What we know for sure, despite all the chaos over the weekend, is that sacking Michael Beale itself would have cost anything from £500,000 to £2M, we can’t exactly know, and the board invested £16M in players, his players, this summer. That’s a lot of money for a wasted project, and in many senses it’s simply too expensive for Rangers to dump Beale now.
So how does the man turn this around? How does Michael Beale come back from his break in Crieff and turn his struggling squad, the one he built, into a much better-oiled machine?
Well, honestly, we could sit here and offer tactics and how to better shape your squad, but is there any real point? Michael Beale is the man who has to actually do it. To heck with it, we nevertheless shall.
What we would suggest is ripping up the bizarre formation thing he’s trying and going back to basics. And we do believe Tom Lawrence (and Kemar Roofe) could be pivotal to this.
See, a huge issue with this Rangers team is its lack of width – that Michael Beale has forced his fullbacks to provide so much width while also having just one sort of winger (Matondo/Sima) bodes poorly for structure and shape.
How about a front three of Lawrence on the left, Roofe in the middle and Matondo on the right?
It seems so simple – three clean clinical and experienced players who are all fit now, as Rangers’ attacking trident. Let Lawrence offer the left channel, Matondo on the right, and have Roofe using his running and freedom to fill in the gaps?
Midfield? Put Cifuentes, Raskin and Cantwell in there, simple and clean.
Defence? Sterling, Balogun, Souttar and Ridvan. Not terribly complicated.
In short, what we feel is Beale is overcomplicating things with a weird setup that doesn’t even suit the players he’s signed.
Simplifying it into a 4-3-3 or trying variations of it but keeping that width seems to us to be the way forward.
Is it really rocket science?