Tonight’s Sunderland friendly goes down as one of the biggest farces Rangers have experienced in years, and none of it was the club’s fault.

While the first half was sluggish and our opponents were certainly sharper and quicker to most of the play, the global feed cut out for 10+ minutes, as fans melted in rage and humour over the debacle, with a view of Jon McLaughlin’s backside frozen in time greeting them for long enough.

Once the feed was back, it was right in time (literally to the second) for the Black Cats to open the scoring, with a defensive mix-up seeing the ball sail past hapless McLaughlin.

Then half time ensued and all seemed well enough, analysis among fans telling us few were happy with the fitness or display on offer in the first half, before the players eventually returned to the fray in the second.

And that’s as good as it got – floodlight failure from our Portuguese hosts heighted the sense of shambles as the stadium darkened and the delay lasted a good half an hour – the fans at the ground put their phone lights on, the fans at home mixed again between disbelief, rage, and humour.

Before eventually, a pitch-black Portugal saw the game officially abandoned – just in time, exactly to the second, for the floodlight to get fixed and restore vision. By then all was lost.

This was a complete and total disaster, and even included a second cut out of the feed in there too.

For once we can’t blame RTV or even Premier Sports, who were also showing it, because Sunderland’s own channel experienced the cut out too – while the hosts were complicit on the floodgate farce.

All in all, Rangers got nothing out of this tonight, aside a small lesson that we’re a wee bit behind on fitness.

More work needed done on that for sure, but let’s hope this one is replayed and without the absolute shambles of technical chaos that marred this one.