Unfortunately, last night confirmed what Gio said, what Ibrox Noise has said, and that everyone of a Bluenose persuasion thinking with their head and not their heart has said:
Rangers are completely out of our depth in the Champions League.
The Europa League this isn’t, where mince like Eintracht (they’re really not that good) can overcome Barcelona and where a modest Rangers can somehow overpower Borussia Dortmund.
Haaland-less Dortmund nearly produced a result last night against titanic Man City for goodness’ sake, are we seriously saying they were giving it their all last season in the Thursday Cup?
This is not to take away from what Rangers achieved, it was still one of our greatest-ever European runs – but unlike 92/93 where we more or less achieved the ‘semi finals’ of the Champions League, it just wasn’t the highest level.
Where we are now is, and we’re being deeply exposed home and away for having a squad which simply isn’t equipped to deal with this quality of opponent when they’ve got the Champions League to play for.
A lot of fans tried to blame the referee, and even more did actually accept our players put in a half decent shift of guts, but for quality, we’re absolutely miles short.
Some fans will find some way to blame others, to find excuses for us shipping seven goals home and away – they’ll point again to Dortmund and Leipzig, and yes, we had Aribo and Bassey for those ones, but Bassey himself struggled v Liverpool in the UCL which is where it really counts.
Our point? As we said a few entries ago, we may as well accept making up the numbers at this level, because we’ll struggle to even score. A point would mammoth.
We are very much Malmo of last season, who scored just one goal in the whole campaign. They were out of their depth, as we are now.
There’s no shame in that, our first season back in Europe we were too.
Until we adjust to the staggering leap in quality the Champions League provides by way of better players and a manager who has a clue at that level (Gio doesn’t), making up the numbers is all we can do for now.
Lets not put down the E.L just because we’re in the C.L now. It’s still a great tournament to be in. We had great memories and results last season that will last a long time.
Mabay if we recruited better we could at least hv score a few goals, we wasted 5m on Yilmaz, and 3.5m on Davies = 8.5m We could have got 1, 2 or 3 players tht could have really added to last seasons squad IF spent right. Also we have more money to spend or it wasnt made available.
Also if we kept Balogun n Katic, or even 1 of them we wouldnt hv leaked 11 goals in 3….. thts a fact.
It was a summer of really bad decisions of someone or people at the club. Money questions tht havent been answered also.
Mabay if all of these matters i’ve just mentioned were dealt with better, we’d be sitting in a much better position overall.
100% agree. We’re not at the races…..I predict that there will be changes coming soon one way or another, we’re not winning anything this season unless there is, cause we are back to 2 seasons ago ….the great unwashed are in a different orbit to ours…..we are a club that’s broken. Needs to happen asap for me IMO.
I agree with you david about the signings policy and the EUL being a good competition for us to play in ,however mate I do not think baloguen ,katic would have made any differnce against this standard of opposition, with the best will in the world mate .
I think we would have had to sign a LOT better players and many tens of millions more to compete ,however we may have given the mhanky mob a better game ,I will give you that …which imo is more important .
It’s a fair point about making up the numbers but that would probably apply to about 50 to 75 percent of the teams in the tournament. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the other tournament’s either. Hearts will make extra money that they couldn’t make before and that has to be a good thing. It gives other teams in Scotland a good target and reason to try and qualify.
Says a lot about out summer transfer activity that was supposed to have brought players in with the CL in mind that none started on Wed. We went back to EL team and got what we got last year a spirited performance. I never for one minute thought our squad would be able to cope in that group in fact for the success point of view dropping into Europa League groups would have been a better option as we would have been able to compete in most of those groups.
As are 95% of the teams , only 4 or 5 can realistically win it , Liverpool,city , Bayern Munich, Madrid ,
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