Michael Beale completely sideswiped the ‘Europe’ question at Thursday’s Rangers presser, in a rare example of not answering a question directly and possibly obfuscating the issue, but instead completely avoiding it.
Asked how he was coping with not having European football and how he managed to keep the players motivated, Beale rather evaded that and answered a different question.
Asked:
“How are the team adjusting to no midweek (European football)? Having the new players come in, you might think they’ll want to play a little bit more but has that given you more time on the training pitch with them to adjust and embed your philosophy…?”
Beale replied:
“There’s a huge amount of competition right now which is why I was a bit surprised by the first half performance last week, fair play to Partick, I thought they took part in a really really good cup tie, had a little bit of everything, controversy, interesting goals and missed penalties and everything you’d want in a cup tie but I was expecting a stronger performance from us. I think the boys need to earn their shirt in training as much as they do in matchdays as well.”
As you can see, that’s answering a completely different question. We’re not sure why Beale evaded that question, it wasn’t exactly a trick question nor was it awkward, he just plain batted it away and babbled on about Partick.
That’s his right, to say what he likes in pressers, but this reply wasn’t helpful and did skirt completely around the topic of Rangers having no post-Christmas football for the first time since 2018 and Steven Gerrard’s first Europa League campaign at which Rangers exited during the group stage.
It is a new dynamic – we’re all very used to midweek Thursday football (or Tuesday/Wednesday this season) for the past three years, so having none after new year is definitely quite a new thing, and save for cup matches, which themselves have been on weekends recently, Rangers have no midweek football now.
And we suspect that’s something Michael Beale quite simply doesn’t really want to talk about.
Maybe due to all the injuries we have Again fkn nightmare
WATP🇬🇧
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