I can’t go through
Warburton requires a marked improvement to avert soul searching
“Did we play at the kind of level expected of us?”
PERHAPS only those who have experienced being on the wrong end of a hiding in an Old Firm game can properly articulate the emotion involved.
For most, the offer of a dark hole into which to crawl and inhabit for a few days would seem sorely tempting. Others, perhaps unwisely, have advocated the drowning of sorrows in public as they seek a degree of solace. Regardless of the coping strategy, dulling the pain is a futile exercise.
For Mark Warburton, the long hours that followed a 5-1 loss at Celtic Park last month were best spent alone and behind closed doors.
‘I didn’t go out,’ the Rangers boss revealed. ‘I live 100 yards from Waitrose but I didn’t go out. My son was up for the game and I didn’t go over the door. He has been in football himself for a number of years, so he understands the score. I am sure he found a place to go with his mates. The fact of the matter is that it wasn’t right (to go out).
‘You have to understand the emotion of the city. I can’t sit here and talk to you guys about a different level of passion in Glasgow and then not recognise or appreciate it. Imagine me being seen going out that night. I could have been having a quiet glass of wine and a pasta but it wouldn’t have been right for me.’
Warburton is a man who certainly knows his own mind. In the 17 months since he came to Rangers, his principles have been unwavering. His outlook on how the game should be played unchanged.
He wouldn’t be human, however, if moments of doubt didn’t permeate his thought process that September evening.
Rangers managers losing to Celtic and vice versa is nothing new. But one side being so systematically dismantled is a rarity. Accordingly, the post-mortem is brutal.
Even before Warburton had left the visitors’ dressing room that day, the sense of a seismic defeat was palpable.
‘It had to be frank, we’d just got beat 5-1,’ Warburton said of the dressing-room discussion. ‘I have to be very clear that I didn’t think it (the score) was a fair reflection because of the sending-off (of Philippe Senderos). We lost two centre-halves in a heartbeat and suddenly our back line was Lee Wallace, Joey Barton and James Tavernier.
‘But we’d still just been stuffed 5-1, so we had to sit there and say: “What can we take from this game”.
‘So it was a very heated discussion because the local boys know what it takes. They knew when they wake up the following morning what the papers, radio and TV shows were going to say. It’s hard.
‘They understood it and it was important to relay that message to the new boys coming in. If we lose an Old Firm game 5-1 we had better recognise what we have to do now because you don’t want to feel that way again.
‘That was an awful feeling. That would fire up any player. If you have a poor performance with the ramifications to that level you remember it for a long, long time. I don’t want that feeling again.’
The charge sheet thrown at Warburton in the aftermath was predictably lengthy. Much of it he simply had to take on the chin. On one count, namely that with the scoreline 3-1 he was naive in replacing defender Rob Kiernan with midfielder Harry Forrester, Warburton vehemently defends himself.
‘At 3-1 I still felt we could have nicked the next goal,’ he said. ‘It was a calculated gamble I would take again as I couldn’t have envisaged the sending-off.
‘We were playing against a very good team and there were other questions we had to ask ourselves. Was our intensity right? Did we play at the kind of level expected of us?’
The question is rhetorical, of course. Rangers were poor in all departments that day. Sunday’s return to Hampden offers some scope for optimism, however. Back-to-back wins against Partick and Inverness won’t in themselves form the basis of a belated title challenge but at least it’s a start.
Warburton is convinced they can act as a platform from which to stop Celtic in their tracks.
‘We know we are getting better and better,’ he added. ‘Since the Ross County game, the performances have improved.
‘The sending-off in the last game had a huge impact on the outcome. Celtic were the better team on the day, I’m not arguing that.
‘I still feel fine margins were involved and we need to show we’ve improved on Sunday.’
Successive clean sheets will do morale and belief no harm either.
Defensively, Rangers were
shambolic at Celtic Park — a ‘told you so’ moment for those who had warned that Warburton had failed to adequately strengthen his central defence and that he didn’t know his best pairing.
Warburton offers a rather simpler take on the chopping and changing, though. Practicalities.
‘I read some comments about us not keeping the same centre-half partnership. But we’ve had suspensions, injuries and sickness that’s forced that,’ he said.
‘Danny (Wilson) was injured for one game, suspended for one game, then Philippe gets sent off so he is suspended for the following game,’ he recalled. ‘Then Clint Hill was sick and Rob Kiernan got injured in the Old Firm game and couldn’t play for two weeks.
‘People say we are not steady, but they are not available for selection. That is the nature of the game. Sometimes we have consistency, like with Lee (Wallace) and Tav (James Tavernier). Lee Hodson has been outstanding in training, he was great for Northern Ireland against Germany and he is pushing them.
‘I hope the clean sheets are a sign of the progress and of us working as a team together.’
That Rangers have been more impressive of late is beyond dispute. Warburton has been with us long enough to realise, however, that come Sunday the need for a radical improvement on his side’s last display in this fixture will come to define him. Otherwise, another long, lonely night lies in wait.