Rangers must earn the right to rise, says Lambert
WHEN the topic of the day happens to be the merits of a resurgent Rangers in the top flight of Scottish football, anyone with even a passing association with Celtic is strongly advised to proceed with extreme caution.
Late last year, when Gordon Strachan suggested from the comfort of his Sunday morning TV couch that the matters should be ‘manipulated’ in order to see the Ibrox club, Hibs and Hearts back at the top table, there was hell to pay. The former Parkhead manager was seen, by some, to have committed an unforgivable act of betrayal.
If Strachan was left to rue his typically candid answer to a forthright question, what was lost amid the hullabaloo was his unshakeable belief that the Scottish game is simply stronger with the top clubs on top of their game. It was his means of achieving it that jarred with so many.
For Paul Lambert, there is no desire to play to the galleries. There may be a section of the Celtic support who relish the prospect of seeing their great rivals exiled in the lower leagues in perpetuity, but for the former Parkhead midfielder that is a deeply unedifying prospect.
But, rather than benefiting from some kind of gerrymandering — as Strachan seemed to suggest — Lambert firmly believes that a meritocracy must be maintained at all costs.
‘You earn the right to stay in the league and Motherwell have earned the right,’ said the former Aston Villa manager.
‘ It’ s maybe not good for Glasgow or Scotland because the city needs a strong Rangers, as well. But you earn the right and that’s why I think Motherwell deserve to stay in the league. They were the better team over those two legs.
‘But I think the city and the country needs a strong Rangers. They are pivotal to it. Celtic need that. If I was a Celtic player, you would want your strongest rivals to be in the league because you need that.’
When Rangers collapsed financially in 2012, it was generally taken as read that the club would do three years’ hard penance in the lower divisions before jousting with the giants again.
A humiliating 6-1 aggregate defeat to Motherwell in the Play- off Final — a side which finished 56 points behind c hampions Celti c — has necessitated an urgent reappraisal of that timescale.
Despite having an entire team out of contract — not to mention severe doubts about Stuart McCall continuing as manager — the Ibrox club will still start next term as favourites to win automatic promotion by dint of their financial muscle.
But as the season just gone proves, that counts for little. Hibernian will have designs on learning from the mistakes they made last year, while additions like St Mirren and Morton will strengthen the middle order. After the events of the past three years, there is no appetite for taking anything for granted.
‘It could take them longer than another season,’ Lambert said. ‘But if they do go up, they have to earn the right to be there.
‘Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward. I think that everybody thought they would automatically go bounce, bounce, bounce through the divisions.
‘But Motherwell were in the Premiership anyway and they were used to playing at a higher level off ootball. Rangers weren’t and in those two games, Motherwell earned the right to stay in the league.’
The counter- argument to those forwarding the downside to Rangers’ exile is that the door to success has been opened to others.
Eight different sides have claimed the last 10 major cups in Scotland — a scenario that seemed distinctly unlikely in times of yore.
‘ That is good,’ Lambert conceded. ‘I totally agree with that but that can happen even if Rangers and Celtic are in the same league.
‘It happened in my time — St Mirren-Dundee United in 1987. All you need is five games to win the Cup. Celtic and Rangers can draw each other. So it can happen whether Celtic and Rangers are in the top league or not.’
LAMBERT can also bear witness to the fact that, provided the right decisions are made at the top, football can turn around quickly.
Fifteen years ago, Rangers appeared to be so far in front of Celtic that it would take the incoming Martin O’Neill several seasons before even challenging for the title.
In augmenting the quality he already had with the likes of Chris Sutton and Didier Agathe, O’Neill swept the boards in his f i rst term and quickly r e - established Celtic as a European force.
‘Martin had a nucleus of really good players when he came in and he added to that. It just boomed from there,’ recalled Lambert.
‘We also had a really strong Rangers team to come up against. It was a very high level at that time.
‘The Rangers team now, when the club sorts all its problems, will have to start to rebuild.’
For now, though, only those Rangers fansimbued with remarkable resources of optimism are thinking along such lines.
Having seen their club spend and squander the secondhighest wage bill in the country, the prospect of another season in the second tier is difficult to stomach.
With the much- vaunted ‘ journey’ now into a fourth season, the feelings of recrimination over three wasted years are deep-rooted.
‘ There has been so much disarray, so many things have happened,’ Lambert said. ‘People blaming each other and the authorities getting involved.
‘There have been so many problems and they’ve had to try to keep a handle on the playing side. They had to get a team that would win on the pitch and if they were winning — going from league to league to league — that would have masked a lot of things.
‘But because they have hit a wall at the minute and they are not coming up, the questions are being asked: “Where do they go?”’.