Hibs v Rangers – what Rangers need to fix

The Hibernian ‘fans’ Hampden pitch invasion is totally inexcusable in this day and age! This type of behaviour in the year 2016 is simply not acceptable, but I would prefer to concentrate on the football and focus on the Scottish Cup final.

In the first 27 minutes of the game, right up until our equalising goal from an unstoppable Kenny Miller header, I thought that Rangers had performed very averagely. It took a brilliant Tavernier cross right on to Kenny’s head to get us back into a game that looked like heading away from us.

The problem with our all-out attacking system put together from our wonderful manager Mark Warburton, is, that if we give the ball away too cheaply, with a bad pass by any of our midfield players, it puts our defence in immediate trouble and our two centre backs simply are not strong, sharp or good enough to cope with the fast breakaways, and it happens far too often to be a coincidence.

Tavernier was posted missing when Stokes, in only the 3rd minute, picked up the ball where he should have been. If he hadn’t been too far up the park when the attacking move broke down, he might have been in a position to defend the goal. Stokes ran past Tierney and passed it into the net with an easy saveable shot in the corner of the goal. From the acute angle he scored from, a better keeper than Foderingham would at least have got his fingertips to the shot and prevented the ball from going in.

Since beating Celtic, we have not won any of our competitive games and that must be unacceptable to our management team, who I certainly trust to rectify the problems with this present squad of players; in fairness to everybody, that squad did achieve the main objective of promotion to the Premiership.

Unless we replace Foderingham, Tavernier and the far too casual Wilson, with taller and much better players, I predict now that we won’t stand a chance of winning the Premiership next year. Technically we also don’t have to worry about playing good quality teams in the Europa League as by losing the final, we didn’t qualify anyway.

Rangers were slow, lethargic and definitely off the pace of the game, until we scored. I was describing our Hampden performance by using words like awful defending, we were losing every 50/50 ball; we looked as rusty as an old nail, due to the 3 week lay-off, which as it turns out, did us no favours at all.

We cannot use that as an excuse because we had the game won at 2–1, when Andy Halliday hit that screamer of a shot into the corner of the Hibs’ net to put us into pole position to go on and win the game (or so we thought). We didn’t hold onto the ball nearly well enough in the last 22 minutes and it was our own slack passing that allowed a very average Hibs side to get back into the game, when we lost several corners, and that is ALWAYS our major weakness in the team.

How many times do I have to point out that Foderingham NEVER comes out for any corners or free kicks and our team is NOT GOOD ENOUGH to stop goals in the air.

Victory for this Hibernian side ended a wait of 114 years and 26 days, 41,665 days, almost one million hours and 3.5 billion seconds for Scottish football’s most prized cup trophy, and I hope it is even longer before the next time they win it.

Without the two late corners, Hibernian would not have won the game against a sluggish Light Blues’ side who looked leg weary after that three-week absence from competitive football. Do Rangers have to score 3 goals in every game just to win or draw a match, because of pathetic defending and lack of height in the team? How long will it take before tall, new defending and striking talent will be signed, instead of having too many midfielders?

These and others are areas Warburton and Weir will surely be looking seriously hard at remedying.