After another bad OF result and the strong likelihood 56 is gone for the season, we at Ibrox Noise wanted to take a look at Giovanni van Bronckhorst and his performance.
How has our manager done since November, and how does he compare to his realistic predecessors Steven Gerrard, Ally McCoist and of course, Walter Smith.
And before you wonder where Murty, Bread Man and Pedro went, that whole era was not a realistic Rangers era. It was somewhere in the Twilight Zone and it’s not fair to include it as a barometer of measurement.
As for Gio, he came in midway through the season, already suggesting that the timing wasn’t ideal. He knew it himself, as many other midseason replacement managers do, that coming in on someone else’s abandoned turf and turning things around is an incredibly difficult task.
Fair play to Steven Gerrard, he’s managed to do it at Villa, backed by serious funds and the ability to sign someone like Coutinho, but nevertheless a relegation-destined team are now comfortably midtable.
Gio’s found the going far harder.
Walter Smith he isn’t, no one is. He was a one off, a titanic manager we were blessed with and we miss him dearly, but we must move on. And accept we’re not getting another like him. And Ally struggled without Naismith just like Gio does without Morelos. Awesome up till then. We’re ignoring the Journey part of Ally’s management.
But how does Gio compare to Gerrard?
League wise, the hard numbers are as follows:
Gerrard: 12 games, 8 wins, 3 draws and a defeat.
Gio: 19 matches, 13 wins, 4 draws, two losses.
Gio has a 68% win rate in the SPL. Gerrard has 66%.
Gio has also drawn less. 21% of his league matches. Gerrard drew 25%.
So the hard numbers prove Gio has (marginally) improved Rangers in every department, but the improvement hasn’t been stark enough.
Why have we seen a 4 point lead turn into a 6 point deficit?
Pure and simply two losses to Celtic. You’re going to draw occasionally. It happens in football. But Gio has only lost to Celtic and those are the ones which really count.
Gio’s big domestic weakness has been a complete inability to manage matches against Celtic, or more specifically, manage the absence of Alfredo Morelos in those big matches. Hard to do, in fairness.
Even worse, he wasn’t given the budget to find a decent striker in the window – we needed a deputy for the Colombian, a target man who could play the same game.
Has Morelos’ absence cost 56 and the UEL?
We don’t know that yet, but if you look at the pure hard league stats, GVB hasn’t failed at all.
He’s improved this side on the grand scheme of things, but not enough to keep up with Celtic’s domestic improvement (they have a ridiculous 78% win rate this season).
But anyone yelling Gio out is ignoring the numbers and his staggering performance in Europe.
Anything we get now from this season is a bonus, judge Gio next season when he builds his own team.
But for now, he’s actually done better than the mood feels like at present.
I was saying the same yesterday after the game. Every metric including expected goals for and against have improved under Gio. However, the cold hard facts are that it’s points on the board that count and unfortunately he hasn’t cut it at League level yet otherwise we’d still be top. Getting beaten twice of that mob isn’t good enough.
Truth is we have been really poor all season under both managers but I blame neither. You have to look at the players. Most of our wins have been dragged out turgid affairs. These players are capable of so much more but they’ve had a poor attitude all season. I would say the Hearts 5-0 game was the only game where we reached the heights and even then Hearts threatened to g back into the game at the start of the second half. Let’s stay behind Gio and see what his reputation can attract next season because bottom line we need better players.
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