant Colombian, or anything else for that matter, you now struggle to believe a word that comes out of Ibrox. Outwith the unfailingly candid Gerrard, the place is a circus.
Morelos has been indulged by the management, despite an atrocious disciplinary record and still treats them like idiots.
Someone, somewhere, dreamt up this toxic idea that pretty much anyone who criticised him was a racist and bought him time during a promising start to the season.
All bets are off now, though. He got himself banned, things started to unravel post-Dubai and he betrayed everyone by failing to return from that trip home ahead of the Scottish Cup capitulation to Hearts at Tynecastle.
His latest apology is hollow and meaningless. Like everything else that comes out of the car crash that is the Ibrox PR and media operation.
Tavernier conceding the team melts under pressure and coach Michael Beale explaining on Rangers TV that the problem is they are actually too good for Scottish football — of course you are, dear — is only part of it.
Where do you even begin with that destructive noise surrounding Morelos last month, which started with stories about someone under his car and ended with a club-approved interview with the player being spectacularly mistranslated on Sky Sports and no one other than Celtic — yes, Celtic — demanding answers?
Under chairman Dave King, Rangers have played to the lowest common denominator.
It’s like they set out to identify someone who represented their target audience and decided: ‘Yes, @kingbilly1690WATP on Twitter is our man!’
Having blown millions on Mark Warburton and Pedro Caixinha, it was embarrassing that the then-Aberdeen chairman Stewart Milne felt the need to ask for a public apology for Derek McInnes after Rangers had labelled him a coward for turning down the offer to be their manager.
It was equally disturbing when King said the titles Celtic won when Rangers were in the lower leagues didn’t count. Or that Morelos is worth £40m.
Who knows where to begin with the 2017 missive in which King proclaimed ‘a fresh start’ with Sports Direct and said ‘financial arrangements Y between the parties have been transformed’?
YES, by paying them £3m to tear up their old contract before going on to break the terms of the new one and then leaving the club trapped in a legal battle they cannot escape from.
Company secretary James Blair didn’t emerge well from Lionel Persey QC’s judgment of a case that might yet cost Rangers millions. Punters still don’t know whether they can buy the team’s strips. And managing director Stewart Robertson carries on hiding under the desk amid the chaos.
Nice man and all that, but where is he and what does he do?
When King steps down, will Rangers have any off-field person of presence at all?
The share issue he promised should happen soon. Whatever investment it brings, from the Far East or elsewhere, it is unlikely to be enough to outgun Celtic.
Rangers will have to find a new way to build a club that can compete and Tavernier certainly won’t be accepted as its captain.
However, he is far from the only prominent figure who should be washed away in the necessary clear out.