What is needed at Rangers is another Gerrard – on the pitch
As he watched Rangers’ Champions League hopes sabotaged by “a bit of fear and panic”, Steven Gerrard could have been forgiven for thinking what he needed out on the pitch was a younger version of himself.
The concession of two goals in quick succession to the 10 men of Malmo at Ibrox last Tuesday night was, by any standards, a shocker.
It left the Scottish champions trailing 4-2 on aggregate with just over half-an-hour remaining.
The fact there was a £30-millionplus pot at stake – and 50,000 fans in the ground – only added to the pressure.
By full-time, the Light Blues manager was having to come to terms with the club’s third straight defeat in a week, the first time that had happened in his tenure at the club.
Gerrard’s own experiences show evidence that even the mostmortifying display can be turned into a miraculous one.
Sixteen years ago, the England icon was the catalyst for a comeback that came as close to turning water into wine as football is going to get.
He helped haul a Liverpool side – 3-0 down at half-time to AC Milan in the 2005 Champions League Final – to the most-improbable of triumphs.
The midfielder scored the goal that sparked the Reds’ fightback, with his reaction more of a call to
Big crowds are not automatically intimidating. Look back to 9-in-a-row
arms for his team-mates and the travelling support than a celebration.
Gerrard also won the penalty from which Xabi Alonso scored the equaliser. And all within 15 minutes of the second-half.
It was a powerhouse of a captain’s performance that set up the penalty shoot-out win for Rafa Benitez’s side.
The fact one of Milan’s scorers in that shoot-out was Jon Dahl Tomasson – the victorious Malmo manager last Tuesday – was an ironic coincidence.
Tomasson won the contest with Gerrard hands down in midweek, with his move to keep two up front – even when down to 10 men – acknowledged as a tactical masterstroke.
For many, Rangers’ failure against Malmo shows evidence to confirm a suspicion that their players have an inability to perform in front of a big crowd, something they did not encounter during their Invincible run to the Premiership title last season. For me, that is too simplistic. Big crowds are not automatically intimidating. You only need to look back to the run-of-the-mill games in the club’s 9-in-a-row success under Walter Smith to know that.
More recently, 41,000 were inside Ibrox on Friday night as a muchchanged Light Blues side despatched Dunfermline 5-0.
Of course, every game for any Rangers player in any season brings its own demands, where a draw is a disaster and a defeat a catastrophe. It comes with the territory. However, after beating Celtic on January 2 to go 19 points clear of their greatest rivals, Gerrard’s men did not have to deal with a highly-pressurised situation like last Tuesday’s for the rest of last season.
The closest was the Scottish Cup quarter-final against St Johnstone at Ibrox, and they lost that one.
It is when the chips are down that clubs need their on-field leaders to stand up and be counted, and push every one of their team-mates into the type of performance the situation demands.
Gerrard did it for Liverpool in Istanbul.
Yet last Tuesday, Rangers lacked the type of inspiration that would have come from former captains such as John Greig, Terry Butcher or Richard Gough, who would not miss anyone they felt wasn’t pulling their weight for the cause.
Sometimes verbally on the pitch, often physically in the dressing room at half-time.
James Tavernier, who wears the skipper’s armband now, does not appear that type. He is a talented full-back, and he chips in with plenty of goals – often spectacular – and assists. But he does not seem to drive those around him on to greater effort through the sheer force of his personality.
Indeed, in March 2020 – 40 Premiership games before last Saturday’s defeat at Tannadice – he controversially flagged up a collective mentality problem within the squad in his programme notes ahead of a game against Hamilton Accies.
“Whenever anybody puts a bit of pressure on us in Scotland, or gets in our face, it seems to affect us too much,” he said back then.
“At the start of the season, teams dropped off us and we were scoring four or five goals, but now they smell blood straight away and put us under pressure. We are not good enough domestically to react to that.”
It was a bad PR exercise, exacerbated by the fact the visitors won 1-0 that night.
Seventeen months on, for the strength of his team’s character to still be an issue must be of huge concern to Gerrard.
And just as success helped gloss over some gripes from the Light Blue legions last season, so this campaign’s run of defeats has supporters now questioning how the manager is handling individual situations.
Rotating his goalkeepers, leaving Filip Helander on the bench against Malmo, and persisting with a clearly out-of-form Ryan Kent are just some of the issues being raised.
The Miracle of Istanbul proved the England icon was able to turn round bad situations on the park.
Whether – having delivered the title success fans were desperate for last season – Gerrard can do likewise to prevent the sort of implosion seen at Celtic in their bid to win 10, only time will tell.