The next six days could make or break Warburton
BY your signings, so shall ye be judged. Players — they’re all b ****** s who get you the sack. Losing heavily to your greatest rivals is punishable by banishment to the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, with eternal damnation the sentence for repeated offences.
Prefer a more scientific approach? All right, even in Scottish football’s own logic-defying universe, you’ll accept that some basic principles must still apply.
And, over the next six days, one man’s reputation may just be sent smashing headlong into reality with an atom-shattering force to rival anything the Large Hadron Collider can manage.
Seriously, how can Mark Warburton not be under more pressure? Why are so few Rangers fans, never mind his actual employers, questioning the prospects of a manager who so obviously — and clumsily — fails to grasp the nature of the job?
As of this morning, Warburton’s men sit fifth in the Premiership table. They are four points adrift of leaders who appear to be operating on a whole other plane, even taking into account the draw at Inverness yesterday.
If it is far too early to panic, supporters must be worried about one aspect of this start. Namely that, with the obvious exception of that mauling by the reigning champions, their team have yet to play anyone of note.
Motherwell and Ross County finished just inside the top six last year. But Hamilton, Dundee and Kilmarnock were all bottom-half teams. Rangers supporters must be dreading those days when they have to travel to places like Tynecastle, McDiarmid Park and Pittodrie? More on that last venue later.
Along with the stuttering form and failure to address weaknesses glaringly evident to anyone who saw Rangers play last season, there are even more factors undermining the standing of Warburton as a coach on the up.
As you may be aware, his marquee summer signing, a player whose arrival was treated as if he was Gazza reborn, has been a complete bust in terms of his on-field contribution.
He also appears to have become a liability — a non-person whose name shall not even by uttered in public by the gaffer — and sideshow. Well, who saw that coming, right?
Make no mistake, everything that Joey Barton does wrong reflects on the judgment of the man who signed him. That is just an immutable principle of football management.
And so, heading into six days that could define a season, it is utterly baffling that more people aren’t talking about the prospect — however remote — of Warburton battling to save his job.
With the exception of the odd outspoken pundit, the famously acerbic former Celtic striker Chris Sutton publicly asserting yesterday that ‘the job is too big for him’, there is a general assumption that the man is fireproof.
Surely he couldn’t lose at home to Championship leaders Queen of the South in the Betfred Cup tomorrow night and not have the issue raised ahead of Sunday’s league clash away to Aberdeen. Lose both? It would be odd in the extreme if he was allowed to survive that.
From the outside looking in, at this moment in time, you wouldn’t put good money on Rangers pipping the Dons or Hearts to second or even third place over the course of this season.
Even if you acknowledge that the ‘tens of millions’ promised in such an off-hand manner by chairman Dave King haven’t been provided up front and in full, the way Rangers supporters rallied to the cause, buying season tickets in the tens of thousands, means their budget dwarfs that of everyone bar the champions.
Beyond even the financial might those fans have provided, their sheer collective size means any manager has a very real responsibility to maintain standards. On this point, Warburton increasingly sounds like a man who, while willing to pay lip service to his environment, doesn’t really get what managing Rangers means.
Passing off a 0-0 at home to County as the best performance of season is as insulting to the intelligence of the public as saying there was no real gulf between Rangers and Celtic following a 5-1 spanking.
Compare and contrast, if you will, the approach of Warburton and that of the man who might yet inflict more misery — if not quite a definitive coup de grace — on him this weekend.
Like all competitive characters, Derek McInnes can be spiky as hell. But he has accepted the fact that the progress of recent seasons has escalated expectations among supporters. He understood that the patchy start to this season wasn’t good enough — and he demanded that his players put it right at Dens Park yesterday.
He has recruited well this summer, obviously, and always seems to apply common sense where required. Plenty of Rangers fans wanted Del to ‘come home’ to Ibrox before former Brentford boss Warburton stepped into the vacancy.
If the former City trader can turn his team around in the space of the next six days, well, he’ll have earned his reprieve. Continue in a vein that has seen them go three games without a win, with only two victories from the opening six league fixtures?
He might end up realising that some of those b ****** s in the changing room have actually put his job in very real peril.
His comments have been an insult to the intelligence of Rangers fans