Barry Ferguson, towards the end of the PLG debacle, once said:
“I won’t believe we’ve turned a corner till we go unbeaten for 10 matches.”
Now, this may have been ‘won’ 10 matches, the old memory is failing a touch, but his point, truthfully, has remained relevant for the best part of the 14 years since he said it.
If a side, normally at the top, finds itself in a malaise, it’s hard to trust any sign of good form. Until, that is, it starts to go into the 10-match territory.
And we have to say, with 6 wins of the first 7 and no goals conceded, Rangers are well on their way to, in Ferguson’s logic, ‘turning a corner’.
Of course, the world is a very different place to what it was 14 years ago, but the base principles of success in football haven’t really changed that much.
And the 10-match benchmark pretty much remains as accurate today as it has back then.
Now, there is a potential caveat – Rangers went from 14th September last year to 22 January without losing a single SPL match, and there were even only two draws in there. Had a corner turned? Yes, it had, and Rangers were by some distance the best side in the SPL till the wheels came off in that second half of the season.
So this isn’t new ground – Rangers are 7 unbeaten now inside September so we’ve been here before.
But last season’s 16-match unbeaten run shows this manager has it in him to produce the results, and the turnaround.
The question is can the momentum be maintained this time, and can it go into the new year still riding high?
We wait and see, but signs are good right now.