Rangers have not been convincing this season – opinion

7
Rangers have not been convincing this season – opinion


There’s little doubt Rangers’ pre-season then competitive action got off to something akin to a stellar start. Win after win (with occasional draw) saw Steven Gerrard and his shiny new signings looking like serious title contenders.

Ignoring the circumstances of any of the results this competitive campaign, the sheer consistency was there, and we were filled with nothing but praise of Gerrard and the impact his squad was having.

Fast forward a few weeks and it’s all looking a lot bleaker.

It took until the 79th minute (while Livi were a man down, we hasten to add) before a third goal sealed 3 points for the home side yesterday, and we have got to admit the performances aren’t there and by and large the results have become a little less consistent.

Up till Brandon Barker’s 79th minute strike, Rangers hadn’t scored a goal from open play, aside Morelos’ winner v Legia, since the 18th of August v East Fife. That’s almost five matches of play without a single goal scored – and indeed, if we include all goals scored, open play or not, it’s five goals in the past five matches in all competitions, 3 of which came yesterday.

And the hard results of the past 5 are 3 wins, a draw and a loss. The picture for the season overall looks better, but that goodwill of the opening stages has just gone slightly AWOL in the past month.

Rangers are not looking particularly good right now. They haven’t looked good since the win over Midtjylland with huffing and puffing v Legia, St Mirren and Livi among others, and the goals have dried up.

And, if we’re brutally honest, domestically they’ve not been convincing this whole season.

A struggle v Killie, gubbing 10-man Hibs, struggling v St Mirren, getting horsed by Celtic, then struggling to put away 10-man Livi while huffing and puffing again to a win in Fife isn’t really the performances of champions. So yeah, a struggle overall.

Yes, Celtic haven’t been great either, far from it, but right now they’re better than us.

Now, PERSPECTIVE: this is not to overreact. Bloody Man City, the all-conquering titans of English football lost to piddling Norwich, so let’s get some context.

Rangers are still second, only three points behind Celtic. And the only non-win of this domestic season has indeed been that loss to Lennon’s side.

But form right now is shaky. Performances are poor. And there’s the small matter of Dutch giants Feyenoord coming to Ibrox on Thursday, which we will discuss later, even if Jaap Stam’s men haven’t had the best start to their season.

We need a good performance this week preferably with a decent result, and, while we can only speak for ourselves at Ibrox Noise, we’d feel a lot better.

web survey

No posts to display

7 COMMENTS

  1. It's a work in progress. I don't want to be too harsh on SG because he's worked miracles in the squad, but there is a long, long way to go, still. But undermining our Manager at every turn, is not going to help. So, tricky one.

  2. Didn't like the question. Blunt Yes/No. Some variation where we could indicate support and "work in progress" would have been helpful.
    It's not perfect, but would I swap it for regular stellar performances but out of Europe and dropped more points? No

  3. We have 50% more points this season, than we had after 5 games last season.
    12 points this season v 8 points last season.
    That is significant progress. Our play maybe isn't looking so good, but results are more important.

  4. 3 pts, brief achieved yesterday irrespective of performance.
    4 friendlies, 1 Scottish League Cup, 8 European Games, 5 league games 1 defeat and Gerrard is getting slaughtered. Maybe SG could ask his Fairygod mother to sprinkle some Fairy dust on the performances and make us play beautiful football every week eh! It doesn't happen, even the best teams in the world have off days but seem to win

  5. I know it's all about results but for me there is an underlying lack of something in our performances that concerns me. We were lucky to not go 2-1 down to Livi and we may not have recovered from there. We were lucky not to lose a late goal to St Mirren. We snatched a late winner at Kilmarnock and only dismantled Hibs after they went down to 10 men. It feels as though there is a damaging draw or worse around the corner. We don't need to play fast flowing scintillating football. We just need to play better and snuff out teams earlier.

    • Robrob, I agree with you. These are scrappy wins, ground out rather than overwhelming, destructive victories. The games that we failed to win last year. If we had ground out wins againts Killie and Hibs, we could have won the league, but we failed to get the points.
      I would far rather we were playing sexy football, but only if we were winning. I would not swap grinding it out for sexy draws, never mind sexy losing.
      We have collected 3 points in every game except one where I personally feel we had tactics and team selection wrong. At the end of the season, they don't count how many games you played well, just how many points you won.
      RTID

    • We are grinding out results but I fear a slip up is just round the corner. We have to raise our game and it doesn't have to be sexy. It just needs to be better.

Comments are closed.